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Rich Miller
Foreign.
Colin
What's going on, y'?
Rich Miller
All?
Colin
Welcome back to Block Space Live, brought to you by CleanSpark. Charlie, I'm not even an Elon fanboy, but I gotta say, that intro video got me pretty fired up, man.
Charlie
We're going to space. Calling I don't know when and. And we're going to space.
Colin
We're going to space. And we have been all week because it's really SpaceX Week at Block Space and in the larger fintech world, because SpaceX iPodOS tomorrow. So we've got yet another segment on SpaceX today. Charlie's going to be leading that, talking about satellites. And also we're going to be riding the SpaceX Mega ramp, which is its valuation chart. We've got some supplements there to show y' all just why some people feel a little shaky about this IPO and why other people are saying you're dumb if you don't buy it. It's kind of damned if you do, damned if you don't. But following that, we will have a quick note on Coreweave's $3.5 billion unsecured proposed note that just dropped on the wire this morning. Then we've got an interview with Rich Miller, longtime journalist in the data center space, who just took a tour of the Lake Mariner facility and Terra Wolf's Lake Mariner facility. He's got some pretty interesting takeaways. You'll be shocked at how many contractors are working on that site right now. Or if you know kind of what this entails when you're building one of these AI data centers. Maybe not following that. We are going to be discussing, uh, oh, censorship, Charlie. Specifically OpenAI banning two accounts that they believed are linked to Chinese state agencies that were pushing anti data center and anti American government LLM produced content. And then following that, we are going into the token wars. Not crypto tokens. Specifically, OpenAI's decision to lower its token pricing and why Zero Hedge thinks that this is doomsday for AI, despite the fact that usage for these tokens and adoption keeps spiking.
Charlie
That's right. Blockspace goes live every weekday at 1pm Eastern, featuring quick hits on AI emerging tech, a little bit of bitcoin still, and some bitcoin mining where it makes sense. This episode turns into a podcast. Wherever podcasts are found, make sure to subscribe. Subscribe to that feed. And if you're listening on Coindesk, we are ending the Coindesk feed. Head over to the Block Space feed, search Block Space and whatever podcast player you are listening to and subscribe there because this will no longer be on CoinDesk by the end of next week. This show is brought to you by CleanSpark. Nasdaq listed ticker CLSK. More on CleanSpark later on in the show. So Colin, let's talk about SpaceX again. And the thing is, it's a retail mad house. Let's just do the numbers really quick. So it IPOs tomorrow I believe unless something's changed June 12th.
Colin
Well, if, if Senator Warren has her way, the SEC would delay the IPO. Apparently she put in a request for them to delay it, which is almost certainly not going to happen. But I think just kind of shows you where we are in the current political landscape.
Charlie
Yeah. Are you ready to be very unpopular, Senator Warren? Because look at this, this is a retail madhouse. SpaceX IPO said to draw more than 70 billion in retail orders. Retail orders alone are basically enough to cover the entire raise, which is I think 75 billion retail will be allocated 20% of available shares for SpaceX. So Senator Warren, I get it, put some guardrails around things, maybe comes from a good place. Rarely do I ever see that it does. But if you are in this for support and votes, I don't think this is the way to get them because the people want a piece of SPC X.
Colin
The people want a moonshot, Surprise, surprise. But that's really an incredible stat, the fact that the original raise amount of 75 billion could be covered solely by retail. And as we covered on the show this week, according to Reuters, the whole thing is 3x over subscribed to like 250 billion. Really curious where that final number shakes out.
Charlie
Yeah, maybe I can pull up a Poly Markets here in a second. But before I do that I want to talk about one of the core things because what are we going to do? I can't really don't know much about rockets. I don't really know much about satellites. But I will say as the SpaceX satellite is their vector and way they're going to TR shoot their AI modules into lower Earth orbit. It's of very, you know, a lot of scrutiny right now because the SpaceX plan and they unveiled this the other day was to have these little satellite modules which they rocket up into space and create a constellation of them interlinked, pointing down to the ground and to each other. And so they kind of, you know, rolled out a video of it, gave some dimensions and some high level specs and that got people on Twitter arguing about it and the big Question is, do these satellites work? I think it's almost all around the, like, heat dispersion argument. And I'll pull up this viral tweet from JerryRigEverything, who, by the way, fantastic YouTuber. You can find him breaking and demolishing phones. I'm a longtime subscriber of this guy. I love him, he's a great engineer. But he put out this tweet that says this in. You know, someone said satellites work in space because they don't get that all that hot. Somebody subtweets him, Peter says the Soviets put nuclear reactors in space, you idiot. And then Jared says nuclear reactors in space is funny because those nuclear reactors were allowed to hit internally hit 3,272 degrees Fahrenheit while radiantly shedding 150 kilowatts worth of heat. Elon plans on shedding the same amount of heat while keeping his processors cool at 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Jerry asserts that the radiator would need to be the size of a football field. So, Colin, how do we square this circle? Is Elon gearing up for another massive disappointment? And this may be the biggest of all because this is his big foray into public markets entirely around the value thesis of putting these space, these satellites in space.
Colin
I'm just going to go out on a limb and say that I probably trust the engineering acumen of the team that built the first reusable rocket booster, rather than the YouTuber who has never built an aeronautics company. I know that might come to some people as a shock, but you know what this kind of reminds me of? Charlie. To tether it, so to speak, in our erstwhile careers as bitcoin journalists. Reminds me of all the tether truthers who thought that they had found some glorious insight into the one major flaw in the entire bitcoin ecosystem and completely discounted all of the professional opinions of the people actually working in that industry. I'm just going to go out and say it a little more bluntly. I don't think this youtuber has any insight that has not already been discussed in the planning process for SpaceX's satellites.
