AIB Data Centers Inc. (AIB) October 2026 Investor Update Transcript

Good afternoon and welcome to the AIB Data Center Corporate Update Call. My name is Ted Haberfield from MZ Group, a full-service investor relations firm, and I'm going to be your host for today's presentation. Look, I'm really excited to be here as we discuss the opportunities ahead for AIB, particularly on just the heels of what was announced over the last day or so with their contract with Nebius. AIB's model is really just built around securing power first and then deploying standardized capacity in manageable increments. So just a quick note, this webinar is currently in listen and watch mode only. We'll open things up for a live Q&A immediately following the presentation. In the meantime, feel free to use the chat feature to submit your questions and and while you're there go ahead and just drop us a quick message that the chat feature should be to your right when you're looking at the screen just confirm that you can hear us clearly and and let us know where you're where you're watching from today that would be great um please note a replay link for this webinar will be emailed to you immediately after we can conclude today's session so just keep an eye out for that uh that email. Thank you, Jack. Appreciate you letting us know. Welcome. Listen, before we proceed any further, I do want to just go and remind you that today's webinar contains certain forward-looking statements from management concerning future events. Now, I'm not going to read this entire slide to you, but please note that these forward-looking statements are based on the company's current beliefs assumptions and expectations regarding future events which in turn are based on information currently available to the company by their nature forward-looking statements address matters that are subject to risk and uncertainties a variety of factors could cause actual events and results to differ materially from those expressed in these statements with that said I'd like to now just present to you your presenters for today. We have the CEO of AIB Data Centers, Mr. Jerry Tang. Jerry has over 20 years experience as senior executive in global banking and infrastructure development, overseeing $40 billion in real estate and capital market transactions. We also have Jolene Haliski. Hello, Jolene. She is a CPA. She's got 20 plus years and as a senior financing roles and including her tenure over at Deloitte and she's actually been working with Jerry King for the last two and a half years. So today Jerry and Jolene will give us a really quick overview of the company but also really show us some developments that took place especially off of the announcement over the last day and we'll also go over some other really important items that's timely. So with that said, I'm going to introduce you to Jerry Tang, CEO of AIB Data Centers. Jerry, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Ted. I'm excited that you're presenting. So one thing I want to make clear is the... Hold on one sec. Can you hear me? yes we can hear you just fine okay sorry that was an echo just now yeah so we are super excited to have this contract executed it is a 50 megawatt IT load with 12 years initial term it's a firm contract with no termination options if there were termination options, you know, it would be fully paid. And we worked very hard to get this client, and they have done extensive due diligence on AIB, on the power contracts on the site, on our team's ability to execute, construct the data center, getting that long lead time equipment. So we have been through a lot to get the customers, the trust to sign this contract with us. With that aside, this contract, because of a customer confidentiality, we cannot disclose the exact total contract value. However, here on this table, we are offering you some comparisons. These three companies have signed three different contracts, ranging from 1.87 million per megawatt per year to 2.16 million per megawatt per year on it load i can tell you our rate is higher than all three of those so you can kind of do the math to land you know where the you know the tcv is we just can't say that ourselves secondly we are receiving a material amount of prepayment from the client and we can use that for POs and other construction costs right away. So we do not, based on that, we do not need to raise any equity and I'll say that again, we do not need to raise any equity full stop again this is a first proof of point of execution if you go back to may we signed the 65 megawatt utility contract 15 year term and in september four months later we signed this client off-take contract, 50 megawatt IT load, basically the entirety of that 65 megawatt utility load, if you translate into IT load as 50 megawatts. Next step will be getting the financing done and the start of construction. The construction actually will start is already kind of starting. We already started the decommissioning on the site of the existing Bitcoin mining facility. So I'm going to skip this because I think people are very interested in knowing how we fund the whole project. Right now, we estimate the project to cost around 800 million dollars. We estimate we can get a 560 million in construction debt, 140 million in prep equity. Those 700 million dollars will be all on project level and will need 100 million-ish equity to fund the remaining cost. All that will be funded with prepayments. So if you move on, if you look at, you know, our pipeline, CLT is on track to be built. It's contracted. It will be built in the next 10 months, 14 months. We already control another four sites. As a matter of fact, DFW1, we already own the site and have ESA executed. If you add all these up, we'll have another 280 megawatts that we can potentially contract with our customers and start to construct them in the next three to six months. Our strategy, as you can tell, is to focus on smaller data centers, anything sub 100 megawatts. so we don't have to get on a long process to get permits, get approvals. As you know, the pushback from communities on data center is pretty elevated right now. So our strategy is to fly under the radar by focusing on smaller data centers and not to chase the shiny objects, the 200 megawatts, 300 megawatts data centers. If you just focus on the power you have, the 50s, the 60s, the 70s that can be energized in the next six months, 12 months, you're not going to be distracted by the few hundred megawatts that's theoretically available in the next two years, three years, four years. and you can focus more of your energy on execution getting that customer contract signed get that capacity delivered to customer and start to deliver the cash flow we believe we have a wonderful team to execute i myself is a finance expert i have done over 40 billion dollars in commercial real estate finance so this is my strong fit chris has done over three gigawatts of data center construction while he was in amazon and he's leading these new projects for us in aib gary is an expert in sales and leasing for data centers so he can lead those sophisticated conversations with clients but we are not worried about getting clients at all every new data center we'll have four five six suitors for the entire capacity our goal is very simple every data center release to one client and we craft a diversified portfolio eight to ten different clients in the next 24 months this is the most interesting graph here we are still trading at a massive discount to our peers even after we have signed a customer contract i think the market is mispricing our stock big time as we start to show progress on the project that includes getting the financing closed getting the po's placed and start to show progress on construction i believe our per megawatt valuation should revert to market media. So to sum up, I think AIB can be an amazing investment opportunity. We are already starting to show first proof of execution. All we need to do is rinse and repeat on our new pipeline sites.

