How to Think About the Difference Between HPC & Mining Infrastructure | Bitcoin 2026

Thanks everybody for making it out. We've got a pretty exciting lineup of panelists here and we have a pretty exciting topic that everybody's buzzing about recently which is making the transition from Bitcoin mining to high performance compute or AI infrastructure. So as a little bit of background on myself, I'm the co-founder of Hydra Host. I'm also the CTO. We specialize in actually building out AI infrastructure and monetizing it uh with inference platforms. Um, I also have a long background in Bitcoin going back to 2013. So, I have a pretty unique view on both sides of kind of the aisle there. And I'll let everybody else make their own introductions better than I can. But just to jump right into things because we have so much to cover. Can we go one at a time here and you guys talk about how you started out in the Bitcoin space, how you started out actually making the transition into HPC, how you guys are currently thinking about that, and when did it happen? you know, two two years ago, I was talking to a lot of miners here and no one was really thinking about it um to any great extent and now it seems like everybody is thinking about it or at least making plans. So, take it off to you. >> Yeah, my name is uh Taylor Monik. I'm the chief operating officer over at CleanSpark. Uh I started mining Bitcoin in 2015 and that really led me down a path into uh liquid cooling. Um so my career has been split between Bitcoin mining and actually HPC at my my previous company. Uh CleanSpark itself has been mining for about uh six years now. We have roughly 50 Hex Ash online. And to address the pivot question, um, we look at as an add-on to our business. We have no plans to continue to mine. Like I said, we have 50 Xash online empowered. We continue to to to have that endeavor. Um, we had a CEO switch um, last August and into September. Um, and that's really when we started to add and and think about our our HBC vertical. So, right now we're hyperfocused on building out powered shells and providing the infrastructure for the AI companies to come in and and ultimately architect whatever they want to build. >> Awesome. DK. >> Hey, thanks for uh the invitation. I started in the ecosystem in 2017 after being a banker wanker for a few years. I was actually tasked with uh building up uh Calvin Air, the dark lord's private mining fleet. We went from 6,000 A6 to 330,000 A6 in seven countries. Uh left the ecosystem and saw the light with Bitcoin proper. Uh got picked up by Core Scientific, was there for a few years. uh basically building up the business, closing deals, selling hosting and hardware uh and then started my own thing. uh had Sunnyside Digital for a few years where we were focusing on working with great teams like CleanSpark, Matt uh and team obviously in Taylor uh helping make sure that large hardware deals, large infrastructure deals were being done by you know trusted counterparties, intermediaries and then saw the light with uh all of our major partners going from 50 100 megawatts to gigawatts of power under management. You know like this industry was scaling, this industry was maturing. So the vision I saw with Cintech was combining my old company Sunnyside with Kryptech to really become an enterprise services provider. And as that happened, we started dabbling in the GPU side and really saw the light as to what was happening with digital compute. And that's really an evolution of how we manage power to either generate hash rate for Bitcoin or generate flops for AI. And I think that that's really where the market's going. Um we will never abandon our foundation in digital mining. I think that is a fundamental nec necessary component to what we're doing as a business, but we are definitely putting our efforts into HPC and expanding what we're doing there. So, a lot of announcements coming out from our team coming up, but it's an exciting time right now to be part of the ecosystem. >> Awesome. Thank you. And last but not least, Brent. >> Howdy. Uh my name is Brent Whitehead. Um started Gigab with my co-founder Matt Loro about 7 years ago now. Actually started as a flare gas bitcoin mining company. quickly with having issues of procuring certain infrastructure uh for our sites, we started building our own and that quickly grew to where now what we are as a company today is a energy infrastructure provider. So switchboards, transformers, modular data centers. we started getting into the AI space and started getting pulled that direction not out of us actually trying to push towards it and I think this is probably the case for a lot of companies here maybe even some of you guys here on the stage which was organically you saw the transition start happening where Bitcoin mining was the first industry that went and grabbed a ton of load all over the United States and that was the easiest easest easiest um thing to go grab for the AI companies to go out and start converting, you know, large interconnects to AI power. And a lot of these customers that started converting them, so you saw Core Scientific, you saw a lot of people started signing these contracts uh to to retrofit their Bitcoin uh assets, we were already a equipment supplier for a lot of these companies. And so organically, we started getting pulled into uh servicing AI infrastructure. I would say the other thing that we also saw is we we also build and and and develop out sites. And if you if you go back a year ago and you would have talked to most of the leaders in the AI space or even the the Pubco Bitcoin miners and said, "Hey, would would AI ever go out and build a 50 megawatt site >> in West Texas?" They'd say, "You're crazy. you know, you got to be you're not in a city that doesn't have a professional football team