Raw Transcript: Bitcoin Miners Dumping BTC? Mara CEO Fred Thiel On AI Pivot, Next Price Breakout

quantitative tightening is officially over. You'll start seeing some quantitative easing. Uh the repo market's going to need help. You know, there are a lot of areas where I think you're going to see money being injected u in the economy. You know, the biggest constraint in the AI business is power. And the fastest way to get power for an AI site is to convert a Bitcoin mining site. What you're going to start seeing is AI data centers learning how to be curtailable loads. Um, and I think that if anything will create more uh competition with Bitcoin miners. November was one of the weakest months for Bitcoin since 2021. We're going to find out why and what's next for Bitcoin miners. Are miners dumping Bitcoin to transition into AI? Has that been one of the causes of the sellout? We'll find out why and what's next. Fred Teal joins us today. He's a CEO of Marathon Digital Holdings. Welcome back, Fred. Good to see you. Good to be here. a lot of interesting activity to talk about starting with uh market topping and market uh selling of Bitcoin over the past couple months. As you're aware, November has been a weak month, October as well, but in particular November. Let's just start by asking you what happened here and then we can dive into the details. Um well, those of you who may have listened to our our Q2 earnings call may remember I made the comment that I felt the market was getting a little frothy. Um we had seen huge tailwinds around institutional buy in uh inflows to ETFs. You had a lot of expectations of uh Fed rate cuts etc. And um you know the Japan carrier trade was still carrying along quite nicely. And then along came November and you had a couple of things hit backtoback. One was uh Fed rate cut became all of a sudden uh low likelihood poly market started scoring it way down. That caused a risk off. There was the scare around AI assets and all this debt, all these things going on around the AI circular economy and people getting a little tenuous on that. Um and that caused even more kind of risk off. And then you had the rate hikes in Japan that made the Japan carrier trade, you know, people needing to unwind that. Um, in addition, you we've had all along since late summer whales, uh, older whales who have, you know, wallets that are, you know, arguably 10 to 13 years old, even older in some cases. And by the way, these are wallets that are highly susceptible to quantum attack because the the public keys are well known and recorded. um and they don't have any of the tap routt protections uh in them. And so you started seeing whales either selling off uh con you know uh bitcoin that they had or actually just transferring it into ETFs um which looks like a sale. Uh when you see an old wallet that hasn't moved in many many years all of a sudden move people freak out. And so uh there was this compounding effect uh of all of that I think. Um and when you get a risk-off environment, you know, Bitcoin operates a lot like equity uh today, the way people manage it in their portfolios and um you know it you started seeing this kind of uh between Jim Cheno shorting strategy all these things kind of layered on one over another um and then you started seeing highly leveraged positions unwind. you know, we'd had a couple of times in October um a large whale who took a huge short position on the perpetual markets and made out really well with that October dip. Uh and I think you just got other people kind of piling on uh in doing that trade and um you know, here we are, we got a correction. Uh people are still kind of wary as to what's going on. Obviously the whole digital asset trust or treasury company uh model seems to be being called in question strategy traded below it's uh it's MNAV um you've seen a number of these other ones Nakamoto uh MetaPlanet etc drop precipitously um and then you know you had the uh American Bitcoin uh when the lockups expired you know the share price at one point was down I think 50%. Um but so you had all of these events that just created a lot of fear. You had withdrawals from the ETFs uh in the ETPS. And so here we are, you know, a few weeks later and I think we found some stable ground, stable footing. Uh I think the Fed rate cut is pretty much uh priced in at this point. The question is what happens next year? You know, if you look at the macro environment, obviously, you know, money printer go word is kind of the least of what you're going to see. I think um quantitative tightening is officially over. You'll start seeing some quantitative easing. Uh the repo market's going to need help. You know, there are a lot of areas where I think you're going to see money being injected u in the economy, especially as we're going into a midterm election year that the Republicans absolutely want to win. I'm pretty certain we're going to see a lot of stimulus going into the market. Um remember for the deficit and uh and uh for the debt uh having a dollar that's declining is a good thing. Having growth growing dramatically is a good thing. You know, the problem with all that is inflation. Um and how do you kind of keep that under control? you're now starting to see jobless rates tick up, but we're still at a little over 4% unemployment