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Colin
What's going on, y'?
Charlie
All?
Colin
Welcome back to Blockspace Live presented by Clean Spark.
Charlie
Charlie.
Colin
It's earnings season, baby. So for today's show, we are kicking it off with Core Scientific and Applied Digital's latest quarterly earnings. Cores dropped this morning, applied yesterday evening after market close. So we'll go over the numbers, including Core's new $15 billion deal with AMD and an undisclosed Neo cloud. Following that. We have a story on Galaxy expanding its potential data center portfolio with an acquisition in Texas. And then we will cover Meta and BlackRock going in on a data center as well. We will end the stream with none other than Anchor Watch CEO Rob Hamilton to talk about open weights and Thropik's recent letter on the open weight controversy. Plus Jensen Huang's and friends letter in defense of open weights last week.
Charlie
That's right. Block Space goes live every weekday at 1pm Eastern featuring quick hits on AI data centers, emerging tech and markets. We are COMPUTE's daily live show coming to you hot middle of the day. If you like what you hear, you'll love the rest of our content. Blockspace Media is the website with everything we write, everything we produce. You, you can find all of the post live stream breakdowns of podcasts through the website. And if you don't like audio content or written content online, you can get it just straight to your email newsletter.blackspacemedia.com Sign up at newsletter.blackspace media.com this show is brought to you by CleanSpark. NASDAQ listed ticker CLSK More on CleanSpark later on in the show. Colin, let's go to the earnings corner,
Colin
the inaugural earnings corner here at blockspace Live. We will be covering earnings as they come out for the data center companies and bitcoin miners in our coverage orbit. We will most likely package them every other day into multiple reports on the earnings. So for today, kicking it off with Coors and with Applied Digital and Cores.
Charlie
Charlie Cors, can I, can I interject here? Cores snuck this one in this. The Coors Q2 earnings was not posted on their investor relations. It was, there was not a press release. It was, it was a press release about the AMD deal that will, that you'll talk about. And then they're like, oh, and we're doing an earnings.
Colin
So yeah, they didn't announce their earnings call which is very odd. You know most of these companies do. Part of me wonders if they did that to kind of create more shockwaves for the AMD deal.
Charlie
Kind of catch like it's Like Beyonce dropping an album. Sometimes it's better if it just happens and you don't anticipate it.
Colin
So quick headline numbers for cores before we get into the AMD deal. This is their Q2 earnings. Total revenue up from 115.2 million in Q1 to 164.2 million in Q2 co location revenue. Their, their, their AI business line up to 136.7 million. From 17 from 707. Excuse me, from 77.5 million in Q1 and 10.6 million in Q2. 2025 clearly has slingshotted into the dominant business. They actually the margins on their bitcoin mining business were minus 56% gross margins as they continue to phase that out and hash prices in the gutter. Adjusted EBITDA came in at 41.1 million versus 8.9 million in Q1. Net loss was 1.155 billion, driven basically entirely by 1.05 billion. Write down no cash charge for the change in fair value of warrants stock appreciation, not their operations. Capex more than doubled from Q1 which was 389.2 million to 797.5 million. Notes on that later. Specifically how labor costs have ballooned since they signed their Watershed Core Weave deal back in 2024. Liquidity stood at 1.82 billion cash plus Bitcoin up sharply from 1 billion in Q1. Now the big piece of today's earnings call though, the thing that people glommed onto most was this AMD partnership. And it's pretty interesting, Charlie. So the TLDR of the partnership, AMD has signed a 15 year deal for 377 megawatts and a NEO cloud has signed a similar deal for 152 megawatts for a total consideration of just over $14 billion in revenue over the total contractual period for the deals. There are two five year extension options with these deals and AMD holds a reservation right for an additional 1,900, 925 megawatts. Yes, that is 1.9 gigawatts of critical IT capacity exercisable quote at certain times and under certain circumstances, end quote through December 28, 2028. So Core Scientific just booked 530 megawatts across five sites. The total potential expansion though is 2.5 gigawatts of leased capacity. The initial delivery for these leases is early 2027, with the full leases to be realized by the end of 2028. Now here's the interesting part again. This is a two part deal here and AMD is securing 377 megawatts, but an undisclosed Neo Cloud is securing 152 megawatts and AMD has agreed to backstop that agreement. Similar to what we've seen from Nvidia in the past, they are going to their customer and they are ensuring financial certainty for that project with these backstops. And yet another instance of circular financing that has come under fire from analysts in the space. A few things to note here, Charlie, before I toss it to you for second thoughts. And then we move on to Applied. The construction costs have ballooned, my guy. According to CFO Jimmy Jim Ningard. He reiterated that the math now stands at 11 to 12 million dollars per megawatt cost estimate for the initial 530 megawatt AMD and NEO Cloud commitment. That's roughly 6 billion dollars in capital that they plan to finance through project level bonds. COO Matt Brown noted on the earnings call. Because some analysts ask, whoa, I have costs gone up so much because their core we've builds were significantly less than this. Matt Brown said, quote, the thing that's primarily driving cost of construction today is labor. Labor is very scarce in a number of markets across the USA and a lot of general contractors, a lot of electrical subcontractors, the large ones, and a lot of the mechanical trades are just pretty saturated with work right now. What you're seeing is that labor constraint is naturally sort of driving up the cost of labor in some of the very, very competitive geographies across the United States. We've actually covered this, Charlie, because it's one of the, I think lesser observed aspects of this entire AI Capex boom. People talk about the financing, they talk about the deals, but no one really talks about the raw materials or the companies that are going to erect these data centers. And the fact of the matter is the number of companies that have proven expertise in building these massive data centers. It's a pretty small pool and so you're probably seeing some pretty crazy bidding wars for this labor. And as a result, the capex costs have surged significantly since Core Weave signed its first deal with core Scientific in 2024. A few other notes here, Charlie. AMD received warrants up to may receive warrants up to 30 million shares at a $23.47 strike price vesting at 12,222 shares per megawatt of critical IT load under the lease. Since the 500, roughly 530 megawatts was signed on day one. They have 6.5 million shares vested immediately. So AMD has a stake in Core Scientific as a part of this deal. Last few bits total leased customer power capacity is now at 1.1 gigawatts with 24 billion in potential contracted revenue. They are billing 437 megawatts as of mid July. That counts up to 635 million annualized colocation revenue Runway. Their balance sheet has improved. It's moved from 311 million in December 2025 to 1.77 billion as of the end of this most recent quarter. Debt jumped to 4.3 billion up from 1.06. And again the legacy mining segment is really not a consideration at this point. It's a very small piece of their revenue. It had negative 56% gross margins as of the end of last quarter.
