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- [00:00]
Host
Foreign.
- [00:05]
Sponsor Announcer
What's up y'?
- [00:05]
Taylor Monic
All?
- [00:06]
Host
Welcome back to the Block Space Podcast. We are coming at y' all live from Bitcoin Vegas 2026. I'm with Taylor Monic of Clean Spark. Taylor, thank you for carving out some time what is a very busy bust conference for this race.
- [00:19]
Taylor Monic
Hey, thanks for having me on my favorite podcast. Look forward to the conversation.
- [00:22]
Host
Yeah, man, it's a fun one. I'm happy to be talking about AI and HPC retrofits or rather even just greenfields with a guy like yourself, because we were talking before this and you really manage or oversee almost every aspect of that for CleanSpark. So I want to ask you a question that I asked off camera that I think sets the stage. Well, like, what has been one of the biggest revelations about designing a data center for HPC and AI workloads rather than bitcoin? Like, what's one of the biggest differences?
- [00:56]
Taylor Monic
I mean, I think every part of the build is different, but really when you come down to the basis of it, right, it's a warehouse full of computers and so at the end of it, that's what you're building in the bitcoin mining space. You know, we talked about a little bit earlier, you buy a miner and they give you a little bit of guidance, right? Maybe a little pamphlet, a little bit of engineering sport on, hey, this is going to be a successful environment. And it's really been the wild, wild west. You know, when me and you started mining, air cooling was the only thing that was around. We saw a rapid increase in immersion cooling and the adoption of that in our tenure in bitcoin mining over the last 10 years, the introduction of hydro. So it's been like a steady progression, right? And everybody's kind of been able to build whatever they want. The mining manufacturers adapt a little bit to what the customer needs are you go down that path, right? But I think the biggest difference for me is when we're talking with the hyperscalers, the Neo clouds, you know, just our general customers, it's no longer the wild wild West. In some cases, they come in with a 30 page pamphlet that says, this is our basis of design. This is every mission critical milestone you guys must hit. Whether it's the strength of the slab, whether it's the humidity control, whether it's the GPM of the water flow. These are highly subscribed assets, right? These guys know exactly what they want built. They're working endlessly on the other side to get every little bit out of those GPUs. As they're racing against the market of AI. So the biggest revelation for me is while the buildings are much more complicated in a sense of like network topology, you have more networking fiber in one rack than you do in a whole entire bitcoin mine.
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Host
It's crazy.
- [02:20]
Taylor Monic
Yeah, it's much more crazy of a build as in there's much more items, but it's almost easier in a way because you're not building something that you're not so much unsure of, but is unknown. A lot of these sites and these basis of design have been built by other builders, other developers, and you're stepping in and building on something that you know is concrete. There's a bigger blueprint, there's a wide
- [02:39]
Host
for the specs that you need to meet and for the conditions that you need to.
- [02:42]
Taylor Monic
Yeah. And it differs whether it's a TPU or a GPU or whatever the end, you know, compute load is. It's all going to vary, but you get a very concrete building block. And not to mention the level of support that you see from companies like Nvidia, Indel and some of the major hitters is overwhelming compared to the level of support that we would have received from any of the bitcoin mining manufacturers. They're really there with you and the customer hand in hand to be successful.
- [03:06]
Host
That's interesting because I would have thought that it would be fair, very challenging to go from, you know, very simple. Just we're putting this shoebox miner here. We need to make sure that it's powered correctly. Obviously you want to make sure everything's spec, but you don't have to worry about all the other auxiliary infrastructure to support it as much through the aic. I thought that that would be a steep learning curve. It sounds like from what you're saying, it's almost refreshing from an engineering perspective to have clear rules and a clear guidebook to follow.
- [03:32]
Taylor Monic
Yeah. And I'm certainly not saying that it's easy. Right. And that we didn't have any pitfalls and there were no problems. Like, that's certainly not true. Right. We had different steps, different hurdles that we had to get through. But to your point, when you have a clear path of where you need to get to go, it's a lot easier to build the steps, hire the right people, bring in the right thing. Right. And it's not honestly a big surprise to a lot of us at CleanSpark. Right. We have multiple members of the staff that have experience in both high performance computing, standard data center operations, colocation. Right. Like we have a lot of guys because that was part of our thesis on bitcoin mining. Right. Is okay, let's go find guys that operate highly complex facilities, bring them to our not so highly complex facilities and they're going to be overqualified, run a bitcoin mine, but it's going to be ran really well. When you look at the networking topology of redundancy and some of the stuff that we built into our big mega locations like Sandersville Falls, a pretty typical data center blueprint. Right. So not everything was perfect. It definitely is a learning curve. But to your point, when you got something that's concrete that you can work towards a lot easier to fill those gaps. And having the private previous experience of a lot of our staff has been extremely helpful. They've also been super interested in getting back into hbc, getting back in the state of data center. So it's not like we're having to pull teeth. You know, the guys are just naturally excited about it, continue to evolve their career and you know, go into the future of, you know, AI hpc.