Charlie
Okay, so, yeah, I mean, so one of the, one of the very fair criticisms of Elon is that he sells the moon and he regularly misses timelines and he has these incredibly ambitious goals which he often doesn't hit. But on the other hand, he, he and his companies do produce incredible engineering feats which are the cusp of, like, technological progress. So here's a Reply I haven't verified this to Jerry's tweet saying that SpaceX's AI one, which is the satellite design, uses a double sided deployable liquid radiator. Stephen Boltzmann calculations confirm this area radiates the appropriate amount. So I think a lot of folks are trying to calculate radiation based upon like old engineering or improper like engineering, inaccurate engineering assumptions. I can't do this. I will share this one interesting angle though. So I think a lot of people just forget that SpaceX has some, I believe 42,000 Starlink satellites in low earth orbit right now. And in fact here's a whole like thing on Space.com explaining them because surprise, surprise, Colin, it's actually a big trend right now to it's quite common for people to think that the satellites don't exist. It's actually almost like you go into some. Wait, really?
Colin
Yeah, yeah, we have, we have Starlink truthers now.
Charlie
We have, it's a lot. So much so that like SpaceX has a lot of marketing devoted to like proving empirically that these satellites exist. And so you know, here's a space.com, you know, piece on it and it's pretty interesting. But there's you know, 40. They want to have 42,000. I'm sorry, I was, I misspoke. They have 10,000 Starlink satellites up and there's some interesting data in here which I won't get into. But I also learned that the average lifespan of a Starlink satellite is about five years. So I don't know if that changes the math on the AI satellite constellation idea, but we'll have to see.
Colin
Yeah, for sure. And one note on that before I pull up just a chart or two before we get rich on. I mean Penchan couldn't write this any better in terms of people denying that those satellites exist. I mean Covid just totally accelerated us towards a post truth future man in a way that I think most people are still not reckoning with. But we'll leave that there. You mentioned getting Poly market up. I did want to share the odds for SpaceX's post IPO market cap. Currently the consensus, if we can call it that, is that it will settle. 50% are betting that it will settle between 2 and 2.5 trillion. 33% are saying 1.5 to 2tr. 13% saying 2.5 to 3 trillion. Is this just shout out to the 1% that thinks the IPO is going to double after it debuts?
Charlie
I don't know, can it double? Don't they like gap These things up or down, I don't really know the stock market.
Colin
I don't think circuit breakers exist on the upside. They only exist on the downside. No crying in the casino, Charlie. And, and last note on this just to give an idea of, of how, of why people are so torn over this thing because we brought it up on the last stream, right. Like betting against Elon in the past typically hasn't been good. I mean sometimes it was good if your timing was right. But when you look at this, I mean, does this seem like something that retail should be aping into right now?
Charlie
Looks like a crypto chart, man. You always buy all time high breaks, I'm telling you.
Colin
So, so for people listening on the stream right now and without Visual, this is SpaceX's monthly valuation from 2015 to current. Now it's currently valued based on the IPO pricing and 1.77 trillion and it just absolutely hockey sticks upwards starting in 2025. It was below half a trillion in, in the outset of 2025 and now it's, you know, 1 1.77 trillion people thinking it's going to get above 2 trillion on IPO day.
Charlie
So I mean we'll have, we will have to see I don't know what
Colin
scary you're being in or out of the market currently.
Charlie
Yeah, just, you know, just, just take solace in that. Whatever you do, you're going to make the wrong decision. So that's just how these things work. Whatever you do, the market will do the opposite.
Colin
Schrodinger stock.
Charlie
Yeah, I had a couple more SpaceX topics lined up but I think I'm going to leave it there because tomorrow's the ipo. I don't want to belabor this point. We have Rich Miller in the wings and we're going to have a very interesting conversation with him. So we'll bring him up here in just a moment. But before we do that, a word from our sponsor, CleanSpark.
Colin
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.
Charlie
This is our proof of work and
Colin
we are setting the standard for what's next. Learn more about the intersection of energy
Charlie
and bitcoin@cleanspark.com all right, Rich Miller in the backstage. We are going to bring him on up here. We haven't even had a chance to do a mic check but we're going to just run right in it. We'll see how this works. Rich, Hey, I Can hear you. Welcome to the show.
Rich Miller
Awesome. It is great to be here.
Colin
Thanks for joining, man. Really appreciate it. Before we hop into it, Rich, just give people a quick background and what you do at Data Center Richness.
Rich Miller
Sure. I've been covering the data center sector full time now for about 25 years through a series of publications that I launched. Data Center Richness is the newest. We look at just about all aspects of the data center industry, particularly in terms of handling the scale that's going on and frankly, building better data centers, because that's a big topic now, but do podcast, YouTube and also on substack.
Charlie
We're basically in the same line of work now, Rich. It's amazing. We've been covering bitcoin miners really since it became an American industry, but they all pivoted to AI. And so my first question for you is, you've been covering data centers for decades and it's absolutely the most important industry in the American economy right now. When did you identify this crypto to AI shift? When did it pop up on your radar and what did you think when you initially started watching this trend?
Rich Miller
So the interesting thing is I started paying close attention to bitcoin mining operations back in the early days of Bitcoin enthusiasm. 2014, 2015, there was a lot of ideas that crypto miners would be data center. Customers pretty quickly figured out that that was not going to be the case because data centers are built for enterprises and cloud with a lot of redundancy, a lot of cost overhead to stay online all the time. Crypto doesn't need that. And, and they were always looking for the sort of lowest cost approach and they wanted a lot of power, which would turn out to be important. So crypto built its own style of facilities and data centers. The data center sector plowed ahead with enterprise and cloud. The moment when everything changed was in 2022 when two things happened. The first was that in the state of Virginia, a little area in Northern Virginia called Data Center Alley in Ashburn ran out of electrical power. And this was important because that is ground zero for the data center industry. It's where all the networks meet. It's where the most cloud and data center capacity was deployed. Because historically, the way that data centers have always chosen where they were going to locate is by following the network. They wanted to get close to the big Internet intersections and the major business markets, and everybody build data centers right around the, the interconnection exchange. When they ran out of power in Northern Virginia, suddenly people couldn't deploy all the capacity they wanted, and that shifted to a new strategy, follow the power. So that was the first thing that happened. And of course then in November 2022, ChatGPT appeared on the scene and we, you know, it became pretty clear that AI was going to become a really significant use case. And by mid 2023, it was also clear that these customers would want very large chunks of capacity. What happened is that the data center sector moved in the direction of what the crypto miners were doing in terms of suddenly wanting to follow the power, find places that didn't necessarily have to be in a core network market, but had lots of land and particularly access to a lot of power. There were a lot of crypto mining companies that had that at that time that were thinking about the, at first I think they talked about as hpc, but then the AI shift. So it's really been fascinating to watch and I've learned about some of these companies watching some of you guys podcasts because there were a lot of new players suddenly appearing on the scene who very quickly have become consequential for AI deployments.