Fantastic. Thank you, Jerry. Appreciate your uh opening remarks and we're going to move on to our our q a session uh we're uh receiving a number of questions and and management will try to answer them as time permits however please forgive us in advance if we're not able to get your question but i can assure you that management or their advisors will do their best to answer your questions offline by sending you an email or by setting up a call directly with you. Our first question is coming from Ron. Appreciate your question, Ron. Question is, on CLT1, what is the total development budget? How much Nebbia's prepayment is released before the first haul is commissioned? And what coupon and conversion terms are you underwriting for the project referred?

If the prepayment stays in escrow until SLA milestones what is the sponsor equity check required to reach financial close so we've got multiple questions maybe we can just break it down of what you're allowed to respond to and and answer to Jerry thank you yeah thanks for this clarifying question so total budget as we illustrate that in the slide if we just go back to this slide is about 800 million dollars in terms of this prepayment amount all i can say is it's larger than the 100 million dollar equity requirement for the project and it will be released upon uh pos and the construction cost so we can start to draw uh the funds in the escrow like now what that means is uh there's no equity needed in the near term for AIB I think that might have answered everything there am I correct if there's pre maybe yeah yeah okay if there's anything else Ron that you have you can just send a follow-up in the

chat that would be great just want to make sure you got all your answers next question comes from Dhruv Dhruv asks what would be the cost around the project and whether it would be funded fully by customer PPM I think we already answered that yeah yeah um there's anything else you want to reiterate there jerry i guess uh no equity needed for this uh project no additional equity needed for this project gotcha um let's take a question from jack jack is asking do you expect that this agreement with nebius will lead to deals with companies of similar quality and size great question that's a great question yes

so we our goal is to craft a portfolio number one this is great proof right because you need to go through a excruciating process of diligence of our capabilities the power the team the execution and the pls for long lead time long lead time items um so when other similar size the company look at us they will have a much better feeling about you know giving their next capacity requirements to us but even before you know we sign this contract with navius we are already being pursued by multiple by multiple clients of similar caliber for our other sites. We as a team has, you know, has a great credibility in terms of financing, in terms of leasing, in terms of project management, construction. A lot of people have placed a lot of trust in us already. This only adds to that.

Fantastic. Thank you, Jerry. Next question coming from Fedor. Hopefully I said that correctly. Fedor is asking a good question, really talking about power passed through Nebius at cost, or is it bundled into the rate, and who bears the tariff risk under the ESA?

