Applied Digital Corp. Q2 FY2024 Earnings Call

Good morning, and welcome to Applied Digital Fiscal Second Quarter 2024 Conference Call. My name is Sheri and I will be your operator today. Before this call, Applied Digital issued a financial result for the fiscal second quarter ended November 30, 2023, in a press release, a copy of which will be furnished in a report on a Form 8-K filed with the SEC and will be available in the Investor Relations section of the company's website. Joining us on today's call are Applied Digital's Chairman and CEO, Wes Cummins, and CFO, David Rench. Following their remarks, we will open the call for questions. Before we begin, Alex Kovtun from Gateway Group will make a brief introductory statement. Mr. Kovtun, please proceed.

Thank you, operator. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Applied Digital's fiscal second quarter 2024 conference call. Before management begins formal remarks, we would like to remind everyone that some statements we're making today may be considered forward-looking statements under securities laws and involve a number of risks and uncertainties. As a result, we caution you that there are a number of factors, many of which are beyond our control, which could cause actual results and events to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For more detailed risks, uncertainties, and assumptions relating to our forward-looking statements, please see the disclosures in our earnings release and public filings made with the Securities and Exchange Commission. We disclaim any obligation or any undertaking to update forward-looking statements to reflect circumstances or events that occur after the date the forward-looking statements are made, except as required by law. We will also discuss non-GAAP financial metrics and encourage you to read our disclosures and the reconciliation tables, the applicable GAAP measures in our earnings release carefully as you consider these metrics. We refer you to our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission for detailed disclosures and descriptions of our business, as well as uncertainties, and other variable circumstances, including but not limited to, risks and uncertainties identified under the caption Risk Factors in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q. You may get Applied Digital's Securities and Exchange Commission filings for free by visiting the SEC website at www.sec.gov. I would also like to remind everyone that this call is being recorded and will be made available for replay via a link available in the Investor Relations section of Applied Digital's website. Now, I will turn the call over to Applied Digital's Chairman and CEO, Wes Cummins. Wes?