- [04:47]
Host
So you mentioned Sandersville and that's where you get segue because I wanted to get to that at some point. Really interesting site, you know, prime location right in Georgia in terms of being close to metropolitan areas and also just having access to reliably based at Georgia has what have been the considerations for going about a retrofit? And then we'll kind of tease this out later. Versus or for. For Sandersville. Are y' all greenfielding or are you. Are you like what's, what's going to be the process? I guess because when I look at the ones in Texas like clear Greenfield, Sandersville, you already have operations. So what's the approach for how y' all are thinking about taking that facility
- [05:28]
Taylor Monic
and repurposing kind of nailed it in your question. So we'll step through that. Right. So you know, Sandersville, highly valuable asset for us, right? To your point, close to a metropolitan city or what the data center industry looks at as the NFL cities, right? Very close to downtown Atlanta. To your point, we already have reliable power and the bit biggest, biggest part or best part for us is it's proven power. We can bring a customer to our location. There's 250 megawatts of power being drawn from the substations that are there. We're not waiting on substation bill, we're not waiting on a ppa. That power is live and current. Right. And then you bring up the next point. Do we retrofit our chicken coop style facility that we have there or do we retrofit our containers that we have there? Because we got a mix, right? We have containers, chicken coop and actually a large amount of immersion on that site. So we looked at the financials and the processes of retrofit versus greenfield and what we did is we worked with the city and said, hey, would you guys be acceptable if we move this power to another plot of land right down the road, Development authority there? Absolutely. We'd love to work with you guys. We got a tremendous relationship with the guys in Sandersville all the way up to stack to the mayor, the city council, right. We've gone in there, we put our best foot forward. So we actually acquired another plot of land up the road across the street to our current facility. We've worked with all the right partners there in the city, including MIAG and everybody. So we are actually going to mine at our current location until the day the data center flips over, which is strategic for us. Right. We have some miners there that buy that, you know, let's call it a year and a half, build cycle, the end of life. We can naturally retire those machines. They did their job, we paid them back, made our money. Those will naturally retire at like s19xbs. If the hash price continues where it is, we'll move our S21s to a location where we have XPS retire those, backfill the fleet. So yeah, we're not going to retrofit those, we're actually going to mine with those as long as we possibly can. And we've already started flattening the land, getting all the trees, stumps, all that kind of stuff out. By now it's actually probably done clearing flat and then we'll continue on our construction process in a completely greenfield new environment.
- [07:21]
Host
So what will the, let's say Sandersville 1.0 for the old site? What eventually.
- [07:29]
Taylor Monic
So we'll take our immersion modules that we put in, we'll take those to another location. If the air cooled fleet is in a place where the margins are still correct, the hash price is correct, participating. Take those air cooled units out, move those once the AI did and then we'll, we'll retire our chicken coops and we'll, we'll take those down. If the hash price is applicable, we'll go stand those up somewhere else and continue to mine on them. But everything that we've put into Sandersville is something that we can take apart and move, but we'll still have a large office presence there to obviously Support the construction of the data center and then support the data center in the future. And then we're actually going to repurpose some of the land into storage and doing a major increase on our miner repair center that we're going to build out there.
- [08:08]
CleanSpark Narrator
We are CleanSpark, America's Bitcoin miner. A publicly traded company with the largest operating hash rate powered entirely by self operated infrastructure across four states. This is our proof of work. We are setting the standard for what's next. Learn more about the intersection of energy and bitcoin@cleanspark.com so when you go about
- [08:38]
Host
greenfielding one of these facilities, what's. What are some of the first steps that you take? Like how do you, how do you lay the groundwork and plan for taking on this monumental task of setting up one of these massive data centers?