only. So, uh I think there's a period of time um uh during which you had a lot of uncertainty. The government shutdown didn't help it at all. Lack of data didn't help it. And now I think we're on a little bit more stable ground. And we'll have to see what happens here. Um you know, between now and the end of the year. I think all of the tax selling and all that has already happened. So, we're pretty much in this, you know, coming up to the Christmas lull where we're not going to see anything and then it'll be game on again in January. I interviewed uh Matthew Seagull from Van and uh this is what he had to say. Uh this is a couple weeks ago. I'll play you just 30 seconds. Take a listen. We'll comment together. It's a pretty expensive upgrade cycle, but the returns over the cycle are better. So, they're basically like selling Bitcoin to fund this pivot. And when credit conditions tighten, then the cost of the debt that they need to repurpose this facility goes up. And if Bitcoin sells off because credit conditions are tightening, then they literally need to raise more debt at the same time. So the these are really levered bets on AI and then when AI and Bitcoin are correlated, it's going to be, you know, doubly bad for the stock. So that's what we've seen here in the last month. you was talking about miners. Can you comment on that? Yeah, I think um if you have uh if you have a lot of Bitcoin and you're borrowing against that to invest in AI uh and um you know, as an investor, not as a minor um and you see, you know, those profiles go negative, then yeah, it's going to cause a lot of issues. Um I think as you look at miners investing in AI um and borrowing against Bitcoin um you know that's just a challenging situation. I think if Bitcoin price is depressed, I think Bitcoin miners really need to be focused on um you know mining Bitcoin and then looking at how they can leverage the assets they have, the portfolio of assets they have and converting those into higher value assets where you could do AI. And there are multiple ways to do that. You can either um go to an HPC developer and say, "Hey, I've got a site. I've got power. take this, turn it into something, pay me a long-term lease. That's what a number of the miners have done. Some miners are saying, "Hey, I'm going to go build a building. I'm going to put some uh, you know, raw metal in it, meaning I'm going to go buy GPUs uh, and I'm going to run those and I'm going to rent that out to somebody." Um, and then there are people who are just doing, you know, land and power deals uh, with developers um, from a green field perspective. uh you know I personally think that um the miners uh that have appropriate sites should look to converting them into high value AI sites possibly. Uh there's also a hybrid approach where you can mine Bitcoin and operate AI at the same site if you have sites that are big enough and have the right type of internet connectivity and access to other resources. Um, and then there's also the model that, you know, we talked about on our Q3 earnings call, which is you start running inference AI yourself as a minor. We do it in the same containerized modular format that we do our Bitcoin mining. We don't have to build big buildings. We don't need water cooling. It's all air cooled. Um, and so we're beginning to put our toes in the water and move towards a vision that we have regarding um, inference AI. uh we think training is something that should be best left to the hyperscalers. Um but as you look at inference AI there are other things that become important. you know you need to be able to offer private cloud because if you are running inference AI means you're running a model and you're um provisioning it with data that data is like gold to you and so you want to protect it and so private cloud becomes very important and one of the reasons we made our investment in um uh this company in France Exion that's going through final regulatory approval in France um is essentially here's a company that was developed within EDF one largest energy producer in the world um to operate and manage their data centers that run their nuclear power plants. Uh that have amazing technologies around managing and operating private cloud data sovereignty, data protection. Um and it's something that we believe is a core component you need to have if you're going to offer inference services. And it allows us to provide a more rounded out um solution to the marketplace. And we look forward to be talking a lot more about that um once it passes regulatory approval here and uh as we lay out our full road map of what we intend to do in the AI space. The global financial system is rapidly moving on chain and today's sponsor Cool Wallet is a name worth watching. Cool Wallet builds next generation cold wallets designed for a world where real world assets, payments, and savings live on the blockchain. Their flagship credit card- sized hardware wallets combine CCAL6 plus secure element protection, mobile first usability, and a unique 2 plus one factor authentication system that requires your phone, your biometric ID, and your card to approve every single transaction. So, here's a cool wallet go card. It's an easy to use onthe-go card-sized hard drive that stores your private keys and literally fits inside your wallet or purse. Activating the card is simple and takes about 30 seconds. 