Greenidge Generation Holdings Inc.

Q1 2024 Earnings Conference Call

5/1/2024

spk00: Thank you. So our next presenter is Jordan with Greenage Generation. Let's give him a round of applause. Thank you very much. I'm shocked by the massive turnout here and appreciate you all for having me. So I'm Jordan Kavler, CEO of Greenage Generation Holdings Inc., We currently build, maintain, and operate data centers, primarily focused on Bitcoin mining, along with related power and electric infrastructure. Basically, our team started with a knowledge of electricity markets and power plants that helped make us a market leader in the construction and operation of data centers. Currently, our main revenue sources are hosting and self-mining for Bitcoin. And then we also sell power back to the grid out of our power plants in Dresden, New York. We're working on developing additional revenue streams right now, including engineering, procurement, and construction management services to help others build data centers, as well as pod sales. When you mine Bitcoin, you either mine them out of these pods constructed or out of buildings. For us, our team has worked diligently over the past five years or so making more efficient pods that then we found we could find a way to sell those to competitors, which we just started to do. And separately, we started to get into the AI data center space. You hear a lot of Bitcoin miners going down that road. For us, we feel our primary benefit is that we have knowledge in the electricity market and power, and we have good access to real estate. So we're trying to leverage that to also pull into the data center space. while building a team of individuals that are more knowledgeable in that area and the actual build out of such systems. Currently, as of about April 2024, we have 1.8 hectohash of hosting, 1.2 hectohash of self-mining, and our power generation at our power plant in Dresden has 104 megawatts. For us, we look towards what additional capacity can we actually provide. So right now we have 122 megawatts of current capacity with an additional 84 megawatts that we could add in the near future within the next year. And then longer term, here in the presentation, we have an additional 250 megawatts bringing us to 456 megawatts. But there is a chance that could actually even go up to 700 megawatts as one of our real estate sites may have additional power that we're looking at right now. The history of Greenwich is that it started with a shuttered coal power plant that was purchased, converted to a gas power plant, and then afterwards, as opposed to merely selling power to the grid, they started mining Bitcoin. As that went on, the company grew significantly. However, throughout the decline in Bitcoin prices in 2022, because of some debt structure, to some of the Bitcoin mining rigs that were owned needed to reshift the company. So 2023 was spent primarily working on restructuring of the debt and certain asset sales, whereby we reduced the debt from over $150 million down to $70 million. And then looking forward, when I joined the end of 2023 to 2024, we started to work on repositioning the company, doing that by significant SG&A reductions, and trying to acquire new strategic assets and properties that we could build up to either develop or sell. As I said before, one of the main benefits of Greenwich is that our team knows how to run industrial assets, and we have a strong network of experts in the field who can help drive results. We're good at knowing electricity. We're good at building. We're good at putting together power sites. and being able to then manage the most efficient production of such assets. We have low costs in power. We constantly seek out those low power costs. We have high uptimes. And as a result of that, we're able to reduce our infrastructure and capital spending. In Q4 2023, and then the first quarter of 2024, we had our first two quarters of positive cash flow in the past year. So for us, We've sort of taken the time to right the ship from losing significant money to now actually starting to gain money. And now we're trying to reposition ourselves to, again, continue our growth pattern. We also, over the past five months, found over $7 million of savings in SG&A from where it was previously. A lot of that was reducing spend on advisers. and other inefficient uses of money. Our current footprints, as mentioned before, we have a power plant in Dresden right now, which has 104 megawatts. We also own 150 acres of land in Spartanburg, South Carolina, where of that land, we've already been given a will serve letter for 60 megawatts of power that we can take by June 2025. And right now, we have a request in for at least 250 megawatts of power for the remaining 130 or so acres on the property. And we're currently looking to develop a substation there to take the initial 60 megawatts and either develop it for ourselves or reposition it for a sale. We also have about a property in Columbus, Mississippi, which right now we're building out. to deploy about 2,400 miners. Right now, that has access to 8.5 megawatts of power. That's expandable to 32.5 megawatts. And then on top of that, we lease a property in North Dakota, which has 7.5 megawatts, and there we're also doing some EPCM services and deploying some of our green pods. We separately have two hosting arrangements, one small one in Canada, British Columbia at Conifex, which is small, about two megawatts. And then we have another one with core for another 12 megawatts. And those are going to be redeployed to our other sites at about June 1st or so when our current hosting arrangement ends. So when we look at how greenage has changed before greenage was purely driven by self-mining, the problem with that was that when Bitcoin prices dropped, we took a huge significant hit because of that, which altered the business significantly. We also had excessively levered balance sheet and we had high SG&A costs compared to the overall team that we had. We've tried to reposition that so that now we have more of a diversified mix of revenue between hosting where we're guaranteed a certain fees, regardless of the price of Bitcoin, as well as having our own self-mining And then we also sell some power to the grid. So we have those three sources right now. And as mentioned before, we're trying to diversify into other areas that can just add to our bottom line. We're trying to grow our real estate portfolio and increase the power access because I think a lot of this in the mining space, it's really a play on power, whether you're actually mining for Bitcoin, building an AI data center. It's can you find access to low-cost power? And can you find the spread between what you're getting that power for and what you can then sell it off to for others. That's really the whole, you know, what this is all about. And for us, we're happy that we have de-risked balance sheet by reducing our debt by about 54% down to now 72 million. So for us, what makes us unique, right? There's tons of Bitcoin miners out there, and then you hear tons of companies positioning into AI data centers, right? Which is two nice buzzwords people throw around. For us, I think what's really important is We have a real estate network, and our controlling shareholder has access to 350-plus industrial sites, and some of the sites we've bought have been through them, and we have power expertise. So for us, as opposed to just looking in the open market for sites to buy, we have the ability to look through all of the companies they own and find they have tons of industrial companies that have either through technological advancements or through the fact that they've actually just moved to another facility, we can then find access and be able to purchase those sites. And because of our knowledge in the power space, we're able to then work with the electric companies to actually find ways to add more power. Once you add more power, then that gives you the ability to then reposition it either for Bitcoin mining or for an AI data center. So for us, that's what's the most unique. And from that, we've created this new GreenEdge playbook for how we create value, which to me seems pretty simple. First, we find sites that either right now, currently, or in the future will have access to significant low-cost power. If we see that there is a road to be able to get there, then we'll go out and acquire the site. Once we have the site, then we determine the best use. If you have a site that has really low-cost power, but maybe you only have $20 30 megawatts, something that's sort of small on the smaller side, that's probably best served to use for Bitcoin mining. But if you have somewhere that you could get 200 megawatts or more, that's best used for an AI data center. Once we acquire those properties, then we have two choices. And I could use two examples for Columbus, Mississippi, for instance, left, which is the smaller amount. If we