- [08:52]
Taylor Monic
Yeah, so I mean breaking it down step by step, you know, starting at the core with a, with a bitcoin asset. I think we all honestly look at it as a 5 to 10 year asset and we plan around that. So the first major change you're making is you're now looking at a 25 to 30 year asset. Right. So you need to make sure that the leases coincide with that. I know I'm getting basic and boring here, but I want to get into the weeds. Right? Got to make sure the leases are good. You got to make sure the power contracts good for that term. Right. You need to make sure that the redundancies that the customer is going to want to be is in place. And then from there it's honestly, you know, kind of a standard construction built. You know, you go in, you work with your customer, they're going to give you a basis of design or set of requirements that we talked about earlier. From that basis of design, you're able to architect. All right, fantastic. The slab I need to build is this. The building I need to build is this. The office space is this. You start to lay that basis of design over the land, see where the topology cooks out and everything like that. Once that's all agreed and set, start marking your fire entrances, your fiber entrances, your roads, all those little minor details that maybe you don't care so much or think about in the bitcoin side because you're just bringing in a star linker. You don't really need that so much support on a bitcoin site. And then, you know, you flatten the land out and make sure it's all buildable. And then you just start from the concrete up of building out that basis of design with all the, you know, prescribed requirements that that person has, whether it's liquid cooled or air cooled, that obviously change your equipment and design philosophy. And then you build it like a general construction project. Get it to a kind of a ready for service date. And depending on your contract, you might be responsible for building hot aisle containment into the white space. You might be responsible bringing water lines into the white space. Customer might want you to also install the racks and go forward. So varies a little bit on contract, but outside of just making sure that you're secured for a much longer term of that asset rather than that, it's a lot similar to a bitcoin mine. But to our point earlier, it's a much more complicated bitcoin mine with a lot more redundancies, a lot more cable, a lot more fiber, a lot more of everything that we know. And you go from there. But it's not exactly rocket science now. People have been building data centers since the early 60s and they'll change and evolve just like we did in bitcoin mining. But nothing major past. Just making sure you're set up for a much longer period of time and maybe being more secure than you would be in a bitcoin mine with a little bit less risk than you'd be willing to take because on that shorter timetable.
- [11:09]
Host
Right, right. You said it's more complicated obviously, because of all the infrastructure that goes into it. Also seems more complicated in a good way as well, because you can work with these people and have synergies with them. But it seems like all the different counterparties in this business are more really involved in the data center process. Like you mentioned, getting support from the folks at Dell, some of the OEMs, imagine also your partner submer, also have been helpful in terms of thinking about how to devise viewing. On that note, what are some of the considerations you have to take for cooling these computers versus bitcoin? Like how much different is that infrastructure?
- [11:53]
Taylor Monic
Oh, well, I mean, the infrastructure is certainly different. I mean, at our, what I would call some of our premier locations, all Sandersville, for example, right. We have these chicken coop style designs that we worked endlessly on the CFD and they run a PUE of 0. Right. Or 1, however you want to describe it, there's no entry fans, there's no exhaust fans, there's no air conditioning, there's nothing. Right. The miner sucks in fresh air from the outside. We came up with some tricks and methods to make sure that that hot air on the other side lasted far Enough away from the cold air intake that it can run through 140 degree day and have no input. Right. But a standard data center is going to have chillers and all these things that are built in and all of those are what's going to end up doing the cooling and making sure that those chips are at the correct level. So from a engineering basis of the base layer bitcoin mining, we almost looked at it as what's the most to keep it alive versus the bitcoin industry, like we talked about, has these very strict set of, set of specifications that they say, hey, we want it to be 72 degrees in the dash, under plus or minus 1 degree. We want the humidity to be exactly this. Right. So the engineering perspective is instead of building to survive, you're building to thrive is almost like the way to look at it. Right. And so all of those things make it more complicated. But to your point, the data center companies are willing to spend money on redundancy. So if you have a chiller go down, you're gonna have a backup chiller, got a CDU go down, you're gonna have a backup cdu. So there's redundancies and better maintenance processes that go into all these facilities that make them function at a much higher level. And then a little bit off topic here, but kind of on the same level, the quality of the infrastructure going in is monumental. Right. The, the difference of a, a bitcoin mining immersion container versus the level of quality that we're going to receive from a vertif. Right. An Integra or Submariner is going to be through the roof. Right. So not only is the building more complicated, it's more redundant, but like the core product that you're putting in there is at a much higher quality than what we were seeing in bitcoin mining infrastructure. Yeah, I mean you've been referring to
- [13:49]
Host
them as chicken shacks, Right. You know, and it's, that's, that's that not to denigrate the fact that these are well run and clean, but you just don't need that much, you know what I mean, for the bitcoin.
- [14:00]
Taylor Monic
Oh, and I don't mean to degrade the chicken coop at all. Right. From an engineering perspective, it's a beautiful, it's a work of art. Right. The fact that we can support 150megawatts of computers with zero cooling, you tell that to somebody in the data center industry, they're going to be really impressed. Right. But to your point, it comes with some drawbacks of not Having the humidity control and the temperature control and those things. So I don't, I don't mean to degrade what we built. I'm very proud of it actually. But to your point, yeah, you just get much more sophistication in the data center and it's for good reason. Right. The margins are much higher on the data center, on the end user product. Right. Versus in Bitcoin mining. The margins are tight. We're trying to maximize everything that we possibly can. So spending 10% and having a 1.1 Poe is really impactful in a negative way for us versus on a data center having a PUE of 1.3. They're still making plenty of money and that's absolutely no issue. So they're able to have that extra capital and funding to make these facilities more sophisticated, more resilient, ultimately, you know, a better quality product. Right.