Colin
Rich, quick, quick question that, and for some context, I don't know what year this was, but when, when he's talking our listeners about Data Center Alley, Virginia, data centers account for like anywhere from like 25% of the entire state's electrical capacity at a given time. But going back to the need to chase where the power is, did anything change about the networking where they were now able to move further out the curve to middle America, places like Texas, Ohio, Pennsylvania. Did anything change about the actual networking of these data centers that allowed them to do that, or was it just purely necessity driven?
Rich Miller
It was purely necessity driven that the thing they needed first was the power, because you can always drag the network behind you. And that's what a lot of the big guys, if you're Google, if you're aws, if you're Microsoft, you've got deep relationships with network providers. Most of them have dark fiber operations, so they can work pretty quickly to get fiber to a place where you wouldn't necessarily have the kind of connections that you have in Northern Virginia. That doesn't mean you'd have the same level of connectivity there, particularly in terms of the number of networks you can reach. But the other thing is some AI workloads need really low latency. Others seem to do okay with some of the reasoning models. In particular, they're going to take a little bit to answer your question. The latency that you would need for 911 services or emergency services and things like that, or financial services. Not the same. Rich.
Charlie
I'm curious about the DNA of the different companies. Now you have traditional data center builders and traditional tech and hyperscalers and you've got the, I would say historically a bit more wild west bitcoin crypto miners. And I'm curious because it seems like both industries are going to have to come together to figure out how to talk to the other really well, from the perspective of like a bitcoin crypto miner, is there something in the DNA of how those companies operate that you see that is different, that is an advantage in this new world of like rapid build out speed to power?
Rich Miller
I think there's a couple of things I'd highlight. One is that data center operators are very used to dealing with enterprise clients, large clouds. So they've always have focused for a long time on really kind of being pretty corporate and working towards strong credit ratings. And I think that's an area that's been important for them and their clientele that's a little bit different as opposed to crypto in most cases. I think the thing that's been important is, is that there's all sorts of players now whose interests are aligned about bringing more AI capacity online. And some of those players I think have played a really important role in working with some of the crypto mining specialists who wanted to make that crypto to AI shift and had the power. Nvidia very clearly has worked closely with a couple of them to help them understand what the requirements are going to be and help them to kind of get up to speed. And Dell I think has played an important role in that as well. And I think when everybody's sort of interests are aligned around getting that capacity online, there's been some cooperation to help help some of these folks who are new to it move up the value chain a little bit more quickly. And I think, you know, the other thing is that there's a lot of differences between the facilities that I think there's been a gap to bridge there. I talked to Wes Cummins from Applied Digital on one of our podcasts and he talked at length about there was a real learning curve to go from what they were doing with crypto and to deal with the kind of gear that Nvidia might be bringing in. But there are some corollaries too. Lots of bitcoin folks are very comfortable with liquid cooling, have seen it before, probably to a higher degree than some of the people in the data center sector have because it's been on the horizon for a long time, but it adds a whole maintenance and overhead thing that a lot of people have resisted. So it's really Nvidia that's shoving the entire sector into the liquid cooling sort of frame of mind.
Colin
You know, speaking to those challenges, Rich, I was initially very skeptical in 2023 when these Bitcoin miners started talking about making this pivot, because a handful of these companies have, quite frankly, never really been very proficient in mining bitcoin. I mean, they're always mining it at a loss. Part of the reason why they could sustain their operations was during bitcoin bull runs, they could sell their equity into the open market and then use that to cover their costs and expand much more rapidly than, let's say, a more financially prudent private miner would do. But as you noted in your article, I think the biggest thing that they had an advantage here was that they were already sitting on the power agreements. And so then it was just a matter of what is the best model for them going forward. And it seems like the convergence on the powered shell model that the majority of them are going after, believe out of the biggest one iron is the only exception is in they're going fully integrated. But you got a chance to look at one of these constructions at Terra Wolf's Lake Mariner facility more recently. And so I would love to open this part of the discussion. If you could just tell our listeners what were some of your biggest takeaways from touring that site. It must have been pretty interesting.
