Conference Transcript - BTDR 2026-06-03

William Norcross, Other

Great. Well, good morning. And thank you, everyone, for joining us today at the B of A Tech Conference. My name is William Norcross. I'm a senior director in our technology group based out of New York. I'm joined today by Harris Bassett, chief strategy officer, and Tesh Daya, head investor of investor relations of Bitjir. Thank you guys for spending the time with us today.

Haris Basit

Thank you, William.

William Norcross, Other

Before we get started, I think for those on the phone and those in the audience, maybe give a little bit of a brief background that we can dive into the conversation.

Haris Basit

Sure. My name is Harris Bassett. I'm with Bityear about three years now and Chief Strategy Officer. I'm responsible for a few things, including, surprisingly, chip development. We're doing some very aggressive advanced chip development, and I run that group, as well as have responsibilities in investor relations and capital markets and global energy strategy.

Tess Dyer, Head of Investor Relations

Tash Daya. I joined the company a few months ago, earlier this year. It's great to be here. It's an exciting time in our industry, so we're so happy to be hosted by you, William, and the team here, so thank you for that. Before we begin, please note that this presentation and Q&A session are for informational purposes only and do not constitute an offer to sell any securities. Our remarks will include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. These statements are based on current expectations and are not guarantees of future performance, and we assume no obligation to update them. This presentation does not purport to contain all information that may be required to evaluate our company. And for more complete discussion, please refer to our most recent filings with the SEC, including our annual report Form 20F.

William Norcross, Other

Well, Bitters journey started as a Bitcoin mining company. It's obviously evolved dramatically here recently and now includes AI and co-location compute. Perhaps give us a sense for the evolution of the business. Was there a eureka moment when something changed? Perhaps just talk about that evolution.

Haris Basit

Yeah, that's actually a really interesting topic. And I think some people will be surprised to learn that we've actually been in AI perhaps longer than any of our other cohort of companies that are Bitcoin companies transitioning or adding AI. We were doing AI cloud three years ago in Singapore at a relatively small scale, but we were cutting our teeth on it back then. And we've grown that business quite a bit since then and expanded that into Malaysia and soon into North America as well. But so at least on the cloud side, we've been thinking about this and actually doing it for a very long time. And then when it comes to co-location, that's been more recent and there's been an evolution in that. I think the industry itself was very skeptical of Bitcoin mining companies getting into being co-location providers because there's a very big difference between the data center that you use for Bitcoin versus AI cloud. But I think a lot of that skepticism has been dramatically reduced or eliminated over the past, say, 18 months. So when we started 18 months ago, we were sort of trying to dip our toes into it. I think we got a lot of advice, which was probably right for the time that we needed a partner, a development partner or a capital partner to really play in that field. Or we needed to hire a big team of people ourselves. And so we started down that path and then the industry changed. We became much more convinced that this was the right way to go and the best use of several of our power assets, especially in Europe and North America. So we've started hiring that team of experts, and we have some great people that we've hired over the past few months and even over just the past few weeks, some leading experts in AI, in AI data centers and in model development and cloud. So we've really dramatically increased our expertise in that area, our capabilities, and we've also well-alonged to developing our site in Norway as a full-blown AI data center.

William Norcross, Other

Yeah, no, absolutely.

Haris Basit

So no real eureka moment.

William Norcross, Other

But just a natural evolution, which makes sense. And as we think about that evolution and such a strong foundation, obviously, where do you see kind of those, I guess, support efforts and the ability to then accelerate that AI initiative? Is it the power elements that you guys have already had in place?

Haris Basit

Well, I think that's the benefit of being a Bitcoin company is that we acquired a tremendous amount of power over three gigawatts relatively inexpensively because there weren't a lot of AI companies hunting for the power at that time. it was really us and a few of our bitcoin uh you know compatriots and uh we got the power relatively cheap large amounts of power at low prices and uh that's the accelerant and that's really the the key thing here that differentiates uh you know how quickly can you get power and how large is that power those are the two things that i think are the key differentiators i would just compliment that our location's also very compelling you think about the footprint we have in the texas

Tess Dyer, Head of Investor Relations

Triangle, a little bit over an hour outside of Austin. Very compelling. That's a 740 megawatt site on its own that we think has tremendous value, both for the company, of course, for these applications.

Haris Basit

And the Norway site, too, is a compelling location in terms of having data sovereignty issues for Europe and really being in a very friendly jurisdiction for AI.

William Norcross, Other

Maybe we'll spend a second more than on the geographic landscape. There's a global business. You mentioned three gigawatts of power that you guys have already purchased. Some of that coming online here in the next year plus. But the bulk of that is based here in the U.S. domestically. Talk about how important it is to have a presence here in the U.S. given the AI focus.