- [14:54]
Host
100%.
- [14:55]
Sponsor Announcer
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- [15:59]
Host
We were talking before recording a little bit about the decision to focus on a PowerShell wingspark versus going into the Neo cloud. Can you speak to that decision? Because to me it's one of the more interesting divisions right now with the public Bitcoin miners that are purging into this business because you have basically iron is the, the, I would say the blue chip here. And then Hive is also making their way into it as well. Most of the rest of the industry saying we're just going to run your infrastructure, we're just going to manage the pallet. Why did CleanSpark also decide to take that.
- [16:33]
Taylor Monic
So it's a multitude of stuff, but I'll kind of break it down into, into two key points. And something that we're really good at is build in operation. Right? We're one of the only few bitcoin miners that actually built everything that we installed. We didn't third party dial. We have a construction team at the time that was ran by Scott Garrison, right. And he built Sandersville, he built Washington, he built almost, you know, every megawatt that we have that we didn't purchase through acquisition, right. So we're really good at it. We're really repeatable about it. We, we understand that core competency, right? And on the operation side, I think we've done a really good job and I hope the market's seen it. I think we've been the leader in uptime, we've been the leader in efficiency, right? We, we've really shown our prowess and we, we can own and operate facilities. We talked about it. It is a little bit more complicated, but we've got the base fundamentals down. There's no difference for us to maintain a, a chiller rather than a dry cooler or you know, the crossovers that come from our big basis in immersion cooling. A lot of that stuff transfers over to liquid to chip. We have a good understanding of chemistry and corrosion, how to maintain the pipes, like all the little minute details, right. There's something that we're, we feel really good about. And the second half is obviously the rat race, right? You've been in bitcoin mining since probably the S9 maybe a little bit earlier. And you've seen all of the companies, Chase, S9, S17, S19, S19, XB, S21, and it just never ends. Right. And the capital outlay is obviously massive. The efficiencies are, are radically growing. And we just don't think that one, we want to participate in that. And I also think that we're very, very early in AI then there could be a massive change in AI compute over the next four to five years. Do you want to beat several billion dollars into some old GPU that has absolutely, you know, no efficiency because X, Y or Z technology came out. I mean, look at the amount of capital that is going into AI and hbc. There is going to be innovation. And so for us, we feel really comfortable that we can provide a really meaningful, really high quality product. We can take advantage of the land and the power that we have. Not only that we've acquired through bitcoin mining, but to your point our new greenfield builds that we have and then we actually see a road long term where we got a lot of kind of flak about having 32 locations instead of having mega sites. Right. But right now we're doing one part of hpc. Eventually we're gonna have to get the HPC to the end user. We think that there's gonna be a lot of validity in our 10, 20, 30, 50 megawatt sites. While they might not be the great for a hyperscaler model company trying to train something, the future of edge computing to me looks extremely bright. We're excited about repurposing some of those facilities in the future for a different type of compute that's coming up on the horizon.
- [18:56]
Host
It seems to me that it makes a lot of sense focus on the bread and butter of what because bitcoin miners ultimately kind of to recap on a lot of what we talked about, you're there's not so much hands on management of the compute itself. So make sure the computers don't overheat basically right. You don't have to network them or any. You just point them to a straight up off you go your min. And so it makes sense to me that like you know, bitcoin miner is the base of empowerment. This really was boils down to. That's all why they go into AI HPC because they can make more bang for their bucks. I'm curious for your thoughts on what do you think it would look like Place yourself in the shoes of a bitcoin miner that was deciding to go the do clouds out. Where would you even start trying to hire out for something like someone who's going to manage the customer. Do you think you could train for that in house? Do you think you would almost certainly have to hire Alex for something like that? Like how. How would you even go about building a team to source GPUs run network them, find someone to buy the comp f. It seems almost like an entirely different business in its own right.