Charlie
Charlie so the earnings and the finance a little bit beyond me but with some deft talking to the DI Metrics MCP server and kind of scoping what's interesting about this deal. This deal kind of reprices the Core Scientific book. So the other course I lease or sorry the other core weave leases are at around 120 low $120 per kilowatt per month. On the critical it however this AMD deal at 14 billion over 530 megawatts in 15 years implies $146 per kilowatt per month which is like 20% somewhat higher. And if we compare this to other neo clouds, neocloud tenants typically pay like a 10 to 15% premium at least as far as deals are aware of. Over like hyperscalers because they're paying for the credit risk but AMD kind of breaks that a little bit. Cores got kind of like a near NEO cloud rate from an investment grade counterparty. So pretty interesting. My other comment on this is that these milestones are pretty crucial. I think Adam Sullivan was talking about this in the piece we published yesterday, the KVW piece on just how important it is to not get in a position where you have capacity reserved and a counterparty or tenant who's not exercising that. So I'm interested to see what the milestones are. I don't know that we saw that they were published but if I consider like a lot of the disagreement or just not everyone agrees about this next about the timing of the CapEx cycle. So if you're, if you got a 15 year agreement then those milestones are going to be very crucial when they happen. Exactly what they are. And that's what my eye is on. I feel like the like Milestones are a pretty important thing to get right.
Colin
You mean milestones in terms of energization for this.
Charlie
Energization, yeah, yeah.
Colin
So the initial Delivery is early 2027. They didn't really fully specify, I think, how much, how many megawatts exactly that's supposed to be. But by the end of 2028, the whole 530 megawatts for these two deals with AMD and undisclosed Neo Cloud should be online.
Charlie
Yeah, but you got the other reserve capacity.
Colin
Yeah, I see what you're saying. Yeah, definitely. And they've got a pretty big pipeline. They've got a gigawatt plus that they're hunting right now. And this will be across five sites. I think the other interesting part about this, if we actually look at their presentation, which I have in front of me, I won't throw it up on the screen because I've got this stock chart here. And just a quick aside on that. To your point, Charlie, one of the things that became very apparent following the Core Weave deal is that Core Scientific was not actually milking this for all it was worth. There was a kind of price discovery element to the core we deal. Core Scientific was pioneering for the bitcoin miners and signing one of these deals, and they took a good deal for the time, at least it seemed. And then you saw Hut 8, Wolf Iron and Cypher come out with their own deals and the value per megawatt was significantly higher. Or if not significantly, it was enough to be notable.
Charlie
Right.
Colin
And now, as you said with this AMD deal, Core Scientific has inched its way back up into a more favorable deal compared to its peers. But the stock's really not doing too well on this news. And I think that says less about.
Charlie
It was up like right out the gate. It was up like a few percent.
Colin
It was up like 4 or 5, and then it tanked. I think that says more about where we are in the cycle. If Core Scientific had struck this deal in the middle of last year, towards the end of last year, in the heady days of the AI bull run, when everyone was like effervescent with excitement over all of these new deals getting slung around, the stock would have been up much more. No doubt. But going back to this expansion and going back to that timeline, specifically, the AMD expansion will be across five sites. Pico, Picos, Texas, Pecos, Texas.
Charlie
Yeah, whatever. I gotta defend my Southwest. My southwest, yeah.
Colin
Pecos, Texas. Dalton, Georgia. Hunt, Texas. Muskogee, Oklahoma and Auburn, Alabama. War Eagle. The Pecos, Texas is estimated delivery in first half of 2027, Auburn, first half of 2027, Muskogee and Dalton in the second half of 2027. And the Hunt County, Texas in estimated 2028, first half of 2028. So and those are split according to this. 185 megawatts in Pecos, 120 in Dalton, 110 and Hunt, 82 in Muskogee and 32 in Auburn, Alabama. So really stretching their, you know, stretching their capacity across these sites here. And they are currently looking at 2 plus gigawatts of new site opportunities according to their presentation. So Charlie, I think we can leave cores there. I'll go ahead and rifle through Applied Digital's earnings as well. So Applied Digital reported their fiscal Q4 and full year 2026 earnings
Charlie
yesterday.