because it's that big of a city and you're not a half a gigawatt, you're wasting your time. It's not going to happen. Uh and so I think a lot of the the Bitcoin miners have just kind of avoided uh jumping into the AI space because they they they saw these massive gigawatt scale sites happening quickly. You've seen that collapse where people have started going to smaller and smaller sites. Uh and so those two avenues really led us to saying hey we have a lot of things that these companies are looking for we should really pursue it and organically do I think Bitcoin you know to answer the question on that side I think Bitcoin will continue to be a part of our business absolutely there's no intention of killing anything uh that we're doing in the Bitcoin ecosystem it's more so the total addressable market I think is so much larger in AI right now that it it's skewing what your business looks like candidly >> cool thanks guys so u one thing you just hit on Brent is at least superficially there seems to be a lot of similarities between Bitcoin mining and AI infrastructure right both in both cases you have to go get power and that is the bottleneck in many situations right but one of the topics here that we really want to explore is what are the differences between AI infrastructure and Bitcoin like what are the real challenges there and making that transition but before we dive straight into that I do want to ask you guys you know the AI infrastructure stack is pretty complex there's a lot of different parts to it Right? If we look at what you know Jensen at NVIDIA has said, it's kind of like this five layer cake. Right? At the bottom you have energy, then you have chips, then you have infrastructure. It's pretty broad models and applications. Where do you guys see your companies fitting into that stack? Like what is your business model that you have in mind going forward? Are you looking to own GPUs? Are you looking to do colo or you just providing equipment? And I'll start with Brett first and we'll work our way back. >> Yeah. Um, great question. On our end, um, we look at it as there's the energy, the infrastructure, the the cloud space, the labs. Um, we do not have intentions at this moment to go and purchase GPUs. Uh I think we're I think there's a lot of similarities that if you look at all the companies in the Bitcoin space that have started moving into AI, there's a lot of similarities that of what they did from a principal standpoint in Bitcoin that they're doing in AI, right? Like we did a asset light model in in in Bitcoin, which was we're going to build sites. We're not going to go buy AS6. GPUs are really expensive, a little bit more than S S21 uh or or you can see how much I'm out of the Bitcoin space now. That's probably not even the newest ASIC. Um but we don't see ourselves buying the GPUs. We really see ourselves on the energy and the development of that with our infrastructure. We we see the ability to be a full vertically integrated u AI infrastructure developer from the whites space, the transformers, the e-houses, the switchboards all the way across. Um that's where we see the biggest bottleneck candidly. Um, our view is it's really interesting that in a lot of ways this is the first time that you're seeing technology, you know, if you went back 10 years ago and you ask Google how hard it is to go find a site to build a data center, they'd say, "Yeah, I just choose where I want to build a data center and it just comes down to capital and, you know, getting my stuff together." We're reaching the point in time that in the United States technology is innovating quicker and growing quicker than what the physical real world is keeping up with now. And I don't think that's ever actually going to stop. That's uh if if you truly see how AI is growing exponentially. And so our view is energy and infrastructure is always going to be the rate limiter for all of these companies in the AI space. Uh, and that's why I think Bitcoin miners are probably some of the most wellpositioned companies in the world right now for the AI industry. >> Awesome, TKO. >> Man, it's like he set me up for this one. That was fantastic. Um, absolutely. We've been a partner to the largest Bitcoin miners in the market for the past few years. Um, we made a commitment that we would never be a Bitcoin miner on our own to maintain that Switzerland type neutrality where you never want to feed someone that will be your competitor. So that's really the mentality that we're taking to the GPU and HPC space is we will never be a hyperscaler. Syntax positioning in the market is to become what I would I term a hyposcaler. So otherwise known as edge compute or inference compute where we're looking to really develop smallcale data centers 2 to 25 megawatts in every NFL city in the United States every NHL city north of the border respectively uh and then in Europe and obviously Latin America Middle East etc. We do think that our advantage is understanding how to manage largescale fleets for cleaning testing repair which is why we acquired HMEC last year. Uh the acquisition of Crunchb which has now recently re been rebranded to Cint HPC has given us the ability to actually plug in and manage GPUs and sell compute directly to clients. We don't need a fluid stack. We don't need a a neocloud in the middle. We actually own the relationship from the GPU right to the client. The next phase of our growth after we raise some capital is to really go down a little bit further. We're not going to be a power generator. That's not where we play. That's not our specialty. we will be owning the infrastructure and making sure that we manage that power that we get from our power generator partners and the reason being is because when you're a when you're renting or you're a lease of a infrastructure site you