- [20:03]
Taylor Monic
Oh no, it absolutely is an entirely different business in its own right. And that's a completely fair statement. You know, if I was going to do it, I think there's two paths, right? You can obviously go in and incentivize people at industry leading companies with capital and stock and incentivize them to come over. But more than likely what I would do is try and find a young startup and acquire them and bring them into the cleanspark fold. The ones that have the competencies that we need. Whether it's networking, procurement, that type of strategy. So yeah, you're either going to have to go out, steal them from the big guys, which is going to be hard because like we talked about so much capital in this industry they're not going to let their high performing employees go or you got to find an opportunity where there's a startup with a bunch of guys that came together and maybe they're lacking funding or want to accelerate or want to be a part of something bigger and make a strategic move to bring those resources in house. But training from scratch is going to be really hard because I mean you've interacted with both types of compute. Not a lot of crossover between logging into your, your bit main miner root, root and you know, putting in a pool and setting it up versus to your point, just, just networking topology alone and bit miner and HPC is astronomically complicated and it varies upon different chip sets and how people want to architect things. That's another reason why we want to
- [21:11]
Host
say and it's a burgeoning form of combat, you know what I'm saying? Like finding the ways to optimize these computers for these AI workloads. They're evolving in tandem with each other. The use cases and the optimizations for how to actually provide your computing power. Imagine it's a fast moving thing.
- [21:26]
Taylor Monic
Yeah. And we think that's another strength of the core and shell. Right. If we're building core and shells that are high performing, it allows our end customers to focus on exactly what you just said. How do they extract as much as they can out of their models, GPUs, wherever they're at in the stack, stack allows them to focus on that. And then we want to be a strategic partner working with very particular infrastructure providers to say over time, hey, how can we make this facility 1%, 2%, 3% better? They can work on what they're really good at, we can work out on what we're really good at and meet in the middle on ultimately having like you know, world leading products.
- [21:56]
Host
It makes a lot of sense to split up the business or the business focuses I think because it's basically either side taking a different risk and shouldering a different burden. You know, and I think that for some people outside looking in, I've often had people my everyday life when, you know, I talk about this because they're pretty fascinated with the whole, you know, AI transition.
- [22:15]
Taylor Monic
Yeah.
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Host
So why wouldn't one company just do it all? And it's like, well, it's really complicated.
- [22:20]
Taylor Monic
Oh yeah. I mean you started the chip level with what Nvidia is doing. Right. And then you look at the rack level of Dell and all the other providers and then above that you have the infrastructure providers. One company trying to do all that to be very hard for them to be, you know, leading experts in every step. You know, I guess we'll count Elon out of this. I think he's going to end up going full stack. But everybody else. Now I definitely get your point. You got to basically build on everybody. It's almost like building a team, right? Like a baseball team is not going to win because one guy's really good or whatever it is. Right. But if you've got a team member where you're pulling expertise from every single different player, that's how you're going to win a championship. And I kind of look at it the same as building a really good data center. You're going to want the best chip, the best rack, the best infrastructure, the best land and power provider, the best construction team. You take all those expertise, put them in one area, you're going to get something really good.
- [23:03]
Host
So going Back to the PowerShell model, another big difference between setting up these data centers for AI versus buying bitcoin is now you actually do have to go find a customer for space. I mean, if you were hosting bitcoin miners, that was always the case, but actually find someone to park the computers for compute. I'm curious, how do you go about that? You say, okay, we're greenfielding these sites, we got power, we're, we've got some financing, we're going to build it. How do you start with business development for finding a tenant for those locations,
- [23:35]
Taylor Monic
you know, on a basis level, we, we went out and hired somebody. His name's Boyd, he was a 20 year veteran over at your point. So he's been selling, building data centers for, you know, majority of his career. So that's one way. Obviously he's got a lot of connections in the market. He goes out, you know, we get in the weeds of making the one pagers, putting the data rooms together, you know, and then he takes all that ammunition and he goes out to his contacts. So start to sell them. But to be honest and not to sound, you know, odd here, but given the, the heat of the market, we've also had a lot of inbounds, you know what I mean? Being always wondering about that. Yeah, I mean we're a big publicly traded entity. We've been very vocal about our bitcoin mining. Right. We made a CEO transition last August and you know, brought back. Matthew Schultz is our CEO and chairman now. But he's been very vocal that and very clear that we have HBC endeavors and we are going to build data centers. And you know, from, you know, that publication and that media, we've been getting a lot of inbounds from a lot of amazing customers. So we've tackled it the traditional way of going out, hiring a veteran that has the experience, has the knowledge and can do his part. Partnered with this just unrivaled need for compute, we've been able to drive a lot of clients just naturally. And then some of our mild contacts in the data center space have been reaching out. Matt has some and Gary has some. So yeah, it's been a, it's been a mix of both, but luckily for us, it's been a lot of natural inbounds.
- [24:52]
Host
Yeah, it seems to me like there's just so little power available that if you have large blocks and you're a reputable, serious company, I was wondering if they're going to come to you because I've heard that from a lot of other bitcoin miners and it makes a lot of sense. I think it also kind of pours cold water on a criticism some of the miners had who announced pivots a little later. It's like, oh well, he missed out on all the deals. And it's like, oh, dude, we're still in the first inning of this thing.