Rich Miller
It really was, because I've toured a lot of data center campuses over the years. And the first thing is that this is an entirely different kind of scale than we normally see. And it was an extraordinarily busy construction zone, too. You're used to seeing construction activity, but the thing about this is, and they've been public about their agreements with FluidStack, they're building two huge data centers for them at the same time. There is all sorts of simultaneous construction work going on on these data centers, which are 330,000 square feet. It's probably the size of like, you know, three Walmarts each building. And so there's a constant. This constant frenzy of motion with backhoes and little trucks carrying construction equipment. There's huge cranes on site. There's the steel superstructures for the are up, and they're framing out the buildings, and it's a lot of activity. And to the. To the point where one of the biggest challenges I think they have right now is directing traffic on the site as they're trying to move all the parts and equipment into place at top speed. And the thing is they're going 24 hours a day, they working around the clock, which is, you know, pretty extraordinary. And I think they said they've got, you know, apart from there's about 300 staff between Terra Wolf and Fluidstack, but then there's between and in any given day, between 1200 and 1600 contractors, construction workers who are on site and working very quickly to bring all the components, the power, the cooling. You have whole UPS and generator skids that come in shrink wrapped and are next to the data center ready to go. So it's a really interesting job site
Colin
that when reading your article of the tour, that's what really blew my mind was the scale of the contractors on site and two follow up questions. So they have contractors working night shifts and I guess that's part of why this build out has been expedited. You mentioned that it's kind of breakneck speed. It's faster than you would expect for something like this. And the second question, those contractors looking at the job creation angle, which is often hit on by these data center operators, those contractors almost certainly aren't local, right. Like they're coming from around the country based on who they contracted for each specific construction job. I would imagine there's a lot of
Rich Miller
that and that's a really big issue for the data center sector in general. It's no secret that community relations is a real challenge right now for the data center industry. People have mixed feelings about AI. There's a lot of attention right now to the resources that these large data centers use and they're way more efficient than they used to be. But at the same time, what all of these are doing is taking an enormous amount of economic activity and concentrating it at a single point in a community and in the network. So, so particularly there's a lot of power used and that's a sensitive issue at a time when everybody's concerned about energy affordability. So the trade off, there's a couple of trade offs. Real benefits of having data centers in the community. One has been the tax impact, which is often huge because of the amount of not even the building so much as the gear that goes in to these facilities is so expensive that like the sales and use tax on those things, you know, I think in Northern Virginia that those places it supports all sorts of things for the community because they get that tax break. The other thing is that it brings a lot of workers into the community now the data centers themselves are highly automated, so they don't create a huge amount of jobs. So they're a little bit of an odd bird from an economic development standpoint. But during construction there are these huge armies of construction workers that come. The hyperscalers in particular are working hard to work first with the local community and try to get folks who are in state, but they bring in a lot of people from out of state. One of the huge problems for this whole industry right now is there are not enough construction workers, not nearly enough to keep pace with all of the projects that are out there. There's a number of things that are delaying projects, but that's the ability to get folks on site is a real challenge. So you're correct in that a lot of them will come from off site, from out of the area, which then creates other challenges about some places. They'll come in with the size of the campus build outs. Now they're there for longer. It's not just, well, we build this one thing, then we go away. If people are building, you know, Facebook might or Meta might build nine buildings on a campus. And as they do them one after the other, sometimes those people will be there for three to five years. So that's a big factor. But getting qualified people on site is a challenge. And so you people, you see companies pull from all over based on the relationships that they have in the trades.
Charlie
We talk about speed to power because that's Terra Wolf's tagline. That's a lot of industry players. Tagline, Terra Wolf coo, I believe, said they believe they're quote, the fastest ongoing data center build in the US right now. And I'm kind of curious why and what factors I look at. Zooming out really far, the Lake Mariner site, if I understand it's a big brownfield site. So it's like redevelopment. And that seems to be pretty key to all this because then you have power, you've got transmission, you probably have city and infrastructure nearby. What's the landscape of brownfield sites in the US if you could even like speak to that and like are those all bought up and everybody called dibs on them or are there just. Or different plays to make? We're talking about like site selection in
Rich Miller
the U.S. i think there's different plays to make. I think Terrawolf is a really interesting example of a company that said we're going to work with the infrastructure of the old economy to build the new economy on top of it. Lake Mariner is along the shores of Lake Ontario, not too far from Buffalo. It was home to a coal plant for many years that was the leading employer in the community and it had a substation there. And of course, because the power was going out from there, it has all the transmission lines connecting it to the grid. Now, talking to the Terror Wolf folks, that's an opportunity for them. It's not like there's no work to do to make the transition. They had to do studies, interconnection studies with the grid. But what they told me was that that might take a year or two. Whereas if you're trying to get power from a utility and get a new connection, like in Virginia right now, that's seven years. Other markets are, you know, two to three years is standard. Texas, they're having sort of contests like see who can get to the front of the line to connect. So any of the ability to use a brownfield site that already has either some kind of energy infrastructure on site and more importantly that has transmission lines to it, so old power plants. Terra Wolf is also working with a couple of aluminum smelting sites, which of course have tremendous power draws. And so they've got a lot of infrastructure coming to their sites. I do think a lot of the opportunities are probably either in process or being scarfed up right now. But there's also a lot of creativity in people trying to think outside the box. Because what's happened with AI, and this has played out very well for the crypto to AI players, is that all the old assumptions have kind of gone out the window to try and bring new capacity online. And the data center sector has probably never been more willing to think about new ways to get things done.
Colin
I've got one, Charlie. Okay, I want to hit on the public relations nightmare angle really quickly one more time. I'm curious. I know that you talked to the Terror Wolf team. And so I'm going to kind of ask this in two ways. What did they say were the primary concerns for these AI builds? And did you get a sense of the community's reaction to this? Like, did you have any conversations with locals about their thoughts on the data center?
Rich Miller
I didn't have any discussions with the locals while we were there because it was kind of a quick in and out. But I've done, you know, I've read a lot about the community and what's going on. So the sort of backdrop on that is Terra Wolf came in first to do crypto mining on the site. That was. You can see the sort of evolution of their infrastructure as you go across this large campus. Early on the concern was about noise, that neighbors were concerned about the noise from the mining rigs. I think as some of that capacity has been shifted over to AI uses, that's not so much a concern right now. The big concern is water. They say repeatedly that they use a closed loop system, which is one where, where you fill it once with water and then you just recirculate it and use an outside cooling loop and a heat exchanger so that you're not constantly drawing water and evaporating it, which was a strategy that data centers used to use to optimize for their lowest carbon impact. That was the best way to do that, was to use water. Now there's a lot of pushback on water usage. They've got another facility nearby in Lake Cayuga near Ithaca, where there's a lot of controversies and a lot of pushback about that. And of course, New York state, there's enough discussion about it that the state legislature has a proposal to do a moratorium on data centers. I'm not sure how long it is. They're typically about a year to 18 months. And the governor might have a decision on that if that makes it to her desk. There is a lot of community pushback, but what the terrorwolf team told me was, look, because they had a lot of public information sessions, lots of times these are really difficult discussions. The people who are coming to a town hall are concerned about what this huge project is going to mean for your community. What, what's going to change, particularly in rural areas. I think there's a lot of concern that a facility like this could change the character of their community. And so there's a lot of tough questions. And the Terror Wolf team just said, look, when the questions get tough, you have to be thick skinned and you have to listen more carefully when the conversation gets difficult. Because those are the things ultimately, if you are going to be a part of the community for a long time, that you can't just steamroll the local population. You have to hear them, you have to hear their concerns. Historically, Terror Wolf is just in one scenario. The data center industry as a whole has, has over the years has really tried to just like, you know, I'm not going to say steamroll is the right word, but they prefer to work with local officials rather than with the public. And that has had repercussions. Now there's a reckoning that's come. There's some polls showing that, you know, 50 to 70% of Americans aren't interested in having a data center in the community. But, but meanwhile everybody's using data centers all day long for just about everything. YouTube, Netflix, your online banking, your social media. Ironically, most of the community groups that are opposing data centers are using Facebook to organize and do it. And you know, so it's like they're using AI to data centers to fight AI data centers. But I mean, I think the thing that I thought was interesting about the Terror Wolf team is they were like, look, when the conversation gets tough, you have to listen harder and you have to convince people that you're going to be a part of the community, that you have a vested interest in being there and that people are being heard. And you know, that's, that's not an easy discussion, but that's, that's what's going on right now.