don't control your own future if you own the site itself that's when you really have a control of your own destiny I think that be you become a very interesting counterparty for folks to interact with the additional point of what I'd like to put forward to the audience is everyone's chasing the billion dollar deal Everybody wants a gigawatt of power, 500 megawatts of power. That's fantastic. Frontier model training is extremely important and I think it will be for the next foreseeable future. What people forget is that small to mediumsiz businesses, enterprise needs compute. Like that's where the models that we're building are actually being used daytoday. And that's where Cintech is really focused on delivering the compute that they need. A Toyota versus a Ferrari. You don't need a GB300 for most applications. you can use lower quality GPUs just to get the job done. And that's really our target market. That's how we're going to be growing our business. >> Cool. So to try and summarize, would it be fair to say that Brent, you're kind of focused on dirt to power, like dirt to servers, you know, trying to build that up and your company is more focused on the servers to tokens. >> Right, >> Taylor? >> Yeah, we're actually taking advantages a lot of the points that both the other speakers brought up. So we're obviously a large scale Bitcoin miner. We've got sites as large as you know 600 megawatts and some as small as uh you know 5 to 10 megawatts. Our core competency and focus has always been acquiring land and power building constructing and operating data centers. So to your point while they are wildly different at the end of the day they are a warehouse full of computers. It might be a different type of computer but we're going to continue to grow on you know what our expertise is. So our main focus is to acquire land and power and build out power shell data centers. That way we can lease them out to folks downstream that are using AI in you know a multitude of different ways. Um while we are focused right now primarily on the hyperscalers wanted to jump on one of the points TK made we certainly see a wide range of inference that's going to be developed over the future. So we're really you know we took a couple knocks and and over the last couple years people wondered why we didn't have these hypers scale sites like Riot and Marathon and some of the other ones we had a more distributed approach and I think that that uh same strategy is really going to pay off at the HPC market over the coming years as uh training becomes less involved and they're trying to get that you know ultimate product out to the end market. Awesome, Taylor. And I want to thank you for setting up the meat of the discussion pretty perfectly here. You know, what are the differences between these things, right? So, I'm I'm going to challenge you a little bit and just throw it right back at you. You know, there are both computers in a warehouse, right? But they're very different computers. They're very different where uh different workloads, um different capex, right? Um AI infrastructure is phenomenally expensive compared to Bitcoin mining. The cooling requirements, the power requirements are exponentially higher. um the SLAs's you have to maintain contractually that doesn't even exist in Bitcoin mining, right? You don't have a customer in Bitcoin mining. So, how do you guys think about the difficulties of making this transition? What are you thinking about as a company is going to be more difficult for you to tackle? How are you resourcing that? How are you strategizing about that? >> Yeah, and in some ways it is more difficult, right? Like to to hyperfocus on one point just to give some clarity to the users, right? Like in Bitcoin mining, network technology is minor switch, bigger switch out to the internet, it it's incredibly simple, right? Um but when you look at a high performance compute cluster these days, you have more fiber in one single rack than you would in a whole entire data center, right? Um but on the flip side, the Bitcoin mining industry, and I'm sure TK can jump on this, has been a little bit of the wild wild west, right? when you buy a minor from Bitmain or or what's minor or Kanan um it comes with a little pamphlet gives you some guidelines how to run it you know minimal engineering kind of input on on helping you design and build facilities on the up opposite side when we go into a customer at this point you know sometimes we'll get handed a 30-page basis of design that has every single requirement that these customers would like inside of their data center all the exact specs how they want it built and everything like that so while it is a more complex and difficult build at least we're now working in an environment where we have very strict engineering guidelines to say hey this is what the customer wants as long as we can deploy infrastructure that matches those we have a clear set way to win and so you know there's positives and negatives to you know all parts about it is more complicated but in some in some ways it is a little bit more simple >> got it awesome I want to double click on the hardware component with you Brent so you know you've built infrastructure for Bitcoin mining you built it for also HPC now um completely different power and cooling profiles what kind of engineering challenges has that presented what kind of operational challenges how you was kind of tackling that divide. >> Yeah, it's I mean it's it's um it would be a wild statement to say a modular Bitcoin mine is the same is is you know comparable to HBC um whites space. Uh it is it really comes down to redundancy is probably the biggest thing that you see. Uh I mean you you go to certain Bitcoin mining sites and they don't even have a main breaker on the box versus you know this one had