- [25:21]
Taylor Monic
I couldn't agree more, man. We are absolutely in the first inning of this thing. I mean, even looking the progression of verbiage out of the, let's just call it the model companies, right? At first it was 100 megawatts, 500 megawatts, a gigawatt. Now they're talking about, you know, endless amounts of power and, and again, like we have no idea where AI is going to go. AI has been great. It's been a really useful tool and it's doing all this kind of stuff. But what happens when it makes its first like major, major breakthrough on cancer or replacement for oil or one of these like, you know, mega thought projects that society ultimately needs to figure out? What's the investment going to look like then when they prove that, hey, we hit this milestone, it's just going to double? Is it going to triple? I mean, the projections for these companies are absolutely, absolutely astronomical. So did we miss out on some of the first deals? Yes, but we're also learning from those first deals what SLA do they have that are pitfalls? What construction schedules really didn't make sense. Like we're learning from all the first kind of movers. And so, yeah, obviously there's, there's the argument to say you missed the initial boat, but it might be better to be on the second boat, learn from the first boat and not have what happened. Right, right. And have a better outcome. So we try and look at it from a positive perspective. And to your point, it's endless opportunity. There's more than enough to go around for, for everybody. There's just not enough power. And the people that have secured land and power are, you know, in my opinion, really in the driving seat.
- [26:34]
Host
And so power really is the bottleneck this point.
- [26:37]
Taylor Monic
Right.
- [26:37]
Host
I mean, how do you think about the US's grid in terms of putting a certain cap on the AI and HPC expansion that we've, you know, because we've seen voracious appetite. But if you think about, obviously we're going to continue to build, you know, more generation. But if you look at like the schedule for megawatts are supposed to come online across the country over the next like 10 years, a lot of it is renewable. Like, there's, I mean, there's some natural gas plants planned, but there's very, there's like one nuclear facility and who knows when that'll even come online. So I'm just curious if you think that. Well, I guess a better way to ask this question is, sorry, it's a little rambling, but like, what does the rat race for megawatts look like in a few years?
- [27:21]
Taylor Monic
You know, I, I've been being told over and over for the last years, you know, there's no more grid power. There's no more grid power, you know, X, Y and Z. I want to give a huge shout out to our Land and energy team, Duncan Poe. We basically gave the initiative and let's call it November, we said, hey, go find us power for HBC. And over a few short months, we're upwards of 900 megawatts secured, all grid, no behind the meter, no gas, nothing. Just purely off the grid. Right. So I think there's still power to be found. I think humans are going to see this. A nation will need for power and they're going to double and triple down on it and start building generation to catch up. Right. Because we're going to continue to build. Right. Humans just don't stop evolving. Right. We just continue to evolve, involve evolve, make things better. So I think the power ramp is going to catch up. Not completely. Right. I think a lot of the data center products, they are projects that you hear about may, may or may not be real. Right. We see the cancellation rate of a lot of these facilities. Like, I think 40% of them are stopped throughout the country. But also, you know, you heard from President Trump directly. He wants people to start putting on behind the meter, start paying for their own load. So I think that's an obvious place where it's going to go. And then you have the modular reactors that have been kind of in the vaporware for 10 years. And people are super excited about the thought experiment that it is. But I think those are actually starting to come to market. Truly be landed.
- [28:38]
Host
They're building one in East Tennessee. They're building one,
- [28:43]
Taylor Monic
yeah. So behind. Behind the meter, I think, is going to be a huge driver. I think if this nuclear thing catches on in the way that it's been proliferated in the market, that could be another huge driver. Right. That. I also don't think the grid's tapped out yet. We keep finding power and maybe we just have a really special team or whatever it is, right? But we keep finding it. People have been telling us for years and years there's no more. There's no more well clean Spark scaled from 50 to well over a gigawatt of power, all on the. All on the grid.
- [29:07]
Host
So how much of that not to do Yalls horn too much. But we can extrapolate this out to the whole bitcoin mining industry. How much of that is. Because that was the whole business for bitcoin miners for the last five, six years.
- [29:20]
Taylor Monic
Us.
- [29:20]
Host
It's like the reason why they've been so well positioned for this AI boom is because they've been the only ones buying up 100 megawatt blocks out right. All over the U.S. i mean, is part of the success that y' all are seeing is because you just have TE's that are dedicated to this and like, you know the game.