Thanks, Alex, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining our fiscal second quarter 2024 conference call. I want to start by thanking our employees for their ongoing hard work and service in supporting our mission of providing digital infrastructure solutions to the rapidly growing high-performance computing industry. Before turning the call over to our CFO, David Rench, for a detailed review of our financial results, I'd like to discuss some recent developments across our business. Let's start with our data center hosting operations. Our 100-megawatt Jamestown facility continues to perform as expected and operated at full capacity with consistent uptime throughout the quarter. This marks the fifth consecutive quarter in which the Jamestown facility has operated at full capacity. Our 180-megawatt Ellendale facility in North Dakota also operated at full capacity with consistent uptime during the quarter, bringing our total hosting capacity to 280 megawatts across our North Dakota facilities. Both facilities are contracted out to customers on multiyear terms. During the quarter, we announced the initial energization of our 200-megawatt Garden City facility in Texas. This is a significant milestone in Applied Digital's ongoing efforts to meet the growing demand for low-cost scalable digital infrastructure. The Garden City facility had a small contribution to our results this quarter and is currently operating at approximately 132 megawatts, with the remainder of the capacity expected to come online in the next several months. As we brought on the facility, we realized there were additional infrastructure improvements needed for the grid. We expect these improvements to be made no later than April. Our customers continue to send miners to the facility and we are actively installing them. With the increase in the cost of bitcoin, we are seeing demand increase significantly for hosting services. As a reminder, our Garden City facility is fully contracted with fixed prices, so we are not exposed to volatility in the crypto markets heading into the halving event this year. Once our Garden City facility becomes fully energized, we will have approximately 500 megawatts of hosting capacity across our three data center hosting facilities. We expect our three sites to deliver up to $300 million in revenue and $100 million of adjusted EBITDA on an annualized basis. Operating cash flow from data center hosting services will ramp up significantly in March as the majority of our prepayments burn off in February. Let's move on to cloud services, which provide high-performance computing power for primarily AI applications. It continues to grow quickly as we progress further in supporting our existing contracts and pursue additional opportunities in our pipeline. Since our last earnings announcement, we have added an additional cloud customer, which brings our total annual contract value of cloud service contracts at full capacity to approximately $398 million. We tailor our agreements to our customers so that they can exercise options embedded in the contract to deploy GPUs and ramp up hosting capacity over time. While the typical customers for our cloud service have been private VC-backed companies, we are now also seeing strong demand from the enterprise market for large amounts of GPU compute capacity. We are excited to see demand increasing from this important segment of the market and have plans to hire sales talent to enhance our outreach efforts. We continue to secure access to GPUs; however, there have been some delays in installations attributable to pending deliveries of networking components. We believe it's prudent to receive GPU deliveries only when all associated equipment is on-site and ready for installation, which is how we structure our client deposits. Additionally, we continue to actively explore vendor financing and other tailored financing options to support the capital requirements for the 34,000 H100 GPUs we have on order to support our current customer demand. To date, we have four 1,024 clusters installed and are planning to ship an additional four in the next two weeks. These clusters, as they are currently configured put us in an elite class of next-generation supercomputers in terms of raw compute power or petaflops for the most demanding AI applications. We expect to reach a minimum of 10 before the end of the fiscal year with the Jamestown cluster representing the opportunity to put us in the top 10 supercomputers for AI workloads. The fully commissioned clusters are expected to generate over $200 million of annualized revenue. Lastly, let me provide an update on our purpose-built HPC data centers. During the quarter, we broke ground on our first 100-megawatt high-performance compute facility in Ellendale, North Dakota. This facility will offer low cost, high-efficiency liquid-cooled infrastructure designed for HPC applications. Construction is proceeding as expected. Our unique proprietary architecture and design implementation together with the strategic placement of the Ellendale facility near sources of abundant and renewable power will offer scalable infrastructure for these workloads. It will offer significant cost reduction to our customers and deliver best-in-class performance that maximizes high power density compute. We believe that this advantage is sustainable in this emerging market for data centers specialized in running AI workloads. Our contracted power and adjoining land at our facilities will become valuable assets over the next 18 months. We believe there will be a significant supply constraint for power in the data center market. We have already seen robust demand for our data centers, which driven by the burgeoning AI landscape has exceeded our initial expectations. We believe we'll be in a strong competitive position to support this demand. As a reminder, we have 400 megawatts of capacity in development across North Dakota and Utah. This does not include the current 9 megawatts of capacity we have at our standalone facility in Jamestown to support cloud service customers. As we enter the second half of fiscal 2024, we're well-positioned to capitalize on the demand we're seeing across both our cloud service and HPC data center business and we will continue to allocate our capital appropriately to the highest risk-adjusted returns to maximize shareholder value. With that, I'll now turn the call over to our CFO, David Rench, to walk you through our financials and provide an update on guidance.

Thanks, Wes, and good morning, everyone. Revenues for the fiscal second quarter of 2024 were $42.2 million compared to $12.3 million for the fiscal second quarter of 2023. The increase was driven primarily by the full quarter of revenue generation from the Ellendale facility, the Garden City facility beginning revenue generation during the fiscal second quarter of fiscal year 2024, and additional revenue from the Jamestown facility due to increased uptime. In addition, the company recognized a full quarter of revenue from the first cloud service contract during the fiscal second quarter of 2024. Cost of revenues for the fiscal second quarter of 2024 was $29.2 million compared to $11.8 million for the fiscal second quarter of 2023. The increase in cost of revenues was attributable to higher energy costs used to generate hosting revenues, depreciation and amortization expense, and additional personnel expenses, driven by the growth of the business as more facilities were energized. Selling, general, and administrative expenses for the fiscal second quarter 2024 were $21.1 million compared to $27.2 million in the prior year comparable period. The decrease was primarily due to lower stock-based compensation expense and was partially offset by increases in depreciation, amortization, and personnel costs. Net loss for the fiscal second quarter of 2024 was $10.5 million or a loss of $0.10 per basic and diluted share based on a weighted average share count during the quarter of approximately 109.7 million. This compares to a net loss of $26.8 million or a loss of $0.28 per basic and diluted share in the fiscal second quarter of 2023 based on a weighted average share count during the quarter of approximately 93.4 million. Adjusted net loss, a non-GAAP measure for the fiscal second quarter of 2024, was $5.2 million or adjusted net loss per basic and diluted share of $0.05 based on a weighted average share count during the quarter of approximately 109.7 million. This compares to an adjusted net loss of $3.8 million or $0.04 per basic and diluted share for the fiscal second quarter of 2023 based on a weighted average share count of approximately 93.4 million during the quarter. A significant headwind we faced during the fiscal second quarter of 2024 was amortization and occupancy charges for leases of computing equipment and data center space that have been assessed by the company but are not yet supporting revenue. The lease expense for the colocation sites not supporting revenue totaled $1.5 million and were not added back into adjusted EBITDA or adjusted earnings. Amortization of GPUs not supporting revenue was $3.7 million and was not added back to adjusted earnings. We expect this impact to decrease in future quarters as we resolve supply chain delays and are able to stand up full computing clusters that support revenue. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP measure for the fiscal second quarter of 2024, was $10.6 million compared to an adjusted EBITDA loss for the fiscal second quarter of 2023 of $2.2 million. Lastly, on our balance sheet, we ended the fiscal second quarter with $34.6 million in cash equivalents, cash, cash equivalents, and restricted cash, and $42.8 million in debt. During the first two quarters of 2024, we received $81.8 million in customer payments due to the structure of our commercial arrangements with our customers that incorporate upfront deposits and prepayments. In certain contracts, the prepayments are credited back to the customers over the term of the contract. This has no impact on revenue recognition, but the upfront cash flow is a major benefit for the company as it helps with our CapEx funding as we build out our data centers. Since the quarter closed, we have received an additional $11.1 million in customer prepayments and $23.1 in net proceeds from the ATM offering. The ATM offering is now complete. Now, turning to guidance, due to the delayed delivery of certain networking components for our GPU clusters, we now expect our revenue and EBITDA to be below the low end of our previously guided range for the fiscal year 2024. Network component deliveries improved in recent weeks, but did have a significant impact on the timing of commissioning clusters and our revenue and EBITDA. We now expect to exit the fiscal year 2024 at an annual revenue run rate of approximately $500 million and an annualized adjusted EBITDA run rate of $250 million.