you know you have you have switchboards for redundancy transformers for redundancy up I mean every every aspect of it is just so so intertwined with each other uh because you have I mean and you have to understand the liquidated damages of not it's it's not that people want to put all these redundancies in Um, it's the fact that the the opportunity cost, you know, Bitcoin mining, if it shuts down, it's a pure opportunity cost. These things, these are contracts that the liquidated damages are so massive, you cannot afford to to not be at, you know, 59s or whatever you end up landing at for your uptime. And um, what we have done is we have really taken the approach. We've hired some really exceptional people. Uh, our CTO was was director of of data centers at Google. uh really tried to bring in a lot of the people from the the hypers scale or HPC side to kind of come in and help with the design and engineering knowing that it's not going to be the same as Bitcoin mining. Uh that's been our main challenge. Um one thing I was going to speak on, I guess I'll kind of keep going about the the differences real fast on Bitcoin versus AI. Um I think there's there's there's external things and there's there's there's internal things. Um, naturally the the challenges I'm seeing right now on the external side that are a big difference is I'm seeing more push back from local ordinances and local communities than I saw with Bitcoin, believe it or not. You know, three >> what do you think that is? >> Firm load. Um, I think that's I mean you are not there is not a a pointing time point in time in which it makes economical sense for them to shut down. They will run there is no price response. you know, Bitcoin mining shutting down at a power rate that's probably less from an energy standpoint than what people pay as a residential electrical bill. Um, that's not the case with AI. Um, I think the other thing is is is the disruption factor of how fast and how much capital is moved in these big companies I think creates a stigma where people kind of get pretty pissed off. Uh, I think Bitcoin candidly was kind of the warm-up for it. Um, hate to say it, but that's I see more push back where people say, "Oh, you're building a Bitcoin site? Great. If you're building a AI site, I don't want you here." Um, I look for that to be a bigger issue. And then the second thing is that I would say is a really big difference is too many people are missing the forest through the trees on just getting an electrical interconnect contract. What they don't understand is a lot of these sites and a lot of these ESAs for these power commitments were built off of a flexible load, right? And so I think you're going to have a lot of people that end up buying assets thinking that they have an AI site that quickly realize contractually they could never actually have a firm load with what they have. Uh and so I guess that was just the one thing I'd want to say because I've seen this already kind of play out a little bit. You really need to look into your local ordinances of what you're building if you're going to go for HBC as well as you need to really be looking at your ESA to understand what the mechanics are of that interconnect. >> Awesome. That's very insightful. Thank you. Um, one of the other big differences I want to focus in on is not just the hardware, right? It's the nature of the business. Uh, Bitcoin mining is extremely simple, right? You plug this thing in the wall, you get it running, you put it in a pool, and you start making money basically. You know, there's a few more steps in there, but it's a pretty straightforward relationship. with AI infrastructure there's a crucial difference which is you have customers like you're alluding to right you have contracts you have SLAs's suddenly you know that changes the equation for a lot of different things you might not think about redundancy is an obvious one right but also customer support you know miners have to do customer support uh go to market miners have to find customers right so uh TK you know you're operating more in that part of the stack talk to us about you know the kind of mentality shift you need to have going from mining into, you know, having inference customers, having AI customers. What are the challenges there? >> Well, uh, if anybody's seen me on a panel before, you might notice, uh, a subtle difference in, uh, myself on stage today, and I'm wearing a jacket. Uh, that's probably the first tell. Uh, HPC is a lot more of an enterprise corporate space than Bitcoin mining was. uh and has been historically uh from the days of building data centers in backcountry Kazakhstan. We're now dealing with cifhis systemically important financial institutions that are looking to integrate compute and storage and HPC into their day-to-day operations. So I think the name of the game is materially changed. Uh and it's not just the intensity of capital which is is an obvious factor. It's like a sevenfold per megawatt based on what you're building. uh for capital intensity between HPC and mining, but it's also the riskreward profile of what you're doing. I mean, uh Brent hit on it earlier where if you shut down as a Bitcoin miner, your economic incentive is in 10-minute chunks. So, if you shut down for 10 minutes, you've lost a 10-minute opportunity cost. If you have an enterprise customer or a frontier model training partner that is building a model within your site for the past three months and you shut down for two seconds, all of that opportunity cost is gone and as you mentioned liquidated damages that becomes a major major issue for you as an operator. So the stakes of the game are not seven times higher they're like a hundred times higher right. So contractual certainty, redundancy, all these things just amp up the engineering and certainty