Colin
Just a quick note. Can we just please get on calendar year for these things? It is uriating, man. Every like there are a few companies that do it this way. They either do the like Canadian reporting standards fiscal year. Iron does something similar I think with this where it's like their fiscal year actually ends halfway through the year. It's crazy.
Charlie
I mean, thank God they, they at least use the Gregorian calendar. I mean imagine.
Colin
So I'll just focus on the Q4 numbers here with the main focus and then also touch on 2026 fiscal year for a kind of bigger picture. So for the Q4 numbers for Applied, revenue was 258.7 million, up 407% year over year. Their adjusted revenue was 240.4 million. They partitioned off their cloud services business so they have colocation and they have a small cloud contingent. They actually did a kind of reverse merger and created this company called Chronoscale, which is also publicly traded. So when you adjust for that, adjusted revenue came in at 240.4 million. Net loss was 110.6 million. Adjusted net income 12.9 million. So the adjusted diluted earnings per share was $0.04 per share. Actually beat expectations. Adjusted EBITDA at 42.4 million versus 1 million a year ago. And net operating income 39.9 million. Now for the fiscal year revenue is 611.3 million, up 167%. Adjusted EBITDA coming in at 107.2 million versus 19.6 million for the fiscal year 2025. Major announcements and strategic events. Again, they spun off their cloud services business and merged with Exo Bionics, a robotics company, to form Chronoscale. NASDAQ listed CHRN Applied retains 96% ownership but excludes it from non GAAP figures going forward. Signed three new 15 year hyperscaler leases in rapid succession. Delta Forge 1,300megawatts at $7.5 billion for the deal, Polaris Forge 300megawatts at 7.5 billion. Again Polaris Forge 3,300megawatts 7.5 billion per the last deal as well similar terms and post quarter Delta Forge to 210megawatts for 502 billion total in contracted value all with the same hyperscaler customer. Their total contracted HPC book is now 1.4 GW 36 billion dollars in base term revenue with 86 billion if renewals are exercised and it raised 2.15 billion in senior secured notes at 6.75% interest due 2031 as well as taking out a $550 million revolver via Goldman and post quarter they issued another 1.59 billion in notes at 7% interest due 2031. Their balance sheet restricted cash jumped to 4.2 billion, debt to 5 billion, total assets to 9.9 billion up from 1.87 billion a year ago and their legacy Bitcoin hosting business actually doing better than if they were mining outright. It remains a, you know, it remains somewhat cash flow positive high margin cash generator. It's not affected by bitcoin prices or difficulty because they're not mining outright, they're paid hosting fees. So overall pretty decent quarter for applied. I did see some questions about the remaining capacity at some of their leading sites and I believe they mentioned on the call that they expect to sign a deal soon so. You're muted Charlie.
Charlie
It is the call in show today and we are going to keep on rolling with deals. We're going to go to Galaxy next. Before we go to the Galaxy expansion, a word from our sponsor CleanSpark.
Colin
We are CleanSpark, America's Bitcoin miner, a publicly traded company with the largest operating
Rob Hamilton
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Colin
This is our proof of work.
Rob Hamilton
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Colin
don't worry Charlie, you'll get yours here pretty soon.
Charlie
I will.
Colin
We will hop on over to Galaxy which has announced a new expansion for its AI play. This is coming to you all from Block Space. Galaxy Digital expands AI play with 74 megawatt Texas data center campus. The details as reported by Block Space Galaxy has acquired 500 acres in McGregor McLennan County, Texas, under development agreement with the City of McGregor for a new AI and HPC campus. The initial development phase is 74 megawatts, which is notably just under ERCOT. 75 megawatt large load threshold. Galaxy out here trying to circumvent the new batching requirements by getting in just under that 75 megawatt threshold. Pretty smart. It should help them expedite energization for this site. They have more aspirations for it though. They won't stop at 74 megawatts. According to the press release, they are hoping to expand the site into a multi hundred megawatt campus through 2030, saying it has the potential for that. But it's contingent on the utility building out additional transmission infrastructure. Power is expected to start flowing in 2028. The land purchase generated 7.5 million in land sale revenue to the city of McGregor, Texas. And Galaxy will be building and funding its own private substation. Also in accordance to some of the new rules we're seeing out of the Public Utility Commission in Texas, where they're telling data centers, you're going to have to build your own infrastructure, buddy, because we are not subsidizing that cost on the ratepayers during this massive boom in building in the state. It will be a closed loop water cooling system, the same approach as Helios. So if you're worried about not having clean drinking water in Texas, don't worry, you'll be fine. It'll be a closed loop system. And you can point to this when people tell you that the data centers are guzzling up all of the water and we're quickly approaching a Mad Max esque apocalyptic scenario. It's important to note that this is just a land banking and early stage development play. There's no tenant here yet. They still have to build on the site. But it is Galaxy's first expansion outside of their Helios site, which has Core Weave as its anchor tenant. That site, very impressive over a gigawatt of scale and they are continuing to build phase two as we speak. Now the other interesting part of this, and they didn't give a timeline for this, they're hitting on all the FUD angles in this release. If you can tell we're paying for the transformer, it's going to be under 75 megawatts, so don't worry about it being too large just yet. By the way, we're using closed loop water and they say that the estimated tax revenue for the city of McGregor will be 130 million in local property tax from this site. My question is, is that over the lifetime of the site, what time frame are they using for that? Because it's clearly not 130 per year. But needless to say, they are hitting on all of the data center propaganda talking points to make this seem like a big benefit to the area. And, you know, it does seem like Overall, the city, McGregor, Gregor consented to this. So they're more or less happy with what they see.
