AIB Data Centers Inc. (AIB) August 19, 2026 Conference Transcript

Welcome back everyone. Next we have AIB data centers, Inc trades on the New York Stock Exchange, American under the symbol AIB and is a developer and operator of digital infrastructure focused on AI hosting and high performance computing workloads whose platform combines access to reliable scalable power resources with modular infrastructure deployment designed to accelerate the development of next generation compute capacity. But first let's start with a video.

In the AI economy, power is scarce. AIB has it. Scalable, secured, built for what's next. AIB, the power, the people, the pipeline.

The VP of Sales, Gary Heitz, and the CFO, Jolene Haliski. Welcome to the conference, you both.

Thank you for having us.

Thank you, Anna. Good afternoon to everyone, and thank you for having us and for joining us today. Before we begin, this presentation contains forward-looking statements, including statements about our development plans, power capacity, and commercial opportunities. Actual results may differ materially. Please review the disclaimer on this slide and the risk factors in our SEC filings. First of all, I'm just going to chat briefly about a corporate overview. And here's our business in a snapshot. We convert existing powered land and brownfield sites into AI and HPC-grade co-location facilities. Three things define how we do that. First of all is we're a power-first organization. Every site is backed by an executed ESA and grid tied to available generation and transmission. We do not break ground on the hope of interconnection. Secondly, we're owner-agnostic. Our tenants bring their own GPUs under modified triple net leases. So we carry no hardware risk and no residual value risk. Third, we have an AI optimized design. 150 kilowatt per rack, liquid cooled, and plus one redundancy delivered in nine to 10 months. The numbers on the bottom of this slide indicate that we have our scoreboard of 65 megawatts of contracted power, about 140 megawatts under development, and about 570 megawatts of total identified capacity. Now we'll talk about our market backdrop and why does power first matter? Because the constraint in this industry has moved. Data center power demand is compounding at 38% per year through 2030. Grid additions are growing at only 2% to 3%. This is not a gap you close with capital. $720 billion of grid investment is needed, and interconnection queues in primary markets already run five to six years. Meanwhile, North American data center vacancy is at only 1%. Hyperscalers are committing more than $1 trillion to development. U.S. capacity goes from about 15.5 gigawatts today to a projected 95 gigawatts by 2030. So the scarce input is not land, and it's not capital, and it's not GPUs. It's a signed agreement with a utility that can actually deliver. this is what we go and get first, being a power first organization. Gary will now spend some time talking about our pathway to success. Then I will take you through the quarter and we'll open it up to questions.

Thank you so much, Jolene. So we have three differentiators that we feel really separate us from the market. People, power, and pipeline. People, this is important to understand And as a new data center operator, AIB does not have the pedigree of operational excellence. However, our team does. We put strategic stakeholders in place, whether it's 30 years of experience from our GCs, our project managers, our procurement team, working with companies such as AWS, working with some of the biggest REITs, such as Digital Realty. individuals like myself that's had over 10 years of experience working with all the major hyperscalers and neoclouds from a sales perspective and it's just not the team that we have built internally but it's also important to note that we are putting key strategic vendors in place as partners to help us execute on our goals and our mission we have the best in class when it comes to hiring engineer firms, design firms, GCs, and even operators such as CBRE, JLL, T5, just to name a few. Moving on to power, and Jolene already spoke to this, we are a power first strategy. So we're not going to offer any land to any potential customers where the power is not already secured. And we're not marketing theoretical power. We're developing sites that already have the power purchasing agreements already in place because at the end of the day the bottleneck isn't the land it's the utility agreements it's the transmissions it's the delivery schedules and ensuring that we're a power first strategy we have the power already in place gives us a leg up on the market and finally pipeline i've been very fortunate over my career to have cultivated and so as many other key stakeholders and execs on our team relationships with the top hyperscalers and really what our target market is, the tier one, two, three neoclouds. And it's just when we talk about pipeline, it's not just understanding what neoclouds, what AI companies need power, but it's understanding what their capacity roadmaps are. We have visibility to who their offtakers are, what those SLAs are, what their capacity roadmap looks like. How many gigawatts of capacity are they behind schedule over the next 12 to 24 months? which one of those customers is easier to do business with, which ones go straight from pass an LOI and go straight into contract negotiations, which ones have outside legal counsel. Having the opportunity to work with many of these neoclads for over half a decade now, we really understand the structure, workflows, and processes of how they select sites and how they move forward through the sales process themselves and that that gives us great visibility in understanding our pipeline which also then allows us to go out and strategically get sites with three or four ai companies or three or four potential customers already in mind for that specific site jolene would you like to talk more about our management team in greater detail sure i'll just add a couple um comments here briefly jerry our ceo has spent 20 years as a

senior executive in global banking and infrastructure development. So he's that rare combination of an executive who has banking and finance experience, commercial real estate, and he also understands power and the data center industry because we have had a successfully operating data center since 2021, and Jerry was involved every step of the way of that construction. I myself, I'm a CPA with more than 20 years of senior finance roles, starting my career at Deloitte and working through Siemens Energy and Weatherford before I landed with Jerry and his team. Chris Iacone is our director of construction, over three gigawatts of data center construction experience. Gary talked about his experience with with Google and Dell. Alex Ocelo brings nearly two decades of data center leadership from Digital Realty Switch and ECS. But the point isn't the logos.