Haris Basit

You know, the U.S. is clearly the right place to be for if you want to become a global leading AI company. But that doesn't I don't want to take away from Europe or Asia. You know, we have locations in Malaysia and Singapore as well as, of course, in Europe and Norway. But the U.S. is sort of at the center of, you know, capital, for example, this investor conference as well, but also just technology, the leading model development. So it's very important for us to be in the U.S. And we are growing our footprint in the U.S., not just by the number of data centers that we're acquiring and the power that we're acquiring, but also in the people. And I think key technical expertise really resides still here in the U.S.

William Norcross, Other

And as we expand out of the U.S. and look more internationally, obviously, you touched on it, your title project in Norway, the conversion there feels like you're in the red zone here getting close to wrapping that up or announcing an attendant. Anything you can share to the team here as to that progress there?

Haris Basit

I think it is very close, very close to being signed and moving ahead. We're very happy with, you know, the negotiations so far. But, you know, it's not done until it's done. And there's a lot of anxiety towards the end of getting every last detail ready on time. So, you know, we're just in that process. We expect that to be, you know, one of the largest data centers in Europe and certainly the largest one in Norway.

Tess Dyer, Head of Investor Relations

I would just add, too, for those that are less familiar, that site, we get a ton of interest from a variety of different potential tenants to look at that site, to have express interest in that site. It's an 180 megawatts gross in terms of its size. It will be the largest data center in Norway upon completion. It will be amongst the largest in all of Europe as well. The first phase is expected to be ready here in December as well. So time to power, very compelling, clearly. and the PUE is only 1.1, so super efficient, very compelling site, powered by 16 hydropower stations, so very compelling site, and we're very excited to get it moving here.

Haris Basit

Yeah, all renewable, low PUE, everything is very good about that, and it's expandable. We're looking at doubling the size of that site over the next couple of years.

William Norcross, Other

Anything you can share on the tenants that you're always looking for, creditworthiness, size, scale, anything you can share with the audience about?

Haris Basit

Well, we're trying to optimize everything there, right? And obviously, at this late stage, we have someone definitely in mind that we're trying to finalize the deal with. And so the goal, obviously, is to get the maximum return, but also maximum investment-grade backing for it that we can or credit enhancement. And I think investors will be happy with all of that.

William Norcross, Other

Yeah, that's great. And obviously, that was a brownfield conversion. as you think about the other power coming online or future M&A of new sites? How do you weigh the options between brownfield conversions, greenfield opportunities? Kind of walk us through maybe that strategy or that scale of how you think about acquiring more power.

Haris Basit

So just to be clear on Tidl in Norway, it was always designed to be a potential tier three data center, even when we built it originally and put Bitcoin in it. So there was that conversion was a lot easier because it was planned to be easier in the beginning. You know, most of our Bitcoin data centers are not that easy to convert because they're not they haven't been laid out and planned as a tier three data center. So, for example, if you now switch to Rockdale, which might be our next large site that we move forward with, it is probably better for us there to purchase new land nearby and do a greenfield rather than take the existing Bitcoin mining facility, which is really built inside of old aluminum smelting facilities that we have retrofitted for our purposes. It's probably better just to build a greenfield site there. And I'm not sure the cost differences are really related to whether it's brownfield or greenfield. I think the Norway site cost us much less for a variety of reasons, but not really that.

William Norcross, Other

Stepping into a tier three location already and retrofitting that makes that easier. So that's a unique situation. I think if we go to the evolution, back to the point of the evolution of the business, revenue is nearly two and a half X year over year. which is tremendous. So congratulations on the accelerating growth. A lot of that coming from kind of the new AI leg of the business. As we think about the evolution, how do you envision the revenue mix shift? Anything you guys can help as you think about forecasting this year and beyond? How do you think about the revenue mix?

Haris Basit

So I do want to make clear that we're not pivoting or transitioning from Bitcoin to AI. We're adding AI and focused very heavily on it, but we're not de-emphasizing or decreasing our role in Bitcoin. We're still a leader in Bitcoin now. We're fully vertically integrated. We design and make the chips. We own the data centers. And we probably have one of the largest footprints in terms of total exahash of Bitcoin mining. And we plan on growing that, not as rapidly as we have over the past 12 or 15 months where we've, you know, grown by a factor of five or something like that. But we will continue to grow it. We're not going to shrink it in or, you know, it's going to continue to be a growing business. And well, the revenue from that really depends on what the Bitcoin price is and what the hash price is. So that can vary dramatically based on Bitcoin coin price. So the emphasis really is on AI, though, especially for all the power that we have in Europe and North America, that where it's possible, we're going to transition to AI in those locations, you know, either a small site that might be a cloud for us or inference, and then the larger sites could be co-location.

William Norcross, Other

And, you know, perhaps, you know, you touched on the vertical integration and the chip development that you guys are going through. The sealer miner roadmap has been phenomenal. You guys had a slide on that in your last earnings presentation. Perhaps just spend a second, because I think, as you mentioned, there's great vertical integration because of that development. Perhaps just spend a moment on that technology.