Charlie
Yeah, I mean, when you, it's, it's great that Galaxy is definitely skating where the puck is going. I would, I would argue the puck has already landed here and everybody else is trying to catch up. Because right now you can buy Transformers, you can acquire power at cost, and it's like difficult in a timeline. You can almost not buy goodwill anymore. You have to figure out how to navigate this marketing and tactic because if 200 people show up at a city council meeting or in the wrong gym and are angry and have signs, those 200 people who. You had no idea who they were, their names or why they would possibly be a bottleneck. They can shut down or indefinitely delay your entire site. When you're spending billions of dollars, you know, nine figures now, potentially multiple billion dollars, this is something you have to figure out. So in a way, it's almost like you, it's like, almost like your marketing spin has to be so precise and you have to send the right people to go knock on the right doors in the small community in nowhere Texas to, to be able to get these deals done. And in a way, Colin, that's how it should be. You know, in a way, this is my, this is my hot take, which is empower the American people to, you know, property rights. Let them give them the tools to, let's say, what goes on in the community. However, unfortunately, sometimes the people can be kind of dumb. So. Shout out to Galaxy. They seem to have like, identified this as like the constraint to getting permitting done. And their, their press release certainly hits those points. So,
Colin
yeah, hats off to the Galaxy team on the expansion and we'll be eagerly awaiting updates for the construction of the site and, and whether or not they have a tenant in the barrel. I'm sure that if they're moving forward with it, there's probably some conversations underway already. I think that covers that, Charlie. Perhaps we should.
Charlie
We're going to roll to another deal in guess where, Colin? Texas. We're going to go to the Meta and Blackrock deal. I'll lead this one after a word from our sponsor, Lux.
Colin
This episode of Blockspace Live is brought to you by Luxor's Commander Bitcoin miner management software for enterprise operations. Luxor's Commander gives you real time fleet monitoring, bulk remote commands across your fleet and Intelligent Miner. That's an automated profitability engine that runs every five minutes and tests your fleet's power settings against live energy and hash rate markets. Ercot backtest show 10% improved profitability with Intelligent Mining over binary mining. Commander Pro is $100 per megawatt or a 25 basis point pool fee adder roughly half the cost of competition, but you can also try it for free for 60 days. If you'd like to learn more, go to Luxor Tech Forward slash Commander to get started. Charlie what are the spooks up to? BlackRock BlackRock Getting into Meta's business with a new deal. You're muted by the way.
Charlie
Oh my goodness. Okay, so here it is as on Blockspace this Morning, Meta and BlackRock form $14 billion venture for 1 GW El Paso AI campus. Not to be confused with the core scientific AMD $14 billion deal also this morning. Not a typo, this is actually the value of this AI campus in El Paso, Texas. You may know El Paso as a very southern city on the border of Texas bordering Juarez, Mexico. So the deal is as follows. Meta and BlackRock announced a joint venture this morning to build and own a 1 GW data center in campus in El Paso, Texas. Total development cost is about 14 billion BlackRock funds. BlackRock managed funds take about 80% of the venture and Meta keeps about 20%, leases the entire campus and runs it construction, manage it, services it, et cetera, metal contribute the land and construction which is in progress I believe worth about 2.3 billion. BlackRock will put in 4.9 billion in cash and Meta will get a one time $1 billion payout up to make it the 8020 split between BlackRock and Meta. BlackRock site is funded by 12.5 billion in debt. JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley arranged the bond through a holding company tied to blackrock State. So what does this mean? This means Meta gets a gigawatt of compute, not necessarily like on its books and a billion dollar cash back as they sign the deal. If this sounds familiar, this is basically the Hyperion playbook. Hyperion is the originally to now 5/Gwatt Meta Data center in Southern Louisiana. The bond on the Blackrock side drew as much as $20 billion in orders or was about 1.6 times oversubscribed. So when we're Talking about the Capex cycle, where does the money come from? Where is the demand here? There's demand for this. So we don't see you know, if you can get a creative financing and you can get, you can tap the money markets they're still flowing a little bit. On the actual physical side of this El Paso Electric wants approval from the McLeod Generation Facility for 366 megawatts of natural gas which by my calculations doing the Mintat thing from dune it's like 400 million cubic feet per day of gas. 813 modular generators which is wild to say out loud. And another angle is that this is not on ercot. Even though El Paso is in Texas, it's not on the Energy Reliability Council of Texas ercot. It's, it's, this is not pulling for ERCOT so it doesn't have to jump through the hoops that ERCOT is starting to put onto their grid for large new loads. I got another couple comments or two but I'm throw it to you Colin.
Colin
I just think it's interesting for what you were saying about this is kind of Meta gets to add a gigawatt somewhat off the books but they don't take on basically any of the financial risk. What really struck me was the bond that is being arranged by JP Morgan and Morgan Stanley for BlackRock that will be specifically tied to BlackRock and not Meta. Bitcoin miners could only dream of having a counterparty like BlackRock. Maybe soon they'll get one, maybe soon
Charlie
but they won't be bitcoin miners anymore.
Colin
Yeah, they'll be vessels for the deep sea.
Charlie
Yeah, they'll be vessels for Larry Fink. Oh man, we got to cool it with our consumers. Conspiratorial. Yeah, no pivot to an AI show.