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So you've increased your holdings from uh roughly 44,000 to now 4 53,000 BTC. Is that correct? Uh it's actually a little higher, but yeah, that's more or less. Okay. But you haven't you haven't the the the general direction of the holdings has gone in this in the direction that the chart indicates you haven't been selling throughout this year. Uh yeah I mean we announced in our Q3 call that we would start selling some of our production Bitcoin uh which we have done but uh you know it means we net increase our balances every month anyway. The the transition to AI I'm going to bring this up one more time. According to this article here, 70% of top miners are pivoting to a 20 billion AI market. Uh, Bitcoin mining profitability plunged to record lows in late 2025 as the hash rate dropped below $35 per pahash per second. I believe your hash rate has gone up. Correct me if I'm wrong. Um, but I'll let you talk about that and and this trend overall. Uh, 70%. Um I wonder why um Mara isn't perhaps following uh this trend closely in the sense that you're selling Bitcoin to fund a transition to AI. Uh maybe you don't need to or maybe you've taken a different direction. What's your approach? Uh well I think a couple of things. One is we're certainly not cutting back our hash rate. Um, and if you look at global hash rate, global hash rate certainly hasn't slowed down other than in the past 2 or 3 weeks with the price of Bitcoin dropping, uh, you've seen some older mining equipment get shut down. Um, but that doesn't mean that miners have necessarily shut down or converted sites. I think most miners that are chasing the AI HPC um, bug like Galaxy um, Riot, etc. are looking to take capacity that they haven't brought online for Bitcoin mining and converting that into HPCAI capacity. You know, the problem is if you have an existing mining site, you have to deconstruct the mining piece and then construct the HPC piece. Um, unless you do things like we do, which is modular using containers. We don't build buildings. We don't do liquid cooling systems with direct onchip cooling for AI. Um, and so it's a different model. If you look at what the vast majority of our peers are trying to do, it's they're either developing a new site, green field site, and they say, "Hey, I've got power. I've got this location with land, Mr. Hyperscaler, come, you know, let's cut a deal and u, you know, pay me rent for this or pay me some fee for it and I'll do it." Or in the case of some of the other Pierce, as I said earlier, you know, they're building a building, putting equipment in it, and saying, "Hey, rent my GPU capacity." Um, and you know, that's uh another form of business. But I think most of the miners have been doing convertible uh bonds as a way to raise capital to do this um at least the larger public ones. Uh I haven't seen a lot of Bitcoin selling uh from the big Bitcoin miners because most of them already sell their production volumes and um I don't think we're seeing decreases in treasury holdings of Bitcoin amongst the big miners at this point. Um that being said uh you know there is a huge amount of Bitcoin mining growth going on in China. China is back now as number three in the world. Um you're also seeing a lot of growth um in places uh like Pakistan is coming online and Kazakhstan still remains number two in the world. So um I think you're going to continue to see growth in some parts of the world. You know certainly Tether um has stated they're going to be the biggest Bitcoin miner in the world. you know, there's a reason why they're doing it and um as opposed to uh converting all those sites to to AI because it still makes sense as a business and we believe it certainly still makes sense. That being said, you know, we are very focused on uh moving towards a world where inference AI is a way to better utilize certain electrons. Okay. Uh this statement, can you just evaluate it whether or not it's true? Apparently, Bitcoin money profitability plunged to record lows in late 2025. I don't know how does that make sense? I mean the having cycle was last year and Bitcoin is having you have to look at it this way right there. There are two things that impact a minor. One is you know how many bitcoin do you get for every block that you win and then the number of blocks that you win is directly dependent on how much hash rate you have running and what percentage of the global hash rate that makes up. So you've had global hash rate continue to grow all this year. Um and so it has gotten harder and harder. the difficulty rate of mining Bitcoin has gotten harder and harder. So, if you haven't added capacity, you've actually gone backwards um in the number of Bitcoin uh you're winning on an uh regular basis. So, if your cost to mine Bitcoin, you know, um let's just say I think the industry average cost to mine Bitcoin is somewhere in the $60,000 range probably. um you know, as long as Bitcoin is trading at over 100K, you're making good money and uh you're able to cover your SGNA above your variable cost nicely. Um but as Bitcoin comes down into the 80s or 90s, it can get um a little tight for especially for companies that are have very expensive energy