and attention to detail that you require. And so over time you'll see that with Cint, we have been upgrading our team and we will continue to do so. And we will be continuing to grow the business through organic and inorganic acquisition. Meaning we are be looking for existing operators in the space in the HPC space to bolt on so that we have the right people in the right seats that have the right experience to get the job done because the stakes are way too high. >> So even your wardrobe had to change completely. Was that one of the hardest parts? >> Not the hardest part, but it's certainly one of the parts for sure. >> Awesome. Right. Um well, thanks for that. Um, one report, a couple different reports I've seen just very recently is that out of all the data centers planned for the rest of 2026, at least half are going to be tremendously delayed. Right? A lot of people are trying to get into this gold rush. A lot of people are trying to bring powered land online um trying to do it quickly. Oftent time making promises that they can do it quickly in order to secure contracts and then secure financing, right? Why is that happening? What what what do you guys think is the number one point of friction, the hardest thing that people are underestimating when they first get into developing these sites? And I'll open it up to whoever wants to answer first. >> Yeah, I guess I can I can jump in there. I think it it's multiffold, but a big one is obviously the construction progress process. You you hit on it, right? You are not building a Bitcoin mine. You are building a highly integrated computing facility that has 100x of everything that went into your Bitcoin mine. Um, and then I think the other big one Brent hit on and I'm seeing it more and more is the community push back. Um, not only were you seeing it very, you know, wellorganized groups that are moving all around the country providing push back on, you know, water usage, energy prices, and a lot of it's misinformation. You know, most modern data centers these days are closed loop. They don't even use water um, post fillup and things like that. Um, but I'm seeing it even in like my personal social media of kids that I grew up and went to school with. That anti-data center movement is growing. I think it's based a lot off of uh you know misinformation of people just not being up to date with current technologies and the impacts that they'll have in their communities and how they operate. You know there's a a big known or misconception that these HBC factories aren't going to have any employees and which we both know that's not true between uh maintaining the MEP to operating at the rack level. Not only are there an abundance of jobs, but they're very meaningful jobs, very high-tech jobs um really, you know, cutting edge things that people can do. Um but we need to work as a community to attack the misinformation um that is happening around data centers. So that way we don't do all this amazing work of having a fantastic design, having the supply chain, hiring all these amazing people building this company and all this technology only to be you know have the knees cut out of it over a community issue or you know a zoning or an ordinance issue. Um and I think the other big thing Brent hit on is the power contracts. you know, if you don't read into the details and you go to secure a big, you know, deal with the hyperscaler only to find out that you've got to curtail your load 8% of the time, the deal's pretty much dead right there. So, those are the three main points that I see holding up some of these data center builds around the country. I mean, uh, I think it might be time for the industry to create its own Bitcoin mining council, which we had put together with, uh, Michael Sailor, who's somewhere here today, uh, to really combat the FUD as to what's going on with HPC. Um, there's a lot of misinformation, a lot of fear, a lot of economic uncertainty because people, they crystallize their anxiety on the data center because of likely loss of economic opportunity for themselves, right? Like people are looking at AI as this massive job killer that is going to fundamentally alter work for the future. They're not wrong that it's going to alter work for the future, but it's the same thing that happened with PCs. It's the same thing that happened with a typewriter or the printing press. You know, the lightates back in the day smashed printing presses because they thought that handwritten scribes were what should be going into continuing to the future. I think HPC data centers really as a sector needs to come together and make the population know that it is better for us to be more productive. The quality of life will actually improve with more use of AI and automation. You know, the less we have to do on an individual basis that's monotonous, I think the better we we will be as a society. So, I think it is as much of an information issue uh as it is permitting, as it is the supply chain. Um, but it's the fear that really people talk to me about pretty consistently in the general population is the way I look at it. You know, like, oh, you're building the robots that are going to kill us in the future. It's like, well, actually, no, I'm building the guy that's going to the the tool that's going to help you not have to transcribe your notes or help you with email processing, things that'll make your life better, right? So, I think it's a positioning as much as actually like fundamental physical reality of construction of data centers. >> What do you think, Brett? Yeah, I think um in my opinion the the the the big priority like the big main things that are slowing down and delaying sites right now is is clearly uh utilities just delaying energization. There's a lot of utilities that have have bit off more than they can