So we are the, I guess, counterparty on the ESA vis-a-vis the utility. However, all the utility costs would be passed through to Navius.

Short and sweet. Darren's asking four questions. So why don't we just go through each of the four. the first one being 800 million for 50 megawatts of critical load implies approximately 16 million per megawatt is this cost high and two what are timeline for completion of data halls and are these broken into two 25 million megawatt tranches and do you have an msa with mbis or is this a one-off deal? Are EBITDA margins in line with peer co-location deals in the space? And then update on Minnesota site. So a little bit to chew through here, but why don't we take the first question, Jerry?

Yeah, I don't think it's high. If you do 800 mil on a 65 megawatt utility load, it's about 12 million per megawatt. It's in the range, I would say. We have seen you know the cost between 10 million to 40 million on utility load so we are right in the middle of the range for a turnkey bill second question the timeline for the first 25 megawatt is 10 months from when we receive the escrow funds um the second one is 14 months and yeah based on sorry to interrupt i think there's a really good slide i know we passed through it um for you oh yes yeah yeah this is the slide yes yeah shows you the two uh 25 megawatt halls and the expectation timeline yeah but sorry to interrupt go ahead jerry yeah no worries yeah um it is a msa uh and if there are future sites where they are interested in uh leasing all we need to do is just to add a pl to a purchase order attached to that msa so we don't need to renegotiate the entire thing and that's one of the reasons why it took a little longer than we thought to get the contract executed. We thought we would have to get this executed in July, August, but it took September to have it executed.

And what about the EBITDA margins? Is this in line with the pure co-location deals in the space? Yeah, I think so.

The EBITDA margin would be about 90%. That's fantastic.

And is there anything you can share with the Minnesota site?

Yes, we are. We just hired a team member.

He's going to be flying to the town to make some progress with this permit excellent all right hopefully that was helpful darren and for our audience next question is coming from todd he's actually got a couple questions so i'm assuming it's the same todd so first one is what would you say is a fair share or price market cap that is following the nebius deal in the next six to 12 months well this is this is my personal opinion i think we should be trading if you look

at some of the comps we should be trading at least you know 10 million 12 million if you use the lowest uh comp here 12 million and we have uh 65 megawatts so you're talking about 800 million dollars market account assuming we don't contract any new clients yes good point good point thank you and a follow-up to to todd's question is uh which i think is a really great question um is why did nebius choose aib when there are lots of different colocation options for them and what made aib stand out in your opinion well number one there are not many colocation options for them that's the reality of the market um and also depends on how you define options right you can have a thousand options if your timeline for the capacity is 2029 20 2030 but if you narrow down to 2027 2028 your options are very very limited all 27 in my mind all 27 options are out everybody is starting to look at first half even second half 28 now uh aib stand out because we can deliver we give client the confidence that we can deliver that capacity in that 27 28 timeline not just we will just have the power obviously we have the power available already but also we have worked very hard to secure some equipments that may be long long time lead items but also we have tremendous amount of uh construction experiences in data

centers that gives the client a lot of comfort yeah the team speaks for itself thank you thank you and i have jolene answer this next one hi jolene um uh this is uh may have been already answered um but not answered but gone through uh but the question comes from drew and just asking what what financing structure will be used i think we can use reference uh one of the slides there but yeah yes so this kind of you know we've been working with bank street for months now they're uh renowned in this space in terms of digital infrastructure and this is

you know the area that they focus on they've been they've done billions of dollars of deals so we're really confident in their abilities in terms of securing the debt financers and what we're projecting is a 70 debt position so just for simple math on 800 million that rounds out to about 560 million and then the next portion of funding that we're going to bring in is preferred equity and we're just in the starting phases there was a question about rates and conversion but that is a private preferred equity at the project company or project co spv level so that would be the next source of funding that would come in around 140 million and that leaves the equity component from aib to contribute at 100 million and i'll just repeat what jerry said Like there's no equity, planned equity raise to create or to be able to fund that 100 million equity portion to the project level.