or are operating pure hosted models, right? So if you own the data center and you're operating it yourself, you're typically uh your operating cost on a per kilowatt hour basis is, you know, could be anywhere from 15 to 20% lower than if you're hosting with third parties. And if you look at people like American Bitcoin, they host with third parties, which is US bit, you know, HUD is their hosting partner. um if you're um owning and operating sites, you know, your your cost per kilowatt hour is considerably less. And you know, at our owned and operated sites, we have some of the lowest costs um in the industry. All right. Uh let's talk about your diversifying strategy overall. So, I'll read a statement from your 2024 December um uh financial statement. This is the MDNA. In 2023, we began evaluating CASPA as a potential way to diversify our revenue while continuing to utilize our current infrastructure and expertise in digital asset compute. At December 31st, 2024, we held approximately $4.3 million or 34 thou 34 million Caspa coins on our consolidated balance sheets. Can you comment on uh that development? I know it's been almost a year since December 2024 and overall your diversification strategy. Yeah, I think the diversification strategy now is much more focused on u AI and u providing private cloud compute. Um much less so on diversifying amongst altcoins. I mean we still mine um some old coins um because it makes sense to use some excess power to do that. Um there's certainly some interesting profitability in some coins. uh we don't detail you know specifically which coins and how um as much because it's an immaterial portion of our revenue to be um but I think the predominant part of our diversification is now really uh around inference AI private cloud uh and what we're doing to bring those types of services to enterprises around the world a few the few highlights from your mining updates in uh in the last quarter of 2020 25 uh in September we produced 218 18 blocks, a 5% increase over August. Um, energized hash rate increased 1% month over month. At our Texas wind farm, all containers and miners now fully deployed and connected, keeping us on track to achieve full operational status in the fourth quarter. Um, and I believe Texas has interesting uh wind power and grid uh power updates. Can you just comment on that? Um, well, I think in particular that's a site, a wind farm that we own uh which we operate behind the meter at. Um you the great thing about operating behind the meter at a wind farm that you own is that uh your marginal cost of energy is near zero. Uh you know your your costs to operate and maintain that site are um you know most probably somewhere around a penny per kilowatt hour. Um and so it's essentially free energy when the wind blows. And so we have a program we call AARP. It's kind of a uh a play on on on the uh statement of ARP means retirement. We take miners that are fully depreciated from other sites. We move them to a location like this where the power cost is um near zero and we essentially have no depreciation expense on the minor because they've been paid off. So if the miners only run 50 60 70% of the time, we're making great money while the miners are running and they run until they eventually expire. Um and so this is part of our near zeroost energy strategy. We also do this with uh flare gas and oil fields where we operate uh both in Texas and North Dakota data centers that sit in the middle of oil fields um where we generate energy off of flare gas. Again, very low cost. Uh but what's interesting is you know we have um as was announced uh really contemporaneous with our Q3 earnings call we announced um a partnership we're in the process of finalizing with MLX. Um MLX is a very large mid-stream gas company and uh we are going to build three sites attached to their gas pipeline uh that will initially generate about 400 megawatts of power uh scaling up to potentially 1.5 GW of power where we will also be building three data center campuses. uh and that is a very large amount of energy um all behind the meter which uh we intend to use for you know optimizing mix between you know bitcoin and uh and AI operations and we're very excited about that project um obviously it takes time to build it power plant um but we think that uh we're going to make a lot of great progress on this next year and uh you know in 2027 we think uh you know we hope to be able to start turning on some power from those sites Well, with all that said, Fred, what is the investment thesis for invest for institutional investors when it comes to Bitcoin miners like yourself? Let's just use your company for example. So, uh, Nores Bank, for example, recently took uh a position in MERA rated at uh I think u yeah valued at approximately 5960 almost $60 million as of the writing of this particular article. Now I understand that perhaps before the Bitcoin ETF was launched last year uh institutions needed to use several proxies including MARA for example um as a proxy to to to to be exposed to Bitcoin but now with ETFs and perhaps other instruments available in the market that no longer is a requirement. So I'm wondering how the narrative for institutions has shifted. Clearly there's still a tremendous amount of institutional interest. So I think the