And it's the point is that nobody is learning as we go, we bring decades of diverse and high level experience i could take this so talking about the power it's all about speed the market and having a credible path to deliver there's thousands of data center projects right now but a small fraction of them can actually deliver the power and how are we able to how are we able to navigate the the speed of market and quite frankly the demand for power right now and goes back to the relationships that jerry has built we were he's i wonder if energized assets that were previously crypto mining crypto mining entities and giving us the opportunity to have a first look invisibility into many potential sites that aren't on the market yet and because of jerry's relationships in that in that space we've been able to build out quite a capacity roadmap that gives us RFS ready for service dates for several hundred megawatts of power before the end of 2027 or the first half of 2028 and as an industry as a whole right now if you're just talking about the tier one neoclouds and the hyperscalers they're about 26 to 29 gigawatts behind power capacity so any power that you can have ready for service In 27 or the first half of 28, there's going to be a large demand for that. And us having the capacity and having the opportunity to find sites with energized power before a lot of our competitors and other developers gives us the opportunity to have quite a advantageous capacity roadmap that you can see right here in the slide where we are able to have a lot of power energized and ready for service before the end of next year. We focus on mid-market. So, a lot of our sites that we are looking at acquiring is anywhere from 50 to 150 megawatts. There's several reasons for this. Normally, these sites fall outside moratoriums, which is there's an ever-growing political and social climate that we have to be very aware of and have boots on the ground when it comes to local legislation with new data center developments. Typically, these sites at that size fall outside any type of potential moratorium for new data center builds. Also, it's much easier and much quicker, again, we're talking about speed to market, to build a site that's 50 to 150 megawatts versus a 300, 500, maybe even a gigawatt campus. And those sales cycles are much quicker as well. And it's all about, again, speed the market and being able to deliver power before the end of next year. And we've seen our sales cycles, when we're talking about the mid-market size assets, I like to say more like mid-size institutional, we see typically those sales cycles be anywhere from three to six months. Anything more than that, you're looking at a year out.