Thank you, David. We're well-positioned to capitalize on the growing opportunities across our business and look forward to continuing our momentum in the second half of the year. I'd like to thank all of our team members for their dedication in making Applied what it is today and our shareholders for your continued trust in our mission and execution. We are now happy to take questions. Operator?

Thank you. Our first question is from Lucas Pipes with B. Riley Securities. Please proceed.

Thank you very much, operator. Good morning, everyone. My first question is on the HPC hosting side and the conditional agreement that you announced and a few others. First, in terms of the total value you cite there, should we think of $220 million of revenue per year? And then are your margin expectations for the segment still around 40% and on the capital cost side? I've been working with the $5 million per megawatt assumption. I wondered if that's still a good number to use. Thank you very much for your details.

Good morning, Lucas. Thank you. So there's not a lot more detail that I can give versus what we announced, but let's talk about the cost. I think we talked about in our Analyst Day and the Shareholder Day that cost is moving towards $6 million to $7 million per megawatt versus the $5 million as we've worked through the new design. So the $5 million was more for the previous design and this is the three-story design that we're working on. So that's what we're looking at. But as far as economics, this fits into the economics that we've talked about previously, which is about $2 million per megawatt in revenue and $1 million of EBITDA per megawatt.

Got it. That's very helpful. Thank you for that. And turning to guidance for a moment, in terms of the components that have been delayed, what exactly has been the bottleneck? Could you add a little bit more color on that? And then I think you previously provided some color on GPUs online for the average in physical Q3 and Q4. I think you mentioned it in your prepared remarks but I was trying to take notes and couldn't quite keep up. So if you have maybe an expectation around Q3, Q4 GPUs, I would appreciate the color around all of this. Thank you.

Sure. So the components that are the issue for delivery, it's not the GPUs themselves. It's specific networking components related to the InfiniBand networking piece of the cluster. And I've talked about this several times already, and this has been the bottleneck, I would say for the last three or four months. We are getting delivery of those. It's a matter of making sure you get delivery of every component because you need all of the components to stand up the cluster, commission it, and get it operating for customers. So we're seeing improvement in the delivery of the InfiniBand. It's been specifically on the transceiver side of the InfiniBand deployments. So we had one cluster up and running last quarter. We have four deployed now. As I said in my prepared remarks, we expect to receive another four. And on the cluster, just as a reminder, Lucas, it's the cluster for us. I know it can be a little bit confusing, but it's 1,024 GPUs per cluster is how we refer to it. So we'll receive another four in the next two weeks, that's our expectation. And so also think of where pricing has gone for us on these clusters. You should think about $20 million of annual revenue per cluster deployed. So the difficulty we have is just a few weeks because right now, let's say we're running about eight weeks behind our original expectation. But when you think about the revenue ramp and the revenue generation on a week-by-week basis, we go from one cluster, so we're generating $20 million of revenue per year for that cluster to our business going to four clusters, which is $80 million of revenue per year. And then in a few weeks, our business goes to eight clusters, which is $160 million of revenue per year. So when we look at our guidance, we're just assuming 10 clusters deployed by the end of our fiscal year, which is May, about 4.5 months away. And so that 10 clusters plus our blockchain hosting solutions gets us to that $500 million run rate. I think we can do better than that, but that's the number that I think is a very conservative number for us to hit by the end of the year.