- [29:37]
Taylor Monic
Oh, absolutely. Like, I don't want to get into the. The secrets of how our team does stuff, right. But from a high level, we call it the front door approach. Right. We go into the city, we tell them exactly what we're going to do. We show them exactly the infrastructure is. We show them sound studies, we show them that we don't use any water. Like, we go in the front door and say, hey, transparently, this is exactly what we want to do. This is the amount of power we want to take. This is the land that we want to build it on. Is this zoned correctly for you guys? Are you guys happy with this? Is the power company, you know, on board? Like, we try and do everything we can on the front end, and that builds a lot of really good relationships. And I'll highlight Sandersville again. Right? We went into Sandersville, we took over a mine from a company that hadn't paid their, their power bill. We cleaned up the debt with the power bill, which was obvious automatically, like a good shoe in with the city. Right. We did everything that we told the city we would do. Every permit we would file, followed it exactly on time. Build a construction process. We used all local labor from that area, providing thousands of jobs throughout that process, right in the build. And when you go in through the front door, you're honest, you're transparent, you use the local trades, you help support the community. Like we worked with the schools, we worked with, you know, a wide variety of deals. You know, when that mayor gets a call from a mayor in another city saying, hey, clean sparks here. Should we let him in? And this mayor is like, oh yeah, they've donated this, they built that. They've done everything that they said from start to finish, it helps grow your brand, you know, really organically. And I don't think a lot of people have taken that approach. But the reason why we're in the driver's seat is exactly why you said hyper focus on securing as much land and power as we can. And then out of nowhere, three years ago, HBC takes a full hold. All everybody wants is land and power, and the people that have it are the bitcoin miners.
- [31:11]
Sponsor Announcer
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- [31:54]
Host
So pivoting a little bit to adversarial thinking here, the AI Capex boom has been almost unprecedented in a lot of ways, the billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars have been invested, poured into building these data centers. Some of them have been delayed. There have been a few Announcements and I'm just curious if you have any comments on what you see as being potential pitfalls for these AI builds and for these HPC data center rollouts. Another way to put it, what could throw kinks into the process, not for Queen Spark specifically, but just for the whole industry because you know, everyone subject to laws, Tim, laws of physics, you know, fuel costs rising, supply chains may be failing in certain places. Walk us through how you think about planning for some of those pickups.
- [32:48]
Taylor Monic
Yeah, so I think you hit a lot of the well talked ones, right? You have supply chain construction, like you know, just labor shortages, things like that. But one thing I don't think gets enough discussion and it's something that's personally been taking up a lot of my time and I've been looking at is there is an anti data center movement growing in this country, right. You see it in the canceled projects. You've seen it in, you know, some of the cities ousting city council members that have approved data centers. Right. You see the Facebook groups and even on like my own personal social media kids that I went to school with and growing up with, I'm seeing a rise in anti data center posts. Right. And a lot of it comes from misinformation. You guys are going to use all the water? Well, most data centers at this point are closed loop and use less water than a McDonald's does in any given day. Right. You're going to make the power rates go up. Well, in most cases in the clean spark fashion, we've actually driven property taxes down, energy costs down in the communities that we operate in. Right. So there's a ton of misinformation out there around data centers and that is gaining traction like really, really rapidly. So we're trying to do everything that we can, not only for our own company but for the general, you know, industry in itself on properly educating people that just because we use the power doesn't mean your power bill is going to increase. Right? You think we're going to use a million gallers of water? Actually this whole entire system's closed loop. Some people promote that AI data center has no jobs. We both know that there is a ton of maintenance not only on the MEP side but also in the white space of maintaining the GPUs, maintaining those chillers, pumps, air conditioners. Right? Like there's a lot of jobs and a lot of value creation that come out of this. And so we really need to fight a lot of that misinformation, provide people the truth on what's going on. You know, hopefully over time we can curve that, because I think we can both agree AI in its different use cases is extremely important not only for everything that is going on with the model companies and things like that, but also for natural defense. Right. We do not want to be not market leader in AI. Right. Especially as you see some of these, like, amazing companies like Audrey and things like that are developing fully autonomous drones, submarines, planes flying right along F35s. Right. A lot of that relies on AI, AI, compute, AI development. And as a country, you know, we really need to be on the forefront of leading AI, not only for, you know, our country to prosper, but also for natural defense, you know, keeping that together so it's multifold.
- [34:59]
Host
I agree with that 100%. And so you're saying that one of the greatest threats actually to this is pushback for these AI data centers in terms of impeding progress, like things getting tied up in local council or protests, scaring, you know, people glued rubber stamp project.
- [35:14]
Taylor Monic
Right.
- [35:15]
Host
Because we're starting to see that for what we're doing.