institutional interest today is being driven by a couple of things. One is you know our essentially we're valued um at the value of our uh our Bitcoin holdings. So you know our mining operations essentially get zero attribution if you think about it in the market cap. And savvy investors look at what we have. They look at the mix of sites that we have. They look at the power uh that we currently have plus what's in our pipeline uh that we've talked about and they say you know the biggest constraint in the AI business is power and the fastest way to get power for an AI site is to convert a bitcoin mining site and I think what you're seeing is people have seen well Mara has a leader is a leader they own a lot of power located in some very interesting locations um and if Mara were to convert some of those sites to AIHP PC um that that could be a very interesting investment because the value of those sites would grow dramatically which would drive Mara stock along uh forward. I'm not saying that um we're specifically doing that, but I think that's the investment thesis people have and uh you know, time will tell what it is we're actually doing with our portfolio of assets, but we look at them as a portfolio of assets and we intend to maximize the value we get out of them, whether that's mining Bitcoin, doing Bitcoin and inference AI or converting them to HPC. So if an investor were to ask you Fred, how does a Bitcoin miner, especially the one or a Bitcoin miner the size or near the size of Mara add value to the Bitcoin community in the sense how does it out compete Bitcoin in the long run? What is your strategy for achieving that goal? How would you answer that? Well, I mean, we're not going to out compete Bitcoin um just by mining Bitcoin. Um because to your point you said you have you know ETPs, ETFs, you have you know digital asset treasury companies um if they ever repair their their model. Um it's really more you have a company with a very strong balance sheet who has the ability to leverage land and power assets that are key resources for the AI industry and for Bitcoin mining. um a company that is leveraging relationships with energy majors in a way that they will be able to convert that energy into very valuable things whether that's Bitcoin whether that's insights in the world of AI um but essentially do a number of things that will add significant shareholder value that way well let's um look ahead at the uh business what are the next major milestones for Mara in the next uh couple quarters yeah yeah I mean I think closing our our the investment in the French company Exion once it passes regulatory approval. We expect that to happen um in Q1. Uh finalizing the deal with MPLX. Uh again, we expect that to happen in Q1. Um and then I think you'll see some interesting news about some progress we're making in our efforts. Uh you may recall we uh registered a regional HQ in Saudi Arabia. we set up a um EMA headquarters in France. So I think you'll see some interesting news related to those um that'll kind of give a clear indication of uh where we're going and where we're heading uh as well as you know how we continue to grow our our operations both domestically and internationally. Okay. And then finally let's talk about uh the market looking forward. We've already talked about the macro drivers for why liquidity may return and may be a boon for risk assets like Bitcoin. What about hash rate? What is the relationship between hash rate and price? I have here a chart. Uh you mentioned earlier that the hash rate for Mara in particular has not dropped. In fact, I believe it's a record highs in a note that you sent me offline. Um you can clearly see that the hash rate here has continued to rise while the price has fallen just slightly uh from where it was a couple months ago. Why this divergence? Is there a relationship to begin with? Yeah. So the more profitable it is to mine, the more incentive people have to turn on more hash rate. It's as simple as that. And when the profitability disappears, people shut systems off because older machines become less profitable. The only way to mine uh is if you have, you know, much more efficient machines, which tend to be the newer ones, or you have very low cost or free power essentially. And so people who are grid attached who are paying a fixed price of you know anywhere from 4 to 5 cents per kilowatt hour who then you have to layer on top of that operating expense for the site and then on top of that you have to layer SGNA and depreciation. You know people who are getting to the point where they're actually losing money by mining um they will start shutting off systems and hash rate will come down. global hash rate and bitcoin price will always find uh stasis where there's about a 30% margin in mining bitcoin. Um I think if you look at uh bitcoin uh price and global hash rate and you look back over time you'll see that the margin compression gets to be about 30%. And then um you know hash rate doesn't decline more. uh if it does decline more comes right back up to 30% margin um because the people who are left mining are now earning more money and so I think over time uh really and I said this four years ago at the mining disrupt conference uh I said this July of 21 I said you're if you're a Bitcoin mining you are