That's very helpful. Thank you, Wes, for all the color. One quick one, the $45.8 million in property, equipment, and other assets that have been purchased year-to-date, are you able to provide a breakdown between HPC and GPUs in that number? Thank you.

I'm sorry, Lucas, which number was that? The purchase year-to-date?

Yes, that's the number of property and equipment that's been purchased to date.

So the majority of that goes into HPC. So as you look on our balance sheet, where the GPUs are showing up because of how we're financing the GPUs is the lease asset, the right to use asset.

Okay.

And then on the liability side, you'll see a capital lease. One of the things I would call out with this is on the leases, we deploy the GPUs, the entire right to use asset goes into long-term assets, whereas on the lease liability, it's split about half and half between long-term liability and short-term liabilities. So when you look through the balance sheet, the leases right now, because we're doing what I always refer to as equipment finance. These are capital leases. That's how we're financing the GPUs. So when you look through CapEx, the vast majority of what you'll see is CapEx on equipment, which is the HPC facility, the data center. And then on the lease right to use and the capital leases and the liabilities is where you'll see the GPUs.

That is very helpful. Thank you, Wes, for all the color and best of luck.

Yeah. Thanks, Lucas.

Our next question is from George Sutton with Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please proceed.

Thank you. It's great to see the conditional agreement. I just wondered if you could walk us through the project-level financing side of this and sort of how do these ultimately come together in your mind? Is it a combination of construction loan financing and project financing? And any sense of the market dynamics there that we should know about?

Thank you, George. I've mentioned this publicly before. Since mid-September, we've been marketing these agreements. When considering this, it's important to understand the marketing process. Potential customers conduct thorough due diligence on the site, addressing many questions and making site visits as expected. Generally, this leads into a right of first refusal period where exclusivity is granted, preventing sales to others. I'm discussing this process broadly, not our specific agreement. After that, we work toward establishing a contract. Once a contract is made, we move on to project-level finance. We are currently in discussions with multiple parties regarding project financing and began these discussions before securing an agreement. Typically, for project-level financing, you can expect a loan-to-cost ratio of about 65% to 80%. This financing is arranged at the site level, as we've done with our Bitcoin projects. There is also an equity component to consider, often referred to in our industry as mezzanine debt. Construction financing generally incurs costs around 7.5% to 8%. Then there's the mezzanine portion and our contribution, which has already been used to support ongoing construction at the Ellendale site, where we've invested a substantial amount. I believe we're nearing the needed equity portion, while the rest will come from project-level financing and mezzanine debt. Typically, investors in this phase expect mid to high teen returns on their capital, often receiving their funds back first, along with a small ownership stake, usually around 3% to 5% in the site. This illustrates the process we are currently following.

So I wondered if you could walk through the 400 megawatts that you're ultimately marketing, obviously 100 megawatts now effectively spoken for. Just, it's very clear to us that the demand side of the equation here is going to be pretty significant. Just curious what you're seeing as you're going to market with the other 300 megawatts of opportunity.

Yeah, so demand was robust. We had two parties very deep in diligence last year. As of the thing that we have seen, which has been interesting in January, as we kicked the year off, we've had several more parties show up, three more in the last week. And it feels almost like kind of panic looking for capacity just in the last couple of weeks. So we're seeing a lot of interest and the parties that are involved would easily take more than the capacity that we have. So it's nice to get the first one close to over the finish line, but the expectation for me is that over the next month or two months, we're going to have the full 400 booked out. And as a reminder, I think when we think about this, the biggest issue that we face, which is a high-quality issue, is how much do we carve out for ourselves because we want to carve some of this out for our own cloud solution. And I think that's really the question mark, what's the highest and best value for these, for our assets, because we want to carve some out for ourselves, but we have a massive amount of demand for the capacity that we have. And, George, the reason we have that demand is, the 400 megawatts that we have is 400 megawatts that could come online over the next 18 months. Right? The power is available, the land is there, permitting, we're in a really good position in a market that is already short capacity and I think it's going to get worse over the next few months.