Colin
I say that as a joke to all of the people who continue to use the whole data center and AI capex cycle as an ability to advance certain conspiracy theories.
Charlie
One, you know, one flock camera equals one data center. I don't make the rules.
Colin
And the other interesting thing too is this idea of it being there's like a five year bridge period where it stays off the transmission system because because of the 366 megawatts of natural gas that's being deployed on site. That's a massive undertaking. I mean just think about that. Honestly that that is a huge source of baseload energy that is just being used for bridging this data center.
Charlie
You the, the, the American mind cannot comprehend how much natural gas is in this part of the country. Now this is a little bit outside of the, this is actually a little bit outside of the, outside of like the West Texas, East New Mexico Permian basin producing zone. But you get really close to where all the pipelines cross. So I'm not throwing off the top of my head have exactly the real pipelines are but yeah, there's so much natural gas and it's, it's really a location and short, short transportation.
Colin
My question is what, what happens to all those turbines in that generating capacity once they get connected? Do you just keep them on site just as a backup?
Charlie
I don't know. I mean you can't, you can pull these turbines out and move them somewhere else. I don't know what they're like life cycle is I know depending on the turbine. It's like an incredibly specialized piece of machinery. Elon Musk like actually months ago pretty presciently identified turbine blades as one of the obscure upstream bottlenecks as they're so precise and have a very specific type of engineering and they kind of are a linchpin for all of like natural gas production. So I mean yeah, it's, it's. One turbine in the hand is worth 10, you know, down the road you could say. And they're going to Juarez, Mexico, I'm sorry, El Paso. And yeah, I don't know if you want to be like I'm trying to think 10, 20, 30 years from now, let's say data centers are not as like they are not driving the physical infrastructure expansion of the American economy. You know, it's kind of bullish for the citizens of these, of these cities like you're about to have at the expense of capitalists massive behind the meter generation built out. So how that plays out probably very path dependent. Have the luxury of you know, hindsight down the road. But for now move aside Hoover Dam. Like we are building natural gas.
Colin
Get in loser. We're building that gas.
Charlie
Yeah.
Colin
You know, and last thing I'll say, the other thing that struck me and you covered this though is just that the four year lease kind of gives meta an out here if, if the Capex cycle turns they can just bail on this project.
Charlie
Yeah, yeah. And compare that to the lease terms or the durations of the other neoclouds like 15, 20. Yeah, I think there was a 30 year one. These guys are locked in. So flexibility is king. This is really where the hyperscalers get to come in and say okay, maybe we didn't enjoy the insane upside to our stock that you're the irons of the world or the hut eights of the world World have gotten but we have agility and they have big big treasuries they've been building for years. So if they can not get too over their skis like this has railroad baron money written all over it. We're going to move on to our guest Rob Hamilton in the wings and we're not going to talk about bitcoin. That much we're going to talk about before we bring Rob up. A word from our sponsor. Lygos.
Colin
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Charlie
All right, let's talk shop with Rob. Robert Hamilton, welcome back to the show.
Rob Hamilton
Hello. Thanks for having me again.
Charlie
Absolutely.
Colin
Always a pleasure, Rob.
Charlie
Okay, so let's talk AI. Let's talk open weights. This week Jensen Huang made his first tweet ever shook everybody to the core. What was like kind of a niche topic for those of us in AI, that of open models thrust into the limelight. I feel like everybody else is kind of feeling this with like fable and mythos and the anthropic, you know, hand of God directing what you shall and shall not do. But I guess what I'm asking is to explain what the heck an open model is. Give us a little 101201 explainer here.
Rob Hamilton
Absolutely. Yeah. So the term of art in the industry, I guess maybe if you want to start, if you're familiar with the idea of open source and if you're not, let's just start there. Linux is an open source operating system, right. Windows and Mac are closed source. What does that mean? It means that those companies, Apple and Microsoft own that code and they don't really share with you, you just buy the final software you know of the operating system. Open source though means that all of the code underneath it is present and available for someone to look at. Now in the AI world way, we kind of view this is in the same way where you can have anthropic and OpenAI their models, you can use them, but you're not actually going to be able to like run that on your own computer. Right? The open source movement, which is also commonly called open weights is I can in theory download a model and run it on my own computer. The way I would think about this, there's kind of two buckets actually. So open weights is what most people are normally talking about. Weights come from that term weights and biases, which is the basically the math that undergirds all of these large language models. You can actually it's linear algebra, like matrices, like really large grids of numbers and the, if you have the weights and biases, if you have open weights, it means that you can load it on your own computer and you can run it yourself. You may need very high end commercial hardware to be able to run it, but the idea is that the data is available for you to look at and you can run it yourself. Which is has a whole different context of different business applications that we can get into. But Jensen's letter that came out was basically an encouragement of we need to be nurturing and supporting these open source open weight models for the just dynamism of American capitalism and just the strength of US hegemony. You need to be able to have these tools that are open and available so anyone everywhere is able to leverage these tools how they see fit.
Colin
Rob, one quick question for me here. I think one of the large concerns about these open weight models is they are dominated in the Chinese market right now. That's where all the advancements are coming from. So one of the kind of milquetoast criticisms and I say milquetoast because it's really easy to arrive at and it kind of plays to the idea of the CCP boogeyman is that, well, we want American companies using American models because we only want our government spying on what people are doing, not the Chinese government. Does the, does the fact that they're open weight and you can run them on your own hardware mollify that concern at all or is that not necessarily off the table if you're running these things locally?