chew. Uh and and and candidly a lot of them don't have to be held accountable. That's the problem. They can say sorry bro going to be 12 12 extra months. Best of luck. Um the second one is infrastructure. There's massive lead times on this, you know, on high voltage equipment, on breakers, on medium voltage equipment, you name it. But the one that I think's the most underrated that no one really talks about is the labor aspect. Um, a lot of these projects are going well well over budget because they are having to pay so much money for skilled labor in the middle of nowhere. I mean, these are not it's not like all these sites are being built in metroplexes. I mean, these are some of these are in very remote areas that take thousands and thousands of of of labors. Um, and you know, I had a group that was I was talking with that they were like, we have seven gawatts. I don't know how realistic everybody's got 7 gawatt. I got three. I'm trying to get to seven, right? Um, but they had 7 gawatt and they said, when you run the math for us to build 7 gawatts in the timeline we want to, >> we would be one of the largest employers in the entire United States. There is not enough skilled labor. And I think too many people are underestimating that piece. >> And just for for context for the audience, you know, we we throw around these numbers, they're kind of like Looney Tunes numbers, but like a gigawatt is what I think a gigawatt is roughly like the power that the entire metro area of Denver uses, right? So when you're talking about seven, it's like pretty insane. >> I think they say a typical home uses a megawatt a month. So that would be 1,000 megawws per hour. I mean, you're talking about a lot of power. >> Welcome to predict. The world is a market. Everything is a market. Every headline moves the line. Every moment is your market. Call the moves. Bet on your instinct, your prediction, your edge. Dual bits. Predict where everything is a market. >> Yeah. Awesome. Um I I want to focus on one comment you made. Um one big difference you made this comment earlier and you just referenced it again is is the personnel you actually need to do these two different businesses. How has your road map and your pivot impacted your hiring the kind of talent that you need? Um and how hard has it been to actually fill those roles? >> Electrical engineers are probably one of the most soughta bank right now. >> Yeah. Yeah, I messed up. Uh I messed up. Um engineers are making so much money. Uh if you if you've spent any time in the in the hyperscaler space or in the data center space, you you are you are sought after. Someone is knocking on your door weekly. We have really tried targeting that uh from a recruiting standpoint. Uh as well as on on the the the other aspect I think a lot of people don't realize is there's a lot of um details that go into these contracts. You're you want to have some pretty sophisticated people that have done these contracts before. So we've hired a lot of people from QTS and some other companies that have been doing this. Uh that's been our focus. >> Cool. What about you guys? >> Yeah, for on our side it's a lot of uh CIS admins the guys actually plugging in configuring. Uh we've got quite a bit of in-house expertise as to doing what a lot of the OEMs do, which is uh assembly and server creation. Uh so we're actually looking for skilled hands that have been around GPUs, uh hard drives, etc. Luckily, we know a lot of uh former Ethereum miners. Uh so it's been really helpful to actually get these folks back in the game and employed and assembling servers with us. Um, you know, look at Atlantic Crypto, formerly known as, now known as Coreweave. Um, I think there's a lot of talent out there that cut their teeth in digital asset mining that is going to be repurposed and is actually going to be super helpful for what we're doing as a company going forward. However, we are seeing the war on talent happening right now. like we are needing to upgrade our equity compensation plans, our comp gen generally to make sure that once the folks are trained on the team, they stay with us. They don't get poached by somebody else. Competition is great, but when you're a business owner and you want to keep the best team possible, you have to keep that in mind. And we're not looking for history majors. We're looking for STEM uh engineers, technicians, folks that can actually build stuff. That will be what is valuable in the today and into the future. Taylor. >> Yeah, I mean for us it's it's been a full stack of everything these guys said. So we have our Bitcoin mining operation and uh we've made some structural changes within our company to have a whole entire AI vertical be standalone. Uh so we've covered, you know, a head of AI, we've brought in a a head of sales, we've got a new head of construction, engineering, lawyers, uh project management, cost management. I mean, we've really had to run the full gamut of going from, you know, where we were at in our Bitcoin mining operation to doing everything that you talked about, not only building the facilities, operating them, customer service, you know, the full stack. Um, and yeah, the war on talent is heavy. Um, it's been nice for us at CleanSpark. I think we've done a really good job of of having a really positive reputation inside the Bitcoin mining space. Um, really executed well over the last four years. And now that we're, you know, adding this vertical to our business, we've had a lot of luck hiring from people seeing our success in the mining and and having confidence that we'll have that same type of success in HBC. >> Awesome. Thanks. Um, so one thing I think it would be interesting to explore is you guys are all running businesses. That's hard enough usually, right? You're also running business businesses in this cutting