So last question for me on the Sai Computing side. Obviously we understand the supply chain challenge. Looking past that, I'm just curious on the demand side. So you mentioned you've got another four clusters that could ship here soon. Is there any demand challenge that you're seeing or has anything changed there or is it really just a limitation on the supply chain side?

On the demand side, the only change we've observed is the emergence of a new group in the market. Demand remains very strong among VC-backed startups. However, we are now seeing what we refer to as enterprise customers enter the scene. These are typically large, publicly traded companies with market caps over $50 billion that already have established businesses. It seems they have been developing their AI strategies and are now seeking substantial GPU capacity. This represents a new aspect for us. We've been collaborating with one of these customers for about two months, and they've moved into what we call a proof of concept, essentially testing our infrastructure. I believe we could finalize a contract with them in the next two to three weeks. Overall, the only change is the increased demand, but it's coming from a different segment of the market. I view this market as a bit of a barbell; on one end, we have hyperscalers, and on the other, VC startups, whereas last year there was a gap in the middle. Now we are starting to see activity in that middle segment.

Perfect. Thank you for the details.

Absolutely. Thanks, George.

Our next question is from Darren Aftahi with ROTH MKM. Please proceed.

Good morning. I appreciate you taking my questions. I have two, if I could. If I understood you correctly, it seems that pricing has increased for GPUs. Wes, on an annualized basis with the 10,000, you'd be exceeding $200 million. I'm curious about this because during the Analyst Day not too long ago, you mentioned a $1.5 million monthly run rate. What has changed? Also, regarding the GPUs, I know you're aiming for 10,000 by the end of the fiscal year. Considering there are some uncontrollable factors with components, how confident are you in reaching that 10,000 figure?

Sure. Darren, you're correct. The pricing has increased somewhat. Previously, we were pricing for one of our largest customers at around $2 per hour for GPU capacity on our reserve contract. Currently, for most customers, we are signing contracts in the range of $2.20 to $2.25 for two-year reserve contracts, with prepayments between 20% and 30%. Regarding the 10,000 units, we revised that down from 26,000 due to delays in components for InfiniBand. We are confident that we can achieve the 10,000 target. We are comfortable with both the delivery and financing of the GPUs without needing to secure larger debt, as some competitors have done. This is why we provided that guidance. However, I believe there’s potential for more on the GPU side. We will soon have the first 4,000 plus another 4,000, so by mid-February, we expect to reach 8,000 of the 10,000 we are targeting, which gives us plenty of time before the end of May.

Well, I'm going to squeeze one more in. On Garden City, just looks like it obviously didn't ramp as fast as everyone expected. With the grid components, can you just maybe talk a little bit about maybe what is needed, how quickly those can get procured? And then I'm just kind of curious about your propensity to continue to do business maybe with the next site in somewhere like Texas, like, how would you kind of grade that in terms of wanting to do business in a place like Texas? Thanks.

I live in Texas and love it, so I won't say anything negative about the state. Currently, we are focusing on sites in North Dakota and Utah. We've previously mentioned that we are seeking more capacity in response to market demand. We have plans for additional capacity exceeding 1 gigawatt. Regarding the Texas site, there are some enhancements needed, specifically a capacitor bank for improved resiliency. This isn't specifically at our location but rather at a nearby substation to reach full capacity of 200 megawatts. There are two paths to achieve this: one is getting approval for wind and grid, and the other involves installing the capacitor bank, which is not a significant expense. We've been addressing this since late November or December. The guidance we've provided anticipates a worst-case scenario of completion by April, at which point we will be waiting for the last 65 megawatts to come online.

Great. Thank you.

Our next question is from Rob Brown with Lake Street Capital Markets. Please proceed.

Hi, good morning.

Good morning, Rob.

Just following up on the new anchor customer, could you give us a sense of sort of what vertical that customer is in, I think you mentioned, I guess, enterprise or the VC-backed side. Which sort of group is that customer in?