Rob Hamilton
I think it largely mitigates that. Right. In theory you could have a data center that never talks to the Internet that you can use for all of your analysis. Right. I would say with owning the hardware that these calculations are being done on with competent IT infrastructure, making sure like your firewalls are closed off and it's very controlled in how you can access data into the system and pulling data out of the system that you're able to mitigate those concerns. This also kind of dovetails into the next part of the conversation around China is the reason why China is leading the open source movement is it's very classic in any market. The second mover, the laggard is going to go for open source. If you remember, this is what Meta did with their Llama models. They did open source models because OpenAI and Anthropic were so far ahead. Your best shot as a second mover is to try and create an open source movement with a larger community base that's going to engage and you can get somewhat network effects building on that open layer to eventually be able to overtake it. That's a lot of the strength of what Linux ultimately did in the, in the hardware, in the, in the operating system, in kernel environment was they as being open source. Over time more and more capital and resources get invested into it which becomes a shared good and win among everyone who participates in that.
Charlie
This second mover angle is actually really interesting. So in a way conspicuously, so conspicuously Anthropic is not signed Jensen's letter. It's signed by everyone else. In fact even OpenAI signed it kind of, I don't know later on.
Rob Hamilton
Yeah, they were a follower.
Colin
They were not hedging their bats trying to curry favor, you know.
Charlie
Yeah, it's okay. Anthropic is the, the only like premier model who has not signed this. I did X air grock. I Forget Anyway, anthropic didn't 1 Is this like a de facto admission that the industry is kind of not aligned against Anthropic but they, they want to create some kind of opposition because Anthropic seems to have a direct line White House all out of nowhere. What does history tell us how this could play out?
Rob Hamilton
Yeah, this is interesting with Anthropics success and you could say Personally I feel GPT 5.6 is better than Fable 5 for what I use the belief that and Anthropic is not really coy about hiding this they just believe that these models get so powerful that they need to actually be restricted with how they are used and leveraged for safety concerns, whether that is chemical biological warfare, nuclear weapons or cybersecurity hacking. They believe that these things should be gated. And now for. For the tension between the US and China in a geopolitical sense, these models, the biggest one that everyone's talking about right now is Kimmy K3 and it's a model that comes out of China but is fully open weights. On Monday it came out I just started using it yet today basically to start poking around and a real just. There's several things to think about this where with GPT 5.6 and especially anthropic, if I ever asked it to evaluate my code base for like security audits, it would shut down. It would not give me the latest model. But now with Kimik3 it lets you do all of this stuff.
Charlie
What is that?
Colin
Is that a liability thing? Rob, why is that? Why will not. Why will the two frontier models in the US not give you feedback?
Rob Hamilton
I believe it is a strategic ploy to create distance of a regulatory moat. You could say partially it is because they want to be able to protect consumers. At the same time though, I'm not so sure. Information yearns to be free and you have this really poor asymmetry now where black hat hackers have good enough models to do all of this hacking. But if you're a white hat hacker and you're paying the full price, you still can't get protected. That's the other thing too. Kimi K3 is somewhere between 30, 20 and 30% of the price of Fable 5 and of GPT 5, 6 when you're using it at scale. So it's massively cheaper. It's way more helpful as software helping me try to do my job right in writing software. And I think it just ultimately there's a tension now because you saw when the Kimmy K3 benchmark started coming out maybe a week and a half ago, there was a lot of Anthropic and OpenAI aren't publicly traded but you know, they were getting kind of like pressure on their valuations whereas all of the data center companies stocks were ripping like cleanspark Iron Mara when because ultimately this is a part when you think about from a geopolitical standpoint the US versus China. The US still has all of the chip manufacturing infrastructure to be able to build all this stuff out kind of like the large scale data centers for this at the moment the US is in the lead. All of these Neo clouds, which are things that even if the software gets quickly commoditized down, there are hard capital constraints of what the US is much better at servicing at the moment to be able to kind of protect and project hegemony.
Colin
Rob, Sorry, Jonathan, before you jump in, just how is it that Kimmy K3 is so much cheaper? Is that because the Chinese government is subsidizing the tokens?
Rob Hamilton
Yeah.
Charlie
Is it literally just that simple?