edge area, figuring all these problems, dealing with these difficulties every day, right? Um, what are some of the best horror stories you guys have so far? I know I have plenty. Um, but you know, is there something you could tell the audience a bit more personal about, you know, maybe it was an issue with a city council and the permits you needed, maybe it was an issue with a vendor, maybe it was an engineering challenge that uh was a lot more difficult or hairy than you initially anticipated. Anything that could provide some kind of on the ground details for what is it actually like making this transition? That's >> Yeah. Uh, >> oh, that was for you. >> Okay. Um, I think the biggest challenge and issue that we're dealing with is that in the space that we're targeting, enterprise takes forever. It's not dealing with Bitcoin mining cowboys, which, you know, in my heart of hearts, I I I am I am one. However, I'm transitioning to become an enterprise guy to be honest, hence the suit jacket. Um, it's definitely night and day. We hired an incredible guy who's in the audience today, Drew Jones out of Accenture, former Dell to really upgrade the enterprise chops of what we're doing. to know the level of attention to detail to speak the language that folks on the enterprise procurement side demand you to speak. It's a very different conversation than dealing with somebody that wants to plug in a 100 rigs, 500 rigs, a thousand to someone that is working within an enterprise that needs the compute for their ongoing operational issues and AI applications. It's a totally different language. So that's been the biggest aha moment for me. and uh oh we need to upgrade the entire team as fast as possible. Keep the existing folks, but definitely add another layer to really galvanize the enterprise focus that we're going after. >> Cool. What about you guys? >> Yeah, I mean I don't think it's like a horror story or anything like that, but I think the the biggest eye openener for us is is obviously the contracts, not only between uh us and our our customers, but on on the infrastructure side as well, right? Um that's been something that's been a major uplift and a learning curve for us. Um, actually shout out to the Accenture guys, great partner of ours as well. Gave us a lot of really good insight and steering. And then we also, you know, to his point, upgraded the team, went out and found people that have been doing this for 15, 20 years to help cover those gaps. So, definitely not a horror story or anything like that, but if you're coming out of Bitcoin mining, moving into the HBC or standard data center space, when you start getting into these lease agreements and the infrastructure agreements and having to partner all those documents together to ultimately have a successful outcome outcome for your customer, I think that's really been the the biggest lift for us. >> Cool. Brent, I feel like you've got something juicy for us, >> dog. I have horror stories every day. I'm a professional firefighter at Giga. That's just that's all we do is put out fires. Um, no, I mean, look, naturally, there actually hasn't been anything that in my opinion. Uh, that is absolutely crazy, especially this year. Really just been growing. I think the the biggest thing for us, I'll just kind of go to the I'll take the the Sunday school answer like they did and do the aha moment instead. Um, our biggest aha moment, it was probably when we started bringing in infrastructure to some of these these AI sites and HBC sites. Um, I think a lot of us really didn't take this leap of trying to pursue AI. Uh, because you're right, Bitcoin mining is way more simplistic. And I think sometimes we we we take for granted, we don't give ourselves enough credit of what we're all capable of in this industry. Um, we started selling infrastructure and deploying it and seeing some sites that were, you know, it's like this is supposed to be the most technologically advanced facility in the world. Like, uh, my Bitcoin mining site is like cleaner than this. Uh, and I think that was the the aha moment for us was taking a step back and realizing, okay, just because a company is wellunded and big and has a lot of press releases, um, doesn't mean that they're as they're sophisticated as what you think. And don't take for granted what you are sitting on from your capabilities from having sites from having the ability to you know a lot of people here do infrastructure like it is absolutely uh possible to be right in the middle of all this deal flow uh and and and I think that was the biggest aha m aha moment was it is it is so straightforward and it's it's just waiting for all of us to jump in and and and uh take some of the market share. >> Awesome. Thanks guys. Uh, personally I feel like that character from Bladeunner. Like I've seen things that you people wouldn't believe, right? There's just so many um instances of what you describe, Brent, of folks who turns out don't really know what they're doing or definitely in over their heads or definitely overstating what their capabilities are, right? Um, and one lesson that I've taken from Bitcoin into AI that has been very helpful for me personally is don't trust verify, right? like you always want to see the ground truth of what you're working with. You never want to just trust something a vendor is saying. You want to really verify that for yourself. Um so I I feel like we could talk a lot more about that. Unfortunately, we only have 5 minutes left. So I think we've got time for one more question to wrap up. Um I want to make a slight pivot and talk about Bitcoin and AI and how it could coexist if it can coexist, right? And how you guys thinking about that? Are you thinking about it currently in terms of some sites are suitable for Bitcoin, others for AI? Are you thinking about