minor you will either be an energy company come 2028 2032 or you will be uh in a joint venture with an energy company uh or you will own your own gener generating assets um because there is no way you can be grid attached and still make money mining Bitcoin um in 2032. And I think what you're seeing is the industries going through this conversion. Some miners who are grid attached are primarily opting to go after AI. Um miners who own energy assets have a lot more optionality um which we think is the better way to go. And then uh those who are kind of um not large enough scale to attract a hyperscaler site uh you know have to figure out what business um they want to be in long term. But I think the market is going through its kind of maturation and transformation stage. Um you know Bitcoin mining will likely start moving uh to locations again where there's lower cost power. Uh there are some very interesting opportunities we believe to take um essentially excess power uh not used by hyperscalers in a hyperscaler site and use that for bitcoin mining. There's some technologies around very high speeded switching batteries that can be applied there and other things that we think are very interesting. Um, and that's one of the reasons again why we're deploying inference AI at our own sites is to really learn and understand how do we maximize the value of every electron we have access to because if we have the opportunity to mine Bitcoin or turn it into um AI insights uh at a higher profit then we have that ability to flex back and forth between the two and that's what we think is maximum optionality because you know Bitcoin may very well go on a run to 200k 250K Okay. And at that point that makes a lot of sense because remember being in the AI business is very capital intensive. It costs about 10 times the amount of capex uh than mining Bitcoin on a per megawatt basis though the returns could be 10x as well. So So let's close off on jurisdiction. So you mentioned uh miners will find the cheapest energy sources. How has Trump's America changed the mining landscape for America? Trump has said on the campaign trail and earlier in the year and I believe you know throughout the year especially when the Genius Act was signed that he wants to make America the crypto capital. He wants to bring mining back to America. Has he been successful so far by the end of 2025? Um I think global hash rate has grown faster outside the US than in the US. You know the big problem is miners in the US are primarily competing against AI sites for existing power. And so you have this lag of 2 to 3 years for when you tie up land and power before you can develop a site and get it turned on. And so that's why you're seeing this lag. Uh that being said, depending on um regulatory permitting uh and energy prices, uh you may see a lot more hash rate come on in the US. Uh or it may stay at the levels that it's at. Um, but that's really a function of how much power Bitcoin miners are willing and able to allocate to Bitcoin mining versus doing anything else with that power. Finally, I want to just bring up something that's a little bit closer to home and you get your reaction to this. So, I live in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and BC, uh, I don't know if you're aware of this, but has recently, well, they've always had a temporary ban, but now they've recently just in the last month or two instituted a permanent ban on crypto mining. So, uh, permanently ban new BC hydro connections to the electricity grid for cryptocurrency mining to preserve the province's electricity supply and avoid the overburdening of the electricity grid. A Financial Post article sums this up again. Uh, BC proposed legislation to limit how much electricity will be available to our AI data centers and move to permanently ban new cryptocurrency projects. Cited because uh, it wants to allocate more power to things like mining and natural gas facilities that they believe will add more jobs. So when you when you see headlines like this, a what is your initial reaction and b what kind of conversation would you have with local governments? Not that you want to operate in BC in particular, but perhaps this may happen elsewhere. Yeah, the um state of New York has u some similar rules. I think here's the the practical aspect of it. Um politics aside, BC has primarily hydroele electricity which is not intermittent. it runs 24/7 right so they don't have an issue with they have too much power in BC um they are looking at we have so many megawatts of power that is available that's not being consumed today where is the best use of that for uh the province is that in creating jobs that in you know job intensive industries like manufacturing um or you know data centers possibly but you know data centers create jobs when they're being built. As soon as they're built, there's a lot of automation that runs data centers. So whether you're running an AI data center, you're running a Bitcoin mining data center, it's six or one half dozen. Um the jobs are all created when you construct it. Um it doesn't take more than you know uh 20 30 people to run a certain size facility. So if in places where you have uh a lot of intermittent power, so wind and solar, you typically have high densities of power with limited transmission