Rob Hamilton
So in theory, if you had the machinery, you could run it for free. Right. But to actually run Kimmy K3 at reasonable scale, it's like a one and a half, $2 million specialized, basically server rack to be able to do it at like a reason at a quick pace. So the cost is because that's just at the moment what they're able to charge and profitably like to keep these machines running 24 7. And this is where it goes into distillation, where the US puts out this frontier model. China over the past year and a half has gotten incredibly adept at basically being able to what's called a distillation use those frontier models, store all of the outputs and use that to train their own model. So they're basically able to take the intelligence from the top model and collapse it down. But this is back, you know, I was listening to all in podcast, David Freeberg said when I worked at Google we would go to Yahoo all the time and see what Yahoo returned in their search engines and use that to improve our product, which is basically the same thing happening here. Additionally, a lot of enterprises require what's called zero data retention, where if I'm using a vendor, they don't hold anything on their side. Anthropic refuses to let you do that. With Fable they say if you're going to use this model, you must let us have full access to the queries that you're running for the next 30 days. Kimmy K3 now just lets you not have to worry about data retention at all. Right? So there's like whole classes of enterprises that are able to now leverage the latest Frontier or close enough to the frontier tech without being handicapped. And I think the gap for a while it was like six to nine months is what the frontier labs were, that everyone else has gotten incredibly efficient at getting the distillation out of these models to where Fable now is starting to hide what they're called the reasoning traces, which is if you ever use these high end models, you have you ask a question and then it ultimately gives you an answer but you can click to see the thoughts and that's like the detailed showing your work. They stopped showing that for a lot of queries because they realized that that was exactly what was being pulled out for the distillation. So it's interesting times. I think it's ultimately good for capitalism, freedom of markets and information to be able to have this. There's no reason why Anthropic and OpenAI should be like a government protectorate kingdom to kind of protect their shareholder value. It's better if these models are widely distributed everywhere and the model companies are going have to just find other revenue
Charlie
streams which gets kind of to the heart of the stuff we cover data centers, the value thesis. They're basically token, they sell tokens and so we care a lot of the price of tokens and that's just kind of determined by the software and what happens up the stack. So what in your view, what does this mean for the short and medium term for token vendors like Neo clouds, like the inference providers, what does this mean?
Rob Hamilton
I think it's incredibly bullish because before the only high value token vendors that you had were Anthropic and OpenAI, those were the only ones that charged the most premium high rate and most of that value went to anthropic and OpenAI. But now if you have a model that's 25 cents on the dollar, cheap like it's, it's, you know, you're saving so much money. I just ran a query earlier today that was $35 and Kimmy K3 that would have been probably somewhere around $250 if I use Anthropic and I now I'm going to make many more queries and the person, the NEO cloud that's hosting the data center is going to be able to maintain that margin rather than it being it going all to anthropic and OpenAI's pocket. Right. So for data centers, massively bullish for the revenue opportunities that are able to accrue to them because to your point, they're the ones that have done the hard capex and OPEX overhead to be able to administer these data centers at scale, that's where the margin is going to be able to go to for this metered intelligence. I think in the longer run metered intelligence is not going to be the way these AI companies are going to make money. The data centers can all day because they're literally the gas station in the metered intelligence they're sitting right there at the tap. But if you're One of these frontier labs, you're going to have to find other things to do rather than releasing a frontier model and charging five to six times what the rest of the market's able to do for almost comparable intelligence.
Charlie
What do you think that might be? What do they do? The fat app like fat protocol thesis that we in the world of bitcoin and crypto have been thinking about for forever. Where might the value accrue?
Rob Hamilton
I think the value crews, I think they're going to do things like working on healthcare, they're going to work on frontier physics, they're going to work on patenting like bleeding edge, you know, bioinformatics and like whether it's curing cancer, things that they're going to be able to specifically narrowly point on with leaders in the field to be able to get this access. I've talked to people casually that are within the, I would say the life sciences and working on longevity and life research and that what happening is these frontier labs are setting up big partnerships to like let us help you work on this next clinical trial. Right. And I think it's going to turn into that's something that they uniquely are going to be able to do versus an open source model. Maybe you'd need that extra lift of 10% more intelligent to get the really big breakthroughs. If you're seeing all these breakthroughs of people taking 80 year old math theorems and proving or disproving them like that's where you're gonna get it. And the physics, the life sciences, like there's gonna be even, maybe cyber security, right? Having the ultimate frontier thing like I used to, you know, you could pay $50,000 for a code audit or I can pay Kimmy a hundred dollars and get the full like readout at way better detail than anything I was able to do for before. But maybe if I have OpenAI, maybe I'm willing to pay them $20,000. It's better than the old cybersecurity vendor and $50,000 and they can still chart, you know, spend $500 of tokens and charge me $20,000. That's a really great margin, right? 95% margin. Like there's other fields and things are gonna be able to do. But this ambiguous metered intelligence I think is going to start falling apart because I'm guessing the open source models are going to get even tighter and tighter to that.
Colin
It kind of makes sense too when you think about not every query is as valuable as another one.
Rob Hamilton
Bingo.
Colin
Like me asking ChatGPT, it's like how long should I braise my lamb shank? Isn't quite in the same. Isn't quite in the same category as someone trying to find a cure for lung cancer.
Rob Hamilton
Right, right, exactly.
Colin
Rob, Last question for me before I kick it back to Charlie for final thoughts. Do you think this letter from Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, etc. Does anything to move the needle for the federal government in terms of banning these open weight models? Do you think that it's basically a. Do you think this puts the problem to rest? I should say in the eyes of
Rob Hamilton
the government, I think it's a very strong nudge for Jensen to come out publicly first time ever on Twitter to kind of drop, drop this. I will say if everyone's looking at each other's incentives, the open source model world greatly benefits Nvidia because they're the ones with the differentiator which are the gpus themselves.
Charlie
Right.
Rob Hamilton
And the fabrication of these semiconductor chips. They are a unique place. I think in the long run we'll actually see the asicification that we saw in Bitcoin, but we're going to see it for AI chips where you're going to be able to buy like a GRO 4.5 heavy ASIC that'll be a fraction of the cost and run really fast. But that's still going to take a lot of time to play out. But I think to directly to answer your question. Yeah, I think this is. Jensen was putting his slight thumb on the scale and I'm grateful for it because to be against the open source nature and the open weights of these models is to ban math. And we don't want to do a rerun of the 90s where people were trying to ban prime numbers because of cryptography. You're basically banning matrices. That's what it is. You're banning math. And there's not a free society if you're banning math. And I think it's healthier and better for the American experiment and for all of our lives to try and wrestle with what it looks like in the new world rather than trying to put the toothpaste back in the tube. Yeah.
Charlie
The 250 long American experiment. Jensen says you can all compete for my product.
Rob Hamilton
That's right. That's right.
Charlie
I guess my last question, and this is probably worth a long, longer term dedicated interview and but you mentioned like you could pay 50k for a code audit from a great top tier company. You'd be down to pay 20k from a premier OpenAI model and product, maybe even Less than that. But this gets into normal small businesses, startups who have to now think about how you hire people. Where do you spend money, where do you allocate resources? And this gets into the token spend question, token spend and employees. Basically a lot of what you're doing is figuring out where to allocate money towards intelligence. How do you think about this? Rob, is it too early to have a clear view? What is your current view on I would say agile tech companies who are building things and trying to figure out where to allocate.
Rob Hamilton
Yeah. So I think the stage I'm at right now, well there's a gradient right where to. I don't use this stuff ever to maybe I have chat GPT in the browser. I ask questions whether code or operational like strategy things to leveraging Claude code and Codex and open code. I use open code for the Kimi tool. It goes right in there. All the models are hosted in America with zero data retention. Like it's a very clean setup. And then what I'm trying to do now is I feel that my engineers have a pretty good grasp for their individual silo tasks and the next step is trying to go one level higher to like a company brain, if you want to call it that, and being able to then enable non engineers to be able to get like a 90, 80, 20 rule where they can get 80% of all of the minutiae and all of the skills here without having to be a programmer themselves and and having that be a reinforcing agent model of like building this company brain and strategy and having different things in there. I'm working on that right now with building own our own basic internal cloud that runs all of this information that could be behind VPNs and be secure. So it's not just anyone who walked in could be able to get all of this sensitive information. I think it's time consuming and I've talked with a couple other founders and entrepreneurs in this space and I think everyone's working on the same exact problem right now. They're trying to figure out how to set up like the secure internal open like company brain. And then from there I think once that's done you can start making intelligent decisions on incremental spends on intelligence and tokens. The open source models make it a lot more justifiable though. Something that cost me 250 bucks just cost me 30 bucks. Right. So as the open source models and weights expand and intelligence gets cheaper, we can put more effort into our team. We're pretty lean on being able to get more productivity out of each employee because they have basically a massive team of. It used to be interns, but now it's kind of like coworkers. Like it's getting to the point where they're like they are meaningfully intricate parts of the entire organization. So it's exciting for sure. Happy to come on sometime and talk about that.
Charlie
Yeah, well, that we'll definitely. This will be an interesting ongoing conversation. Rob Hamilton, thank you so much. Co founder of Anchor Watch. Enjoy having you on the show. We'll get you back on. I'm glad we got you to say the word. Neoclouds.
Rob Hamilton
There you go. Thank you for having me.
Charlie
See you. Love Rob. Anchor Watch folks, we had a packed day of deals so if you liked what you hear, all of these clips will be available on our various social media. Make sure to check out our website. Sign up for the newsletter newsletter.blackspace media.com and hit the website for the longer form stories. You can find those also syndicated through channels like Yahoo. Finance. This show is brought to you by CleanSpark. NASDAQ listed ticker CLSK I'm Charlie. I'm Colin and we'll see you tomorrow.
Hosts: Colin and Charlie
Date: July 28, 2026
This episode dives deep into the latest quarterly earnings and blockbuster deals for leading U.S. data center and bitcoin mining companies, with a special focus on Core Scientific’s $14B, 15-year AMD partnership; Applied Digital’s colossal growth and new spins; Galaxy Digital’s strategic Texas expansion; and the massive $14B Meta-BlackRock El Paso data center joint venture. The show concludes with a practical discussion of the open weight AI model controversy with Anchor Watch CEO Rob Hamilton, including analysis of U.S.-China competition in models, cloud inference market disruptions, and the shifting economics of the data center boom.
Unusual Release: Core Scientific stealth-dropped its Q2 earnings, focusing media attention on a newly announced $14B AMD deal rather than routine quarterly results.
Headline Numbers:
The AMD/Neo Cloud Deal:
Market Pricing:
Geography & Timeline:
Stock Reaction & Industry Impact:
Stellar Growth:
Strategic Moves:
Legacy Business: Bitcoin hosting produces cash; not exposed to BTC difficulties/price swings.
Deal Details:
Local Economic Impact:
Permitting & Politics:
Structure:
Key Features:
Strategic Flexibility:
Open Weights 101:
US vs. China Model Race:
Regulatory and Market Pressure:
Data Center & Inference Economics:
Long-Term Outlook:
Implications for Startups:
On earnings:
On data center labor shortages:
On open models and China’s Kimi K3:
On the cyclical market nature:
On evolving business models:
On regulatory nudges:
This Blockspace episode offers a masterclass in modern data center economics, the shifting landscape of AI infrastructure deals, and the wild-card impact of open AI models and global competition. Colin, Charlie, and Rob break down the numbers and the narratives—from labor bottlenecks and lease war games, to U.S.-China AI rivalry and rapidly evolving cloud business models—in a way that’s sharp, informed, and consistently grounded in the practical realities faced by companies building the backbone of the “Compute” era.
For ongoing coverage, transcripts, and further analysis, visit blockspace media.com or subscribe to their newsletter.