So we're really focused on the mid-size assets that we're acquiring and adding to our ever-growing portfolio. jolene do you want to talk about the commercial dialogue here you absolutely so when we look at uh you know what we're proposing in terms of our commercial dialogue we have six active counterparties shown anonymously because these are live negotiations and our counterparties require it gpu uh cloud platforms sovereign ai infrastructure platforms bare metal gpu marketplace ai silicon on and hosted imprints platforms one is in lease negotiation right now for 65 megawatts of utility load 50 megawatts of critical it load typically you know when we when we look at the terms of the lease you're looking at an initial term of 10 years with 10 to 12 years with two five year renewal options modified net terms meaning powers of pass-through there's certain costs that as the landlord we would pick up in terms of property management taxes but the bulk of the biggest cost being power is a complete pass-through and credit-backed tenant evaluation there's also an escalation factor in incorporated into each of our leases at three percent or the greater three percent or the or the cpi factor and there's 12 months of prepaid rent included as a deposit the last part matters we're structuring for the fact that some of these counterparties are fast growing but still young businesses so those prepaid rent deposits pass through and the pass-through energy costs protect us on any downside and provide that those terms for protection and we underwrite to those terms rather than pretending the credit is something and it is not here's our growth trajectory so it's laid out clearly in a path over the next multiple quarters ahead of us. So the left-hand side and then the portion, the first three portions in gray are events that have already happened. In the first quarter of this year, we announced the repurposing of our Bitcoin mining site, a 40 megawatt energized facility for AI and HPC purposes. In March, we began trading on the NYSE, something we were very proud to achieve, and also signed a letter of intent to lease 26 megawatts within that energized site. In May, we signed an ESA that expanded our power access to 65 megawatts and from there entered into the lease negotiation for the whole 65 megawatts. Afterwards, we have the acquisition of the DFW land site, a powered secured site in Minnesota that we're working on. We have a site in Denver that we're also looking to acquire and then Huntsville and then the Carolinas phase two sites that we're also working on. So in terms of our CLT site, we'll expand on this portion a bit. This is an existing asset, an successful, successfully operating site, previously cash flowing 40 megawatt Bitcoin mine that we now have the utility capacity increased by 25 megawatts with that ESA that was executed in May. So basically what we have here when we are built-in advantages for our turnkey AI co-location campus is that we can move fast. We have clean, low-cost utility power backed by strong regional baseload generation. We're pre-zoned for industrial and data center use. We're outside of flood zones, low seismic risk, and carrier-neutral connectivity with multiple fiber providers. this is why we can talk about a nine to ten month delivery we're not green fielding we have the power and it's already at the fence when we talk about the power of execution we have three integrated capabilities that compress our timeline first of all is our power network that gives us a fast path to deliverable megawatts through pre-screened sites and executed esas with utility counterparties the modular build is 10 megawatt data halls pre-engineered deployed in phases with civil work running in parallel on the supply chain we lock in equipment procurement before notice to proceed long lead electrical gears secured early transformer and generator letters of intent in place with site selection and nine key vendors already secured net of all that we underwrite nine to ten months against an 18 month plus for traditional data center builds next i'll move to talk about our valuation gap so across uh across the operators building in in this space in the ai hpc space the market is paying a median of 26 million dollars of market cap per operating megawatt so our in this space there's a range of 15 million to 137 million of market cap valuation per megawatt aib is roughly at 2 million now we understand we're at an earlier phase than every name on this chart and the discount is appropriate what we would want to defend is that the 13-fold discount to the median is not a judgment about our stage it's a judgment about whether the market has looked at us yet because what sits behind our number is not a plan it's not a dream it's not a hope it's an executed it's an executed 15 year esa for 65 megawatts at an energized pre-zone site in a market where interconnection queues run five to six years this is a scarce thing and it's being capitalized at about two million dollars a megawatt and we don't think that gap closes necessarily because of anything we we talk about today we we know it closes upon lease execution so let me show you now what our quarter actually looked like and what we did with the money raised in our successful follow-on offering in q2 this is our q2 2026 results at a glance so what we have here i just wanted to highlight in terms of some of the decisions that happened in the quarter that drove our decision on june fifth we decided to de-energize substantially all our bitcoin mining operations bitcoin prices had fallen far enough that we were buying power at 6.6 cents and reselling it at 6.3 cents so we were losing money on every kilowatt hour on that contract structure written for a business that we were planning an exit so we switched off in the same quarter we raised 63 million dollars with and institutional investors and netted 59 million. We ended June with 52.8 million in cash. And most importantly, no traditional debt, not reduced debt, no debt. The one thing I wanna put on the table rather than have you find in the filing is that the site, as I mentioned, was de-energized since June 5th and has not been resumed to date. So we know there is a revenue gap in front of us and we sized the june follow-on offering raise knowing that and that we would have no debt service to carry through it when we talk about our balance sheet there's just a couple things i want to highlight here mostly being the cap table we have just under 76 million shares outstanding roughly 89 million fully diluted that includes 1.5 representative warrants at a dollar 81 exercisable 7.5 million authorized under the equity plan with nothing yet granted and 3.9 million earn out shares that i would like to comment likely will not be issued as the earn out shares are tied to a 2026 cubita of 25 million when we look at our summary pnl just a couple things i want to highlight here when you look at the kilowatt per hour table on the right that kind of summarizes our quarter in three lines basically you know this pivot away from this substantiates or pivot away from bitcoin mining into an ai hpc leases that we're negotiating at the modified triple net with energy passed through to the tenant so we don't carry the risk of rising energy costs going forward the other thing i'd like to highlight here is our sgna cost triple to 2.7 million that was representative of us being a fully public company for a full quarter uh you know legal dno investor relations costs so that is where we saw that grow not to mention the uh the development team we needed to assemble to actually deliver upon our first project that is basically i'm going to hand off to gary for our summary and then we will jump into questions thank you jolene as i mentioned before you know just going over the strategic highlights power people pipeline and that is that is the key three differentiators that we believe we're going

to be we know we're going to be incredibly successful we've we've built such an incredible team around us and we're putting all the right strategic partners in place uh in order to ensure that we meet all the slas and we operate very efficiently uh and then pipeline we have a tremendous visibility to all the all the ai companies all the hyperscalers we understand the we understand their power strategy and that allows us when we are looking at power we're looking at land and assets we are very strategic with we have customers in mind already for every single piece of land that we're evaluating and that we look to acquire we have three to four customers that are already chomping at the bit to to acquire that and lease that land from us because we have such great relationships with our with our prospects and because we really understand the marketplace awesome so we are ready for questions now edna okay perfect Thank you both.

Let's start with Gary. Why should we believe a NeoCloud will sign with a company that's never delivered an AI data center? And what differentiates AIB?