it in terms of uh hybrid sites that have both mining and AI there? Um what's kind of your current thinking around that? Pass it off to whoever wants to go first. >> Yeah. I mean, I think I've heard the term mullet mining get thrown around over the the last month. >> So have I. Yeah. >> Yeah. So that's that's the hybrid. So from a a company perspective, we obviously have our two business verticals. We're going to continue to do that, but we certainly want to take advantage of Bitcoin mining and AI on the same site, whether you know a simple one's like a take or pay agreement. You have the load of the the AI fluctuating, right? They're going to have to pay for that power anyways. Having a Bitcoin miner on the other side that could keep that load consistent, keep take that power at a a discounted rate. Something that we're absolutely looking to looking towards. And also on the other side, anything that we can do to help balance the grid stability, right? So, every type of AI workload has a a different power demand curve and everything like that. And to their point, that's a big drawback for a lot of the utilities and cities that we operate in. So, anything that we can do to keep that line flat uh utilizing Bitcoin mining is something that we're certainly interested in. So, from a site perspective and a company perspective, we definitely see how they can both work together to be successful. >> Is that uh something, you know, that power draw problem, is that something that's currently an R&D for you guys? Have you deployed that? Like, where are you at with it? >> Oh, no. It's certainly an R&D um on how we're going to do that. um basic, you know, kind of theory is tying into the customer's BMS. Whenever the the the PUE is not being utilized, there's excess power there. We'd be able to ramp our miners on the other side by controlling it via firmware or a number of other um different ways of doing it. But yeah, certainly on the forefront of clean spark mind of of how we partner AI and Bitcoin to be successful together. >> Cool. Ta. I mean, I'll take a different tact on this where we're seeing the intersection of AI, HPC and Bitcoin mining and digital assets actually happening at the uh protocol and application layer. Um, one of our major customers which I can disclose is a company called Invinium. Uh, they're using our services compute and a ton of storage around how to manage data using blockchain technology and actually implementing some Bitcoin itself into some of their processes. So I think that AI itself and HPC generally will actually utilize digital assets for the speed of transaction, the finality of transaction within the workflows that we're actually going to be using across enterprise in the future. >> What do you mean by Bitcoin being part of that transaction? >> Well, Bitcoin itself can actually use as a digital medium for agentic uh applications for different means of uh commercial applications basically. So transactions themselves if you're selling something or a service or a product it can actually be used as the medium for exchange and see itself. >> Got it. Cool. Right. >> I think that um my personal opinion is Bitcoin is naturally what we want to see with Bitcoin is going to continue to become more and more decentralized, right? Uh you you had these mass massive megaized mining sites. Those are not really a thing. And the ones that are still there, trust me, they will be converted. I can almost guarantee you that. Um, I feel like Bitcoin is going to be redistributed into smaller sites and continue to be redistributed into smaller sites. A year ago, 50 megawatts that was only a Bitcoin site. Now, you can make an argument that there are some companies and some neo clouds that would pick up site, you know. And so the way I look at it is if you if you think about uh all this Bitcoin mining infrastructure of a 200 megawatt site that gets turned into an AI site, >> you're not going to go and take that and move it to the next 200 megawatt site, >> right? >> You're going to go put it in 20 10 megawatt sites. And the only reason you would actually the only place where I think Bitcoin has a place in these larger sites is if it's a bridge while you wait for the ability to convert it to an AI site. Right? I'm going to I you know I have minimum utility bills. I have things that I have to do. It's going to take a long time to get this going. I'm going to go put modular Bitcoin mining facilities here, move these assets. I'm going to cash flow them while I wait to build out a AI facility. Um, I don't see the world I guess I know we got only got 40 seconds, but the only thing I would say I don't see a world where the get like the the Bitcoin with the AI together at the same site kind of pencils out in my opinion. I'm still a little skeptical of that. Sure. The reason is is like you're talking about 10 plus million dollars a megawatt to build out a tier three data center. A Bitcoin mining facility is a couple hundred thousand dollar a megawatt. The the the marginal increase that you're trying to get on revenue savings. I I don't see how that pencils out and now you're introducing more variables of equipment that's pulling off of a power that needs to be redundant. >> Well, I really wish we had the time to delve into that even more because I think it's a very fascinating topic. But yeah, next time um I want to thank you guys for joining me up here today. I think this has been a great panel. Let's give them a round of applause for what they've shared and thanks everybody for making it out. >> Thank you. >> Every year this community comes together to celebrate, to debate, to build what comes next. And every year the stage gets bigger. Sound money center stage. So where do you go to celebrate the next chapter in Bitcoin history? You come home. Nashville. July 2027.