Great. Thanks, Jolene. I'm going to kind of tackle two questions at the same time here. one from Fedor, and it's related to a question that was, I saw a little bit, oh, from Jack as well. So two questions. One is, should negotiations with new customers be faster now that you have gone through your first customer negotiation and the other one uh was was what what how long did it take i know we talked about a little bit there's a little longer than normal because of the uh the you know the the details of this master agreement but maybe you can just address uh those two in one yeah so uh it took us um And if some of you have sort of invested along since June, we were negotiating with another tenant for the same space.

We have since then pivoted to Navias because they are a much larger company and a better balance sheet. And we used their form of MSA. So that took about three months, three and a half months. negotiate that agreement. There are two ways to answer this question. Number one, if we were to lease another site to Nebius, it would definitely be much, much faster because we do not need to renegotiate the MSA. We'll use the same MSA. We will just have to change the purchase order attached to the msa number two for other clients so during that negotiation process we were actually negotiating simultaneously with some other tenants for the same space so we can get similar msas largely negotiated so we can speed up the contracting for other sites and we are going to do that on all our new sites going forward just so we have MSAs in place with as many clients as possible and many clients are very open to do that as well even if they're not pursuing any particular site to shorten that negotiation period.

Okay good thank you for walking us through that um we love the details um the next one comes from eduardo uh the 100 million dollar prepayments i think you were alluding to earlier that that it was greater than that um but uh the 100 million plus prepayments are are advance of rent question mark yes Good. Simple, right? Okay. Thank you. This one's coming from with the initial M. Will the financial details of the Nebius contract be released at some point? Why is it confidential?

That's a great question. I'm hoping we can release sometime in the future. However, they have told us they do not want to release the TCB. They haven't done that with any other data center developer either. And they are applying similar standard as their off takers. However, you can, if you just look at this current slide, you can derive what is TCV. You can kind of get an idea what that TCV is from this slide.

Yeah. And also, Lucid Capital Markets analysts sent out a research note yesterday. They were reiterating their buy rating and their price target of $675 on it. But they also estimated your total contract value of approximately $1.25 billion over the next 12 years. Is this something you can speak to as well?

Is that somewhat within reason? well you can do the math if you know how to do math you can take the white fiber number as i said our least rate is above all three of those guys if you take in the worst case analysis you take that 2.16 million multiply by 50 multiply by you know 12 years you kind of get the number understood and and reason probably they want to keep it confidential is they're they're they're

continually negotiating with yes so yeah probably the reason yeah yeah yeah for both parties um so uh next question uh comes from ron uh on the 140 million dollar project preferred what coupon cash or pick, and does it convert into AIB common, and at what price?

Here's my read. I think the accrual will probably be in the low teens. There will be an equity kicker, 10% to 20% on the project level.

We are not going to allow any conversion into AIB common. we're just going to be focused on the project level of financing um it's a pretty pointed question but i think it's fair to ask if you believe uh you there's a big discrepancy between current share price and fair value will management personally buy shares i want to we we have to get out 10b5 uh playing in place to allow us to do that okay fantastic awesome uh great answer um this is coming from todd who are you working with uh to deliver said capacity in the 10-month period

you mentioned for the first 25 megawatt tranche data one question mark i don't know what's this data one we have a gc already they have been working on this for the past three four months together with us and there's a game trot uh they already have bits out for all the equipment they have a biz out for the sub the big subs electrical mechanical so this is a like a fully i guess, prepped, I guess, construction planning place already. Good.

Thank you. We've got about 10 more minutes, give or take. We might be able to do a little bit longer, but a good question coming from Darren. Given process at Spartanburg, can you enlighten us what characteristics you look for in terms of future geographic sites, especially in terms of government and community risks?

We prefer geographies that have more or less clear guidance on data centers and without a whole lot of community pushback. Let me give you an example of what that means. in certain states they already have data center moratorium or data center executive orders in place those are places that are more interesting to us because even though they have these regulations exactly orders in place it gives us a lot of clarity on what's do over what's not And in most of these states, they have a cutoff, be it 50 megawatts, be it 75 megawatts or 100 megawatts. So we know we have, you know, we have the play field for us.