Charlie
I spent a while in oil and gas. I'm familiar of like the criticism of people who are also using it. I kind of know that. But, but what's interesting about the data center pushback is it's pretty apolitical. It's cross party, cross socioeconomic. It is a, it, as you said, it does feel like it's a reckoning coming from the industry. Okay, I kind of want to like zoom out as we kind of wrap this up. And you again, you say 25 years in the data data center infrastructure world, you've seen it change. And Colin, I guess relatively new careers in the non bitcoin data center world. What are we missing? Like what is the like what is like the what's like the bitcoin former bitcoin crypto folks missing or trends in the traditional data center industry? Maybe it's like constraints or bottlenecks we're not aware of. What are blind spots from those of us former bitcoin miners now piling into the AIHPC game.
Rich Miller
I think the first thing that a lot of these companies really are going to need to think about in coming years as they scale up these huge operations is talent. We talked about the difficulty of finding people and there's a limited supply of folks who can operate AI hyperscale data centers. A lot of those folks are already working in the industry. All of the companies that have traditionally been working in data centers are hiring like mad. So I think that's one of the things that's going to come up a lot as an issue probably is trying to find skilled staff who can understand not just the infrastructure you need to run a crypto mining campus, but the additional layers that are involved with dealing with AI customers The other thing that I think is really important, that I think a number of the key players have done really well at is sorting out the financing to scale. And the way that some of these players, I'm thinking Terra, Wolf and Iron and HUD8, have been able to enlist their customers who have enormous financial strength to support them in ways that can help them put deals together to get the capacity deployed. There's a lot of, I think, creative thinking going on there and I think that's one of the ways where we're. There's innovation that's moving both ways here. But I do think that the data center industry is becoming stratified in a fascinating way because there's the crypto AI players, most of whom are doing the powered Land or powered shell model. Then there's the Neo Clouds, who are actually leasing out the GPU space, which apparently now includes SpaceX and that's a whole other asset class within there. Then you have your traditional corporate colocation centers. And then there's the folks who have Google and Meta. Microsoft are still building their own data centers as well. It's a fascinating landscape right now, but it's pretty wild because to your point, two or three years ago, when I looked at these companies expressing HPC and AI aspirations, I'm like, that's not likely to happen because there were big differences, but the gap has been narrowed pretty quickly when everybody's aligned in getting more capacity online.
Charlie
Yeah, it's almost never been a better time to be a nerdy data center guy. So you spent 25 years putting in the work and now you could be the expert. And every dinner party, you get to know every single thing about what's going on.
Rich Miller
Well, it's wild because now I don't have to explain what a data center is anymore. Everybody knows it used to be you say, yeah, I write about data centers. They're like, well, can you come fix my printer?
Colin
I won't speak for Charlie, but I feel similarly because I would usually just tell people I'm a tech reporter. And then maybe if they knew what bitcoin is, I would say like, oh, I do bitcoin or bitcoin mining stuff. And half of the time people are like, oh, okay, that's really interesting. And the other half, they're just eyes glazed over, have no idea what you're talking about.
Charlie
But now it's AI and people care
Colin
about it and they either want to skin you alive when you mention it or they are really interested in what you have to say.
Rich Miller
You never know.
Colin
Well, hey Rich, thank you so much for joining, man. We'll have to do this again sometime. Keep up the great coverage and appreciate you hopping on.
Rich Miller
Yeah, absolutely. This has been a blast and I really appreciate the invite.
Charlie
Thanks a ton Rich. See you online. Love that guy. Recommend his blog, one of the most interesting highest alpha blogs.
Colin
One more time on that data center richness. So go check it out. And before we move on to our ad here, Charlie, and then our next segment, I just wanted to double tap what he said and about the data center pushback and what you said specifically. This is comes from a newsletter we did a few weeks back. Spring 2026 Gallup poll found that 71% of respondents opposed the construction of a data center in or near their community. 58% of those are Democrats, 58, 48% of those are Republicans and 30, 58% of Democrats responded as such. 48% of independents and 39% of Republicans strongly oppose the measure.
Charlie
So oh, oh yeah. And I mean I'm boots on the ground here in Oklahoma, the reddest state in the union. I have my rural conspiracy, anti world money, anti davos like redneck guy saying that this is a way for the deep state to surveil them. And I have my yuppie like socialist adjacent coastal elite saying that it's destroying creative jobs. This, you know, horseshoe effect or fish hook if you will trend is manifested in the AI data center 100%.
Colin
And to your like, you know, redneck davos fearing friend, they're already surveilling you dog.
Charlie
Yeah, they're all inside your phone right now. Okay, we gotta roll on. We, we got core weave, we've got OpenAI, we've got token prices. Holy smokes. We gotta keep on rolling. Before we do that, a word from our sponsor, Luxor.
Colin
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Charlie
And this story has my favorite term I've heard in finance. Yeah, I'll let you drop it. I'll let you drop it.