You know, it's all about building credibility in the marketplace and building consumer confidence. And that's what we've done. And it has a lot to do with the team that we've put in place, myself, the broker relationships that we have. Most of these AI companies, they work with consultants that are highly trusted advisors and having personal and professional relationships, both myself, Chris, who is our project manager, Jerry, we've instilled confidence. They've instilled confidence in this team and they see who we're bringing around from a design standpoint, from an engineering standpoint, having entities like JLL and CBR be involved. There's high confidence that we'll be able to execute and we're not going to over promise and under deliver.

We have realistic rf timelines and we do everything very thoughtful and a lot of insight to ensure that we meet those slas and those timelines and how do you build 65 megawatts with 52.8 million of cash that's a great question i'll grab this one gary so basically we we do not intend to build a data center of this magnitude off our balance sheet and we never intended to on june 23rd we formed aib clt1 llc as a special purpose project entity to hold our real property interests so the ground lease the anchor customer contract the construction and equipment procurement contracts and any project level financing and we've been working with our our bank investment bank to secure those debt funders and have an optimized cap stack to deliver upon the funding that would be required to to construct a data center of this size so the structure exists precisely so that capital sits at the project level it's secured by long-dated credit-backed lease rather than at the corporate level corporate cash funds development deposits long-lead equipment and the development team and the project funds the build and so you have six anonymized prospects and no signed lease.

So when does one convert?

Would you like me to take that one, Jolene, or do you have that one? Okay, so ask the question again. I'm so sorry.

Yeah, six anonymized prospects and no signed lease. So when does one convert?

That's a great question. I mean, these MSA negotiations can take up normally to a year. And I can confidently say that we've pushed through several of them within three months. And again, that goes back to already having credibility with the prospects and already having that established relationship and understanding the workflows and processes and what their SLAs are in order to get a deal done very quickly. And our goal is not just to sign a lease agreement. Our goal is to sign MSAs with most of our customers right now, which is a more due diligence, will take a little bit longer. That way, as we continue to build out our portfolio and our current customer base wants more land and power. It's as simple as signing a new service order and not renegotiating an MSA from start to finish. So that's our strategy. We're looking long-term and we are ahead of the curve when it comes to the industry standard to negotiate these deals.

Perfect. Thank you for that. And what is AIB doing to instill confidence to the identified TAM?

And why should we own AIB instead of the others out there tara wolf cypher applied digital you want me to take this one as well joanne sure absolutely again it all it all goes back to we understand what our our portfolio is we have the power and at the end of the day like power is the bottleneck do you have the power you have the ability to execute and have realistic rfs states set and can you hit those and you have the team around you that can hit those and we've we've established credibility with many of our many of our customers within our tam that we can do that and so your deck yeah go on and quite frankly we're we're having conversations right now about prop about assets about power that won't even be live until q1 2028 but we're already negotiating those those lease agreements that's how far ahead we're looking at this and I'm very excited about what we're going to be able to to present to the marketplace and the deals that we're going to be closing in the next one to two quarters and so your deck says 7.07 per kilowatt hour firm but you reported 0.066 average energy cost in a quarter where the spread was negative so can you clarify sure I'll grab this one so those

Those figures are consistent, and what the 6.6 represents is our realized all-in energy cost for the quarter, and the 7 cents is the rate that we underwrite to as we're negotiating our leases. The problem in Q2 wasn't the cost of power, the problem is the price that we were able to charge a Bitcoin hosting customer for it because of the price of Bitcoin. At the 7 cents delivered, an AI co-location lease at market rates is a very good business. at seven cents delivered into a bitcoin hosting contract at the prevailing bitcoin prices is not a business model at all hence the reasons we're pivoting perfect well thank you for clarifying and so what does happen to your economics if the ai build out slows and neocloud demand softens i can grab this one as well so when i think about it our downside is better than most in the sector for one structural reason is that we don't own any gpus our tenants bring their own compute so we're not exposed to a hardware cycle or a residual value issue we own what we own is a power and the shell and the long dated assets the leases incorporated to those assets which is the most defensible layer in the stack our sites are 150 megawatts and under which means we can stop after 10 megawatt data hall rather than committing to the whole gigawatt campus and these are the protections we have in place as you know as in any industry you're going to have economics that that cycle up and and down so these are the the protections that we have built in place perfect well do you um either gary or jolene um what closing remarks do you have for our investors listening today i would say you know it's been an interesting q2 we were very uh pleasantly surprised with the success of our follow-on offering and the the level of institutional investors we were able to attract that have confidence in our business model and what the business plan that we've laid out ahead of us that we're executing upon i don't have one negative thing to say it's you know being in this industry is it you know the no two days are the same and it's a it's a journey of excitement every day we're we're traveling down a new path and and executing with you know a team that we know can deliver perfect well thank you both for this presentation we certainly would love to have you back on and continue with your progress throughout

the year so thank you both thank you anna appreciate you all right everyone stay with us we will be