So we can't do that, but what I can tell you is the customer set that we are seeing of all the people that are looking at the site, there's not a lot of companies that exist in the world that are going to take down 100 megawatts or 200 megawatts or 300 megawatts themselves. So it's a very small group and all of the companies that are in the mix for us in North Dakota are names that everyone would easily recognize. They're looking for high-power density hosting, high-power density data center capacity, but it's all companies that you would recognize the name instantly.

Okay. Okay. Thank you. And then I just wanted to follow up on the GPU discussion around, I guess, do you still have commitments to buy the 26,000 GPUs and deploy them after May or is that still to be determined on contract activity?

Yeah, those orders are still valid, even up to the 34,000. And so we just expect to continue. By the way, Rob, just to clarify on those orders, it's 34,000 right now for H100. We can still change those orders, whether it's for H200, GH200, right? These are fluid for us. So as the market evolves, we're able to react to that. But we still have those in queue and the ability to bring those when all of the components are available. So the issue in the quarter we had just now, as David mentioned in his prepared remarks, just to give clarity on that, so we took delivery of a second cluster during the quarter. We were paying for that cluster. Those were the expenses. In total, we're just under $4 million. So paying for that cluster without that cluster generating revenue because we didn't have the InfiniBand components to fully commission that cluster and turn it over to our customer. So we basically paused the GPU deliveries ourselves because we don't want to be paying for these GPUs while we can't offer them to our customers and generate revenue. So that's really what's happened for us, but we still have all those orders in place and expect to deploy those. We just need to be more careful, I guess, about when we expect those to be deployed.

Got it. Great. Thank you for the color. I'll turn it over.

Our next question is from John Todaro with Needham & Company. Please proceed.

Great. Thanks for taking my question. A couple of ones here. One, so as you called out before, I think it was supposed to be 20,000 GPUs by December 23. Remember on the last call or the Analyst Day, maybe you did talk about some possible delays in the InfiniBand. Just kind of curious, did that situation get worse than you expected or were those delays kind of on your mind and maybe you guys just mis-analyzed it?

So, John, regarding that, we're receiving most of the networking equipment we needed. There was one crucial component required to make everything function properly. For instance, in one of our clusters, we have the entire InfiniBand setup except for about 28 transceivers, but we can't fully operate that cluster and generate revenue without them. So, it’s really about securing those transceivers. Like I mentioned, we could have received a lot more GPUs, but it doesn't make sense to do so without being able to generate revenue to cover their costs. Therefore, we decided to hold off on that in December. We could have accepted a large shipment of GPUs in December, but again, there was no reason to go ahead. As those become available, I believe we can significantly accelerate our pace, and we've noticed some improvement in the market towards the end of December and January, but I’m not ready to confirm that we can increase our deployment to meet the targets of 20,000, 26,000, and 34,000.

Got it. Okay. And then that's helpful. Another question I had, so you had mentioned this new customer contract in the Sai compute side, enterprise customer, how you could move to a proof of concept and start maybe delivering on that contract shortly. Just curious, with the delay, wouldn't the previously existing contract come before this one, or did anything change with those contracts?

Nothing has changed with those contracts. To clarify, John, we do not have a contract with the enterprise customer yet; it is currently in the proof of concept stage, and we will move to contracting afterward. I just want to ensure that's clear. However, nothing has changed with our previous customers. It is exciting to see a completely new group emerge in the marketplace seeking substantial GPU compute. These are established companies that are profitable and have products. This highlights a new segment of the market that has developed, particularly since late November.

Okay, got it. And just to clarify though, so even with the delays though, customers are still kind of lining up, knocking down doors, it sounds like?

Yeah, we have had no issue with that.

Okay, got it. Thanks, guys.

Our next question is from Mike Grondahl with Northland Securities. Please proceed.

Hey, guys. What is a rough estimate of Applied’s contribution to complete financing of the construction, just the project side of it for the anchor tenant? What do you guys have to pitch into that, roughly, just a number? How much have you done so far?

So, good question, Mike. When we consider the high end, we are looking at 7 million megawatts. For construction finance at the project level, we expect to be between 65% and 80%. Additionally, we anticipate having what is typically referred to in the industry as an equity partner, although this usually resembles mezzanine debt. Ultimately, our expectation is that we will contribute between 5% and 10% of the project in cash for the equity portion. So far, we have already spent over 25 million.

$25 million.

…$25 million on that currently for Ellendale. And then, Mike, when we look at that too, I think David mentioned this in his prepared remarks is for us on the cash flow for the company, I think it's important to note that when we hit March 1, the cash flow from our Bitcoin data centers improves dramatically. Right? We burn through the vast majority of the prepayments at that point, and so the cash flow from that portion of our business improves dramatically.