Colin
I thought that you would like that. So. So this story hit this morning. Let me get it up here on the screen. CoreWeave wants to issue a 3.5 billion senior unsecured note due 2032. And this note will be issued in dollar and euro denominated notes. And this is a practice known as a reverse Yankee. That's. Yeah, you always gotta love when you expand the lexicon with something you didn't expect. Because I was curious about this. I've not seen any bitcoin miner do a euro denominated note. This is not uncommon and it becomes more common when there is a discrepancy in real rates between the continents. So right now, European central banks have dropped their rates at a time when the US has actually hiked. So this allows Core Weave, as I understand it, and please, finance professionals, give me a ping if I step in the mud here. It allows Core Weave to actually issue the notes to investors that are looking for a greater return over what they can get from the current rates with Treasuries and the Eurozone. But there's not much else to say about this in terms of the notes themselves because Core Weave has not priced these yet, as we covered on the show recently. You would have to think that they would have the opportunity to get better pricing than some of their prior notes because as we will see from our friend Rittenhouse research right here, as we actually referenced on one of the shows earlier this week, Core Weave credit spreads have plummeted this year. Their cost of capital has historically been improving as the company IPO'd and as it's shown itself to be a competent operator and, you know, depending on who you ask. Right. I believe Semianalysis ranks Core Weave as the number one Neo Cloud in terms of cloud performance. I think they're the only one in the S tier. I could be wrong about that. But they're most. But. But they do at least annual. I believe maybe quarterly analysis on the performance of these different Neo clouds. And Core Weave is always sitting up high and high and pretty. But I was curious, Charlie. I wanted to see what their current debt stack looks like. And Core Weave's total Debt currently is 25.15 billion. Their projected debt over the foreseeable future is 68.47 billion. That's +43 billion. That comes from their own presentation that they included in the 8k for this press release. So if we look at the current debt load, that gives them a debt multiple of 6.9% given the fact that their last 12 month adjusted EBITDA in Q1 was 3.64 billion. Now some people might be looking at that and saying that's pretty high. But if you look at their projected last 12 month revenue for all of the contractual revenue that they have currently booked, that will be 18.76 billion once it starts booking all that revenue, which gives it a debt multiple of 3.6x. And that includes their forecasted 68.47 billion. But I think that just goes to show you man, like we always talk about these numbers, no matter where you sit in the stack, it is insanely capital intensive to operate within this sector. Right? I mean the least capital intensive is building the powered shells and that still runs you like 10 million per megawatt. But you know, I just, I'm pausing here just because it's hard for me to even think about raising that much capital.
Charlie
It's a bull market for a bunch of sectors of the American economy. Energy, semiconductors, data center fabrication and build out, Electricians, constructor workers. You know who's speaking for the Creative Finance Bros. Because that sounds like the most bull market ever. Can you imagine being the guy who gets to do a reverse Yankee 3.5 billion.
Colin
The investment bankers who are operating in this industry are having the the run of their lives. They're also probably not sleeping, I would imagine.
Charlie
Yeah. Also if you're an investment maker who's not sleeping, carve out 15 minutes of your day, slide into our DMs. We want to interview you and we want you to explain what the next Reverse Yankee is going to be. Or triple SoCal, I don't know.
Colin
Double Yankee split. All right, last note on this before we move on, Charlie, I wanted to highlight that cost of credit for Core weave really quickly because if you look at the worst note in their debt stack and the one that matures the quickest, it is the all in rate based on where SOFR is now plus the 9.62% that they had as the flat rate for the loan is roughly 13.25%. And that was a GPU financed loan that they took out in 2023 before they IPO'd. And now you know, I was like playing around with Claude. Grain of salt here, people. It's like well okay, well what will they get for this unsecured loan? The rate will probably be a little bit bigger since it's not secured by anything. It, it kind of threw out a ballpark of 7, 8%. So and you can also look at one of their most recent secured notes which it matures in August 30th or sorry August 2030. The all in rate with SOFR 7.63%. So I mean you've seen just an incredible compression of the credit or the interest rates that they, they're taking on in their cost of capital. And it goes back to what we've been saying with the number of raises we covered earlier this week like with Keel, also with hut all of these companies are starting to see some pretty competitive rates especially when you consider asset backed financing for bitcoin miners back in the day which didn't really exist for very long but was just eye watering levels. That's the last thing I just wanted to highlight.
Charlie
Yeah, wild again. Finance eludes me a little bit over my head. Give me something a little more that I can understand such as obscure spending script paths on Bitcoin, zero knowledge proof. Yeah, well speaking of script paths and obscure technical achievements on Bitcoin, let's get a word from our sponsor. Lygos.
Colin
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Charlie
Okay, this next story we'll be pretty quick with this one. I have under the category AI censorship because I think we've seen in this past week a tale of two censorships. OpenAI, notably with the lead story just banned PRC that's People's Republic of China linked influence operations which they identified are targeting AI debates in the US which is interesting because harkening back to our conversation with Rich earlier, there are people using AI to make anti AI memes very ironic, but in this case, it looks like it was much more targeted and more state sponsored. So ChatGPT OpenAI has identified two clusters of these accounts and banned them. So I'll say, you know, a lot of the listeners listening to this might be like, well, yeah, of course this is still censorship. This is pro American, pro western censorship. And I think this is an interesting kind of case study for this week, which maybe not didn't do the rounds that much on social media as much as the other case of censorship, which is Anthropic. So Anthropic dropped their Mythos model. If you're not, if you were under a rock. Mythos is the one that was, you know, their superpowered model which is going to hack everything. I'm, I'm oversimplifying, but basically it's this one that they let a lot of key folks, industry players, try out first because it could be dangerous, so they could armor their systems. Well, they dropped Anthropic, dropped Fable, which is the Mythos model with guardrails around it. And guess what? There were a little too many guardrails. And it became the subject of criticism to the level of. There were biologists, researchers like white hat people who basically found they were de facto almost banned from using this model. Because what happens is you start typing in things that are a little bit too close to, like, how to bioengineer something that Anthropic thinks is too dangerous, and then you get a message which says, we can't let you do this anymore. It's very much a I can't do that, Dave message. But this time it's coming from, you know, moral, thought leader, effective, altruist driven. Anthropic now.
Colin
And notable, notable philanthropic. Philanthropic company.
Charlie
Yeah.
Colin
You know, notably never used for anything for military application, not used for advanced targeting in military systems. Venezuela and Iran, bro.
Charlie
The Venezuela thing was three months ago. That is ancient history. Does it matter?