Excellent. And another question from Todd is, when will meaningful revenue start hitting the company's financials going forward? It's a great question, especially now that you have contracted revenue. When will it actually start to kick in within the financial state? Do you want to answer that?

Yeah, yeah, I can grab that one. And so, you know, as you can, we refer to the data hall, a coming online in 10 months. So we would expect operational cash flow to be generated from this site with within those 10 months. A lot of bring us, you know, pretty much into Q4 of 2027.

I want to add to that. We actually have on a corporate level, we have a development fee that we're going to charge to the project. So the company will get some cash flow from the project as a developer. In addition to that, there is a profit that can be generated from NRC, non-recurring cost. What that means is we are going to do the build out inside of the white space, the data hole, and we are entitled to a mock-up. to those costs, even though we're not paying for them.

How is the prepayment accounted for on the P&L?

So there's a few different components. There's the escrow funds. So because a portion of that is a rental prepayment as a security deposit, that goes into a deferred rent. and then there's also the NRC charges that fit out component that actually comes in as a property plant and equipment.

Thank you. Very thorough CPA, obviously. Thank you. This next one comes from Truve. Does the current CLT1 financing plan require any additional issuance of common shares? I think Jerry.

No. No. Period. Yeah.

Yeah. Just thought we'd throw that one at you again, Jerry. Aviv, can you say more about how far along AIB is in obtaining financing for the 70% loan portion and the terms for that?

Sure.

I can speak to that.

Yeah. So we've been working, I think I mentioned a bit previously, we've been working with Bank Street for months now, probably. since late April, early May, just, you know, developing models, developing data rooms, just structuring exactly what is going to be that optimized cap stack. We, you know, just developing the teamwork between our team, their team, and obviously can't go out. They've been warming up their, their financers and their debt lenders for months now on an anonymous basis because no lease was signed. And then since lease has been signed, we have been signing or executing NDAs and getting rolling full steam to actually bring term sheets in and kind of assess who the best debt partners are going to be. They have no reservations from their end in terms of being able to meet that debt component and to bring in those preferred equity partners.

Just add to that, I was a banker. I was a credit guy. I have done over $40 billion deals in commercial real estate. Many of them are construction loans and very large loans. uh i can tell you i'm talking to multiple uh banks uh you know obviously you know we retain the banks through as our advisor the market of color gives us a lot gives me a lot of confidence you know this will be a very liquid piece of the paper we have structured the contract properly so that, you know, the credit underwriting will be, will be, we have basically everything that a lender is looking for in our contract to make it very, very financeable.

Great. And since we're on that, that subject, Philip wanted to ask, how do you plan to finance that at the equity portion of the construction cost?

It's financed by the customer prepayments. Yeah, so that's it. All right, let me just repeat that again. The equity in this cap stack will be funded by customer prepayments.

Yep, okay.

I think, too, I'll just add to that. There is already equity in the project with the pre-construction and decommissioning costs. And I think maybe not everyone in the audience realizes that we did a follow on offering already and funding was provided in that raise to pull forward into the pre-construction cost, which is his equity into the project already.

OK, we've got time for one more question and it's a pretty good question coming from him here. Are you in active negotiations with clients for your other sites?

Yes, I am. With multiple owned two of these sites that are in a more or less advanced. We have each site, we have multiple clients looking at them right now. I would say at least five, six clients. Fantastic.

Well, before we conclude today, I want to thank our presenters, Jerry and Jolene, and also you, our audience, for joining us today. For more details about AIB and to set up a call with the team, you can visit us at invest.aib.us. That's invest.aib.us. Their corporate website is AIB.us. Now I'm going to hand it back over to Jerry for some concluding words. Jerry?

Yeah, thanks. I see, you know, there are some existing investors in the company here today. I appreciate your patience and trust. All we can do is continue to execute, keep our heads down, and not look at the stock price.

Great. Thank you very much. And great. Thank you. And so, well, folks, that'll wrap us up for today as a reminder you will be receiving an email that includes details of the webinar replay so keep an eye out for that but that concludes our corporate update call today and thank you again for joining us and make sure to check it out check us out at invest.aib.us and have a great rest of your day thank you thank you