Haris Basit

Yeah. So in Bitcoin, if you're just doing mining, that has very low barriers to entry. And a lot of the companies that were doing Bitcoin mining and now are completely switching to AI had very little of a moat around their Bitcoin business because they're effectively buying third party hardware, plugging it in where they had low cost power and just turning them on. And, you know, that was it. And that's not that defensible of a business model by itself, because it's pretty easy for somebody else to get into that business. However, the hardest thing by far in Bitcoin mining, and I think there's really no close second to this, is designing an energy efficient chip. And now we are the designers of and the manufacturers of the most energy efficient Bitcoin mining chips anywhere in the world. And so that is a very, very difficult thing to do, as shown by the fact that nobody has been able to beat Bitmain at that for the last, you know, 10, 12 years. And we're the first ones to be able to do that. And we're going to grow that gap. And that's based on the expertise of our chip designers that we have. We have multiple chip design groups, one in Singapore, one in the United States. And we're investing in that significantly. It's not a lot of money from the scale of infrastructure, but in scale of the chip design efforts, it's a significant amount. And we're looking at some very dramatically new technologies there. So that ability to design leading edge chips has been key to the reason that we want to stay in Bitcoin, because it does give us a very deep, wide moat around that business that nobody else has. So we're in Bitcoin for the long term, and we think we have very defensible advantages in that business.

William Norcross, Other

It's an incredible mode. And as you think about using the eventual A42 chip, what else is there beyond that in terms of applications outside of Bitcoin mining? Could it be used elsewhere? And how do you think about that?

Haris Basit

So the A42 chip itself cannot be used for anything other than Bitcoin mining. But the technology that we have developed to get energy efficiency in Bitcoin for that latest generation, and just to be clear, that chip is not out yet. It is expected to be out in the future. We haven't given a date, a new date for it. It's a very, very difficult thing to do. But the technology that is being used within it or will be used within it should have applications on any high intensity compute application, you know, other than Bitcoin. So there's other anything that's spending a lot of energy on compute, which includes digital signal processing, network processing, even the core of the GPU and things like that. There's potential to save significant amounts of energy in all of those. And those could be licensing agreements. I'm not saying that we're going to try to make any of those chips, but those are possibilities for the future. But really, the first thing is to prove the technology in a Bitcoin product.

William Norcross, Other

Yeah, absolutely. You know, look, there's so many priorities and so many things going on a bit here. And they're also exciting. As you think about kind of your cash usage, whether it's kind of brownfield conversions, greenfield, obviously, the chip design and the technology that you're helping spearheading. How do you think about prioritizing and rank ordering these? Because there's just so many great opportunities that you guys are trying to tackle.

Haris Basit

Yeah, so I think the priority really now is in AI, right? And that's where most of the cash is going. And the advantage there is that a lot of that capital is raised on project-based financing. And so it's really just allocated to that. Now, in some cases, you can raise a lot more money than that project needs and use some of that in equity and other projects. But if you look at it on how we're prioritizing capital, it's really being prioritized towards AI.

William Norcross, Other

And obviously, you've seen that scale and seen that return, you know, to date. So it makes sense. Look, you know, I think, you know, we'll flip it over into the room. I don't know if anyone here has any questions they'd like to ask. We'll give it a second and see if anyone in the room has something.

Haris Basit

Well, we need to have a signed lease deal. We want to have the lease signed and, you know, all the legal issues associated with that nailed down so that we're 100 percent certain. before we announce anything. I don't know if that answers your question, but... Yeah, so... Well, okay. So we don't want to announce anything before a lease is signed. Now, when you're negotiating a lease, the big issues like, you know, what the credit enhancement might be or who the counterparties, exact counterparties behind the deal are and the financial terms of the lease, Those are agreed to well in advance, you know, even at the term sheet level, right? But getting a final lease includes hundreds of additional items, which are mostly minor, but, you know, they need to be resolved. And so we're not planning on announcing anything until we have a signed, executed lease.

Tess Dyer, Head of Investor Relations

I would just add, it obviously is a significant focus of management time, as you might imagine. And there's no lack of internal time committed and obviously just intensity to reach closure here. And so we look forward to seeing it through here.

William Norcross, Other

Anything else in the room?

Haris Basit

Expansion. So TIDL right now is 180 megawatts gross power, and we've applied or will apply for another 180 megawatts, which we think there's a reasonable chance of us getting. So and that would be Greenfield, I suppose, if you give it that way.

William Norcross, Other

Is that your question? Well, Harris, again, thank you so much for coming. Anything else you want to mention either to those in the room and on the phone?

Haris Basit

No, I think it's going to be very exciting next couple of months for us. And we're looking forward to talking to investors again.

Tess Dyer, Head of Investor Relations

Yeah, I would just add, A, thank you for hosting us here. Tidle is probably the first of several key projects we have just from the co-location side, let alone our kind of goals and aspirations on the AI cloud side. So I think it's a very exciting time for our industry and for the company in particular. So we look forward to kind of showing that value creation here as we go.

William Norcross, Other

Yeah, no, I appreciate you guys taking the time, and congratulations for everything going on. We look forward to watching the story. And thank you guys all for coming and enjoy the rest of the B of A Tech Conference.