Rich Miller
Yeah.
Charlie
So here's the Wired article. There are a bunch of other stories like this Anthropic walks back policy that could have, quote, sabotaged AI researchers using Claude.
Colin
Well, I saw something and I don't know if it was substantiated, but also they started kind of banning people who are using the model to try to figure out how to build their own models on the backs of it. I don't know if that's true, though.
Charlie
Yeah, so that actually is a thing. So this has happened before for Anthropics models, I assume for other people. But Anthropic had A notable one where a lot of Chinese frontier models. I forget if it was Deep Seeker, Kimmy. But regardless, it was that class of. Of operators. They were basically able to divine how OPUS worked from Opus. So you tested a bunch of throwing up stuff at it and you're able to figure out its weights and you're able to basically kind of recreate that and kind of build a cheaper version of opus. What's funny is, at a high level, this is not any different than the Chinese looking through open American patents.
Colin
Right. And then reverse engineering things.
Charlie
Reverse engineering. And maybe it's not as good, but you can get something which basically is kind of a Rolex. It's just not technically a Rolex.
Colin
Right. And that's a part of what a lot of people think happened with Deepseek as well. Right?
Rich Miller
Yeah.
Colin
Why we were able to spin it up so quickly and why it was so performed so well. I want to hit a few things on this, Charlie, before we move to our next segment. First, I want to share this tweet from Sam Lyman of Bitcoin Policy Institute, head of research. We had him on the show recently to actually talk about this very phenomenon of Chinese actors infiltrating the discussion on data centers in the US and trying to steer the conversation. But this is an example of some of the anti data center cartoons that were produced. And so if you've ever seen one of these around, that's probably, probably what you're. I mean, it might be related to these efforts. It's the most boomer coded stuff ever, though. I mean, look, look at, look at how it's just so boring and so on. Why are our electric bills so high? Because we stopped building energy, that's why.
Charlie
Anyway, we spent the past 15 years degrowthing son.
Colin
Yeah, exactly. And so there are a few others here. The AI industry is booming, but the cost of being born by ordinary people as a bolt of lightning splits the sky above. And there's a AI brain just sitting in the middle of a. A city surrounded by what look like boom boxes but are actually data center racks.
Charlie
Yeah, those are giant racks of B3 hundreds. And then this is my favorite.
Colin
When Trump declared a tariff war, China responded with fiscal discipline and rare earth minerals. It's Trump ripped in a America first wrestling outfit, swinging a hammer. Except the hammer is in the air and it's not making contact with the actual wall that says global future. And then there's just stocks and markets and allies. Just signs in the background of what looks like a Mad Max S Post apocalyptic City. Anyway, pretty low effort. I expect a little bit more from the ccp. Although, that being said, this is the kind of boomer slop you see on Facebook and on X these days, so I guess it doesn't really matter that much. The last thing I will note on this, Charlie, before we close out, unless you have anything else to say. One thing that I thought was interesting from the debriefing from OpenAI on this, first of all, they called the Operation Data Center Bandwagon, and I want to say they really missed an opportunity to just make for a good pun there and making it ban wagon, not band wagon. Because actually a bandwagon is something that you join when you're, you know, late to the party and you're jumping on it late and riding a wave of enthusiasm, but you don't actually have any sort of, you know, claim to supporting the thing when it's actually the opposite going on here. Anyway, one of the insights from the debriefing on Operation Bandwagon comes From Ben Nimmo, OpenAI's principal investigator, who said, quote, I want to be really clear here. This was not a case of an influence operation creating a debate. The debate already existed. This was an influence operation from China trying to interfere in it. And I think this is the real chicken and egg problem about the foreign interference. I don't think it necessarily matters, though. Like, obviously there was always going to be debate from Americans about this. I mean, we have a huge degrowth mindset within, specifically the left in the US and now that's starting to be an anti. There's an anti establishment sentiment on the right that's also pushing this anti data center rhetoric. So the debate was almost certainly going to foment. But injecting needless criticism and trying to further foment it, I think is just as much of a problem as if it had been started by a foreign adversary in the first place. And the results from this in 2025, local opposition. This is from a TMZ article, I believe. Local opposition blocked or delayed dozens of U.S. data center projects representing more than 150 billion in potential investment. And that was in 2025, before a lot. I mean, you know, the CapEx cycle was still booming then, but it's hit a fever pitch so far in 2026. And also the rancor has hit a fever pitch against the data centers as well. So I thought that stat was worth highlighting.
Charlie
It is, truly. I mean, there's multiple narratives happening at the same time. One, you can have a much smaller team exert much greater effective influence in this. Now that we are basically in a post reality online landscape, boomers have lost the ability to decipher what is real and what's not. We will soon lose the ability to decipher what's real and what's not.
Rich Miller
And
Charlie
so how does this affect the landscape of, of us debating about our capabilities to produce real and fake things and ideas and images? Who knows we're real. You can trust us to cover this fairly.
Colin
Are we, are we but specters of the machine?
Charlie
I mean, maybe by the end of the year we'll turn into like vtubers and so you'll never be able to tell. Okay, let's go to our last story, which is the closest we'll get to crypto today because it's about tokens, tokens. But it's not about tokens that go up, it's about tokens that go down. And this time it's a good thing.
Colin
That was well done. Good little turn of phrase there. It's not the tokens you're thinking of, at least not crypto. This is coming from Zero Hedge.
Charlie
Quote, it's over.
Colin
And the headline is OpenAI molds significant cuts to what It Charges for Tokens. Wall Street Journal. Now a few things here. This has not been corroborated, confirmed yet, but the fact of the matter is, is this is, this is an acceleration, if it's true, of a trend that's actually been going on for some time. So the reason why Zero Hedge is saying it's over is that there's a, there's this, you know, sense from the AI naysayers or those who say that we're in a bubble and that this is all crazy, that there's not enough demand for these LLMs or somehow the economics don't make sense. And if you look at annual run rate as reported by Anthropic and OpenAI, Anthropic lapped OpenAI with 30 billion as of April to OpenAI's 24 billion. So the revenues are clearly there. And if we look at the usage, it's also there. But first, I want to get up this chart that shows how token prices have been trending downward. For those of you who listened to the show yesterday, this is basically, this is the chart that materializes James McCavity's thesis that since compute is a commodity industry, it's going to move towards the lowest cost of production and the marginal costs should decrease. That's exactly what we've seen. This is the LLM price index. From Bench LM, that shows the cost per million tokens from March 23rd to present. In March 23rd, it was $60 per million tokens. That was just across one model. It was Chat GPT. It's the only model out at the time, I believe. Right.