capacity. There's a certain amount of power which is just can't get into the transmission line because the market pricing is too low and there's congestion. Those are perfect sites for Bitcoin miners to operate at. And we find even in uh places like Europe um the politicians are more than happy to talk to us about load balancing and dealing with um uh intermittent power. Uh but that requires that you're able to mine Bitcoin not 24 hours a day but maybe only 18 or maybe only 12 hours a day which requires um a different set of uh operating metrics than if you're a grid attached Bitcoin miner running 24/7 365 and most Bitcoin miners are grid attached operating 247 365 because you know they're paying high prices for electricity and so it all depends on the business model you have and who your partners are uh as to what you can do. But I think um you know, we're going to continue to see uh Bitcoin mining occur uh all over the world. You're going to see it occur in a mix with hybrid mix with AI. Bitcoin mining has the ability to make AI a flexible load. And you know in the US for example we only use 100% of our generating capacity at most 2% of the day which means the rest of the day we're using only on average about 60% of our generating capacity. So there's a lot of energy that's available to be used if it's flexible. And Duke University did a study about this where they essentially said hey AI industry needs 40 plus gawatts of power. The US has 70 plus gawatts of power available. if the AI industry is willing to be a flexible load and curtail less than 2% of the time. Um, and so I think what you're going to start seeing is AI data centers learning how to be curtailable loads. Um, and I think that if anything will create more uh competition with Bitcoin miners because then now you have people able to use the same type of stranded energy and I think that'll be a very exciting time because we're very focused on de developing those types of technologies. Well, 40 Well, you quote 40 out of 70 gigawatts is still more than 50%. Is that are you sure about that? Like that seems very high. No. So, the the according to the Duke study, so the AI industry needs 40 gawatts of power. Yeah. The US has 70 gawatts of power available today to give them. Okay. Without having to build a single generating station. Of course, it all depends where the AI operators would want to locate. they have to be located where the power is available. Um, but if they were flexible 2% of the time, meaning they could shut down 2% of the time, um, or less, uh, that power is available to them. And I think, you know, what you're seeing is a lot of the AI, uh, developers today, they want to have redundant power. So, they're on grid and they have full backup capability. And this makes it very hard for grid operators to manage their load because in PJM for example, they had a number of data centers who sensed a frequency drop on the grid which is kind of a signal that hey there may be a brown out of blackout coming. And so these data centers all went on backup power which instead of creating a drop created all this excess energy all of a sudden flooding uh on the grid with no load and creates all sorts of problems. So I think you're going to also start seeing the utility operators telling the AI data center operators, hey, if you're on grid, we need to control your power and when you go on and off. And I think that will all have to come down over the next few years. Well, my final followup is when I when I read a headline like, you know, XYZ province or state bans or limits crypto mining because of energy concerns, my the underlying assumption here that I instinctively hear in my head is, okay, crypto mining takes up a lot of power. Is there a president that you can think of at least in North America where crypto mining has drained power from uh the local grid to the extent that people needed to have worried? You know, I think there's some locations like in New York, listen, early on in the Bitcoin mining um industries kind of explosion if you would. There were some uh mining operators who had uh attached to community power grids. So, in other words, the community generates their own energy. they have some surplus energy. So they allow a Bitcoin miner to mine under the assumption that that Bitcoin miner is going to curtail when the community needs it. And then the Bitcoin miner doesn't do that. And so the community had to go and source power elsewhere which was more expensive. That raised the prices for the community members and that's what has created a lot of the irritation in certain parts of the country with Bitcoin miners. um you know that again is you know uh the acts of some bad actors you know impact the broader industry unfortunately. So thank you very much for your updates Fred uh very timely and uh I'm looking forward to having you on again the show on the show again in the new year. Tell us where we can find you in the meantime. Uh you can find me on Twitter h i l or you can find me uh you know through the Mara website mara.com. All right we'll put the links down below. So follow Mara and Fred there. Thank you again and uh congrats on a successful year. We'll talk again uh soon. Take care for now. Take care. Thank you. Thank you for watching. Don't forget to like and subscribe.