Got it, got it. That's helpful. And I'm assuming that the anchor tenant will be supplying the GPUs, but could you clarify there?

Yeah. So on the data center business, we are just providing space. Think of this as an Equinix or DLR style business. We're providing the space, they select the equipment, and they buy the equipment, and then we're just hosting. Very similar to what we do on the Bitcoin side.

Got it. Got it. And roughly, when would you begin to recognize revenue with this anchor customer? And hey, I'm not going to hold you to it, but roughly as this plays out, when would you expect that revenue to start?

So, right now, the expectation is the revenue would be the very early part of the second half of this calendar year.

So, like July, August would be kind of…

Yeah.

Okay. Great. Then just one last question. The Bitcoin hosting business, any contract renewals or extensions, any updated kind of terms, or is everything kind of locked down in that business?

It's locked down. Notably, we have a contract for over four years on most of the capacity with our largest customer. We have been receiving a lot more inquiries about hosting capacity recently, which shouldn't come as a surprise given the significant increase in Bitcoin's price. We haven't been marketing because we don't have capacity to offer, but interest has noticeably increased in the past six to eight weeks.

Got it. Okay. Hey, thank you.

Absolutely.

Our next question is from Kevin Dede with H.C. Wainwright. Please proceed.

Hi, Wes. I have a question. I'm curious about the number of facilities that you're operating or leasing to supply the power you need for your cloud service at the moment.

Sure. So we have third-party facilities in Denver, in Minnesota, and in Salt Lake City. And then we have our own Jamestown facility in Jamestown, North Dakota.

Yeah. And Jamestown, you have maxed out at 8 megawatts, if I understand correctly.

So Jamestown will hold 5,000 GPUs for us. I can do it on megawatts, or I can tell you on the GPU capacity, however you prefer.

Oh, whatever you're used to is fine. I guess the real reason for the question is related to expanding cloud services, right? Given that the market is really tight, how are you securing the power you need to meet customer demands for your cloud services?

Yeah, so we secured this power back in the summer of last year. So, in the middle of the year last year, we secured these power sites. We saw the demand and we ran out and grabbed the capacity to be able to service it. So we secured that at that point. And so we have the capacity both from third party and our own facilities for the 26,000 GPUs that we talked about. And then as we go beyond that, our expectation is that it will go into our own facilities post that 26,000 as we continue to grow.

Right, so 26,000 to 30,000 of that Delta will go into the Ellendale facility that's under construction now.

Yeah.

Okay. I think I correctly heard you mention a marketing initiative. And I was wondering if you could be more specific about the direction that you're going to take that. Do you think that goes toward that enterprise market that you're seeing starting to develop?

Yeah. So it's specifically for the enterprise market. So, as a reminder, Kevin, I think we've talked about this before, but we've never had a single salesperson at our company. And we hired our first salesperson a few months ago. And we're going to add more to that capability specifically to go after this enterprise market that we see developing now. So that's our expectation. But previous to that, we've never had a salesperson. We've had no sales force whatsoever in the company.

Understood. And congrats on that. I guess I'm just still a little shaky in how you see that market developing. And I guess sort of your competitive positioning and if demand is so strong, why would a marketing initiative be necessary at all?

So, we've hired one salesperson, maybe we'll hire another one, but there's an idea about going out and making sure people know who we are and what we do, because we've never done that before in the history of the company. So that's really the idea. So I don't think you should be thinking that we're hiring 20 salespeople, but I do think it's prudent to get a few salespeople on board, develop that sales organization. And the idea here that we've discussed a lot internally is we don't need it now, but we don't want to wait until we need it to build it.

That makes sense. Okay. Well, thanks for that. I appreciate your clarification. Thanks a lot.

No, no, no. That's it though. But yeah, Kevin, we're discussing it on the call here, but we've debated a lot internally where there's a group of people saying, why would we have salespeople? We don't have anything to sell. And another side that goes, the things that we should develop this before we need it. And I have landed in the latter camp, which is I think it's a good idea to develop a sales team before you actually need it.

I don't disagree. Right marketing makes it all happen. Well, congrats again on the results, Wes. Thank you very much for taking the questions.

Thanks, Kevin.

Thank you, everyone. That will conclude today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time and thank you for your participation.