Charlie
I forget. And I believe.
Colin
I believe that's true. And now we go to April 26th. The blended average of 28 models tracked is $3.3 per million tokens. That is an insane decrease. 95% drawdown.
Charlie
Yeah.
Colin
In a matter of three years. I mean, that's spectacular, but.
Charlie
And yet at the same time, Colin, maybe you have this queued up.
Colin
Use is going up.
Charlie
Use is going up. A very empirical example of Jayvon's paradox. The cost of a good or utility or really something we produce goes down. Demand for it and use goes up because people find it more useful because it's cheaper.
Colin
This is from Open Router, and that's a caveat on the data. This is not total model usage. In fact, you'll see Deep SEQ is overrepresented here, which I think I thought was really interesting. It makes me wonder how. How many people in Southeast Asia or in China are actually using Open Router, or how many Americans are.
Charlie
No, no, it's. It's because Deep Seek is just the, the best bang for your buck right now for. I see, Frontier.
Colin
Yeah, okay, got it. Thank you. But anyway, all that being said, this is AI model rankings. This shows the weekly usage of models across Open Router, which allows you to interact with multiple models simultaneously. And it's just straight up into the right. I mean, look at this total in June 16, 2025, 2.25 trillion tokens used June 8, 2026, 45.1 trillion. I mean, that's an insane increase. And so I wanted to show that, to push back against this idea that lowering the price necessarily means that they're struggling for users. Maybe OpenAI is. I'm not going to comment on that. They have been losing market share to Claude recently into anthropic with Claude. That. That much is clear to me. But that doesn't mean that demand is waning across the sector. If you look at the data, it's the exact opposite. And you can also see this in GPU rental prices. Now, this is not the most complete showing. This is hyperscaler GPU prices, but we see a bump in May. We see H100 GPUs go from roughly 84. $8.40 to $8.60 cents over the last couple of weeks or over the last month. Excuse me. And if we look at neoclouds, we can see an even greater increase with Blackwells absolutely surging from like, what is this $5.30 per hour to. To about $6.70 currently over the last month. So by all indications this is not to me a demand story or it is a demand story per what you were saying about Jevons Paradox. They are competing for users but there's not. Doesn't. There are no indications there's lackluster demand. We just have a lot of competition in the market currently.
Charlie
Yeah, it's a really exciting time to be a token if you're not in crypto. Yeah, it's very clear. I will say the only token I really like talking about is bitcoin. So I'm glad to talk about computer tokens. I'll show maybe this last thing, which is semianalysis, did a really interesting study on how many tokens you can get out of the free subscription tier or the various paid subscription tiers to the two leading ChatGPT and Clauds. And like, if you're not aware, your 20 month Claude subscription is heavily subsidized, you know, roughly 10 to 1. So if you, if you use all 20 bucks of that, of that plan, you're probably using $200 worth of tokens. And so somebody announced a really interesting study on this, basically trying to estimate the margins that these companies are getting and then how many true token usage you can get out of each plan and how much you could spend and then do a little stuff on the margin by subscription, assuming different utilization levels between cloud and GPT. Real fascinating study. I don't think I'm going to get into this because I think that this story is not yet fully told. I think we need to figure out what the average utilization of the average plan is for users of these platforms and then we can get some really interesting numbers that will probably. I anticipate this information being revealed as these companies march towards ipo. So that will, as weird as it is, like this specific number of like how much utilization these companies are having of their different tiered models will be very revealing as to their true economics.
Colin
You're basically saying, you know, there's a clear difference between someone who has a $20 tier for ChatGPT or Claude and uses it to like ask for dinner recipes versus a power user who is getting right up to that, that token limit every single day.
Charlie
Yeah, imagine the user who has the, you know, 20 bucks, the $20 Pro Claude subscription who doesn't really need it. They could probably just get by with free versus the $200.20x Claude who who maxes out every 5 hour rolling window with hundreds of agents that they coordinate under Fable. I did that yesterday. But also, I don't want to live the Uberman sleep schedule or have to wake up every five hours and one minute to retrigger my army of bots. Okay, that's it for today. Thank you for listening to Block Space. If you're on Coindesk, we are leaving the Coindesk feed imminently. Starting next week, you will no longer be able to listen to Coindesk, so head over to the Blockspace feed, search Blockspace and whatever podcast player you're using right now and subscribe there. Thank you so much for listening. This show is brought to you by CleanSpark. Nasdaq listed ticker CLSK. I'm Charlie. I'm Colin and we will see you tomorrow.
Episode Title: Retail Piles into SpaceX IPO, Inside TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner AI Site, CoreWeave’s $3.5B Unsecured Note
Hosts: Charlie Spears & Colin Harper
Guest: Rich Miller (Data Center Richness)
Release Date: June 11, 2026
This episode dives deep into the unprecedented retail investor mania surrounding the SpaceX IPO, the on-the-ground reality of TeraWulf’s Lake Mariner AI data center buildout, and insights into CoreWeave’s major new debt issuance. The show features insightful industry commentary, an engaging interview with veteran data center journalist Rich Miller, plus discussions of AI censorship, token pricing wars, and a pronounced cultural reckoning over the placement and expansion of data centers in America.
The episode offers a layered view of how the intersection of AI, infrastructure, financial engineering, and public sentiment is radically reshaping both the technology and social landscape. From the speculative retail fervor for the SpaceX IPO to the nuts-and-bolts reality of AI data center construction, the show spotlights how the next wave of economic growth is colliding with regulatory scrutiny and grassroots resistance. The episode’s insights into finance, technology, and culture provide a rich resource for understanding the high-stakes world of AI, bitcoin, and modern data infrastructure.