- [35:17]
Taylor Monic
Yeah, starting to see it, you know, all over the country, you know, and even in places like Virginia, you know, capital of data centers, there's starting to be a lot of pushback there. It's just a growing thing. Really interesting to, like, see where some of this misinformation is coming with. You know, I would assume that it's a big China influence of, you know, trying to slow down our development so they can speed up their development, spending a lot of money, you know, building a lot of coalition groups and things like that. Or, you know, people don't really look too much into where the funding some of these groups comes in. And, you know, you start looking at some of the comments, and there may or may not be a lot of bots on a lot of the posts. Who knows where the bots are coming from? But yeah, it could definitely be something. We could have the best supply chain, all the right workers, all this kind of stuff, but be defeated by misinformation and ultimately having a city council or, you know, somebody step in and shut the bill down.
- [36:02]
Host
So just a few more questions, Staley, and we'll wrap up. So you can get to your panel. What is the timeline for one of these great things? You could give like a rough estimate for how long something takes. Like, something takes from announcing, planning, building, getting plants in there in their food.
- [36:18]
Taylor Monic
If you're starting completely from scratch, the land isn't prepared, you never contacted a customer, could be upwards of two years, 24 months. If you've already got a customer engaged, understand the basis of design lands relatively flat. You know, you're seeing accelerated construction schedules, anywhere from 14 to 18 months. You know, people are getting better about these. The word modular, it's becoming more and more a thing whether that to, you know, actual modular build or building up, you know, to wall building and sliding the modules in to save time. So yeah, you could range anywhere from a year if you're mega aggressive with everything in place and you started that day, versus, you know, two years if you're a brand new company coming out, having to figure out a basis of design, figure out a customer, you know, go through the whole marketing process. It could be upwards two years.
- [36:59]
Host
All right, Taylor, as a closing question, the annoying one, what is the future of wingspark's bitcoin mining? And I'm specifically interested in a lot of the smaller sites that y' all have around.
- [37:12]
Taylor Monic
Oh, we're still going to continue to mine. None of our leadership has ever publicly or privately said we're going to stop mining. We're at a really good fleet efficiency. We still actually have about 60 to 75 megawatts of infrastructure still deploy. We have more emerging containers. We have S21 version XPS that we're actually deploying right now in Ripley, Tennessee. We're going into South Dakota. We're actually energizing an expansion this week at our camps tool site. So yeah, we're going to continue to mine. We have a relatively new fleet and we'll naturally wind down, you know, starting the third S19XPS, our oldest miners and we'll take those as margins come and go. But yeah, bitcoin is still an extremely big part of our business. We bifurcated our leader, bifurcated our leadership structure. That way we have a head of bitcoin mining and a head of AI and they both report up through me.
- [38:00]
Host
I was curious about that, how you structure that internally in the company in terms of us splitting those focuses.
- [38:06]
Taylor Monic
Yeah, I mean we split the groups up. And so our head of AI is now Brad Otis. He's worked under me as our SVP of mining for the last three years. There's literally no one else in the world I trust run our operation and he's taken the lead on that. We've hired a guy named Jeffrey Thomas, he runs our AI stack and I got the great honor, pleasure of being able to oversee both those departments and, and basically like watch how we're gonna, you know, use the strengths of, of one to help the other and, and where they should cross pollinate, where they should separate and all those types of things. It's honestly been one of the funnest parts of my whole entire career is seeing all that come together. Yeah. Being super clear, we have no intent to stop mining. We're still currently deployed right around 50x a hash. Like I said, we got new sites coming along and you know, I think that represents like you know, anywhere, 30, $40 million infrastructure. So we're putting our money where our mouth is. We're not saying we're just going to keep mining, you know, so we'll, we'll play it, you know, year by year. But right now, definition is clear. Clean Spark still mining company.
- [39:01]
Host
All right, I lied. Last question.
- [39:03]
Taylor Monic
Yes.
- [39:04]
Host
What. What's going to be your biggest focus this year as you look forward to these green flows? What, what is the thing you are laser focused on for the rest of the year?
- [39:13]
Taylor Monic
Simple. Sign lease build data center. You know what I mean? Uh, we've gotten our bitcoin mining operation into an amazing spot. I've got more than enough confidence in Brad that he can take the helm up there and, and, and carry of, you know, if not all of the burden and load of our bitcoin mining operation obviously there. I'm still there to support and help in any shape, manner or form. But right now, directive is clear. Sign lease build data center. We're super excited about our HBC endeavor. I'm genuinely really excited about what AI can do not only for our company and our shareholders, but obviously civilization for ourself. You know, we talked about those key societal problems that we have. Replacements for oil, you know, cures for cancer, all those types of stuff. If we don't build this compute, I don't really see us awake of, you know, getting there otherwise. So yeah, that's my main focus. Keep it short and sweet. Sign leaseable data center.
- [40:00]
Host
Taylor, thank you so much man. That was a fun conversation.
- [40:02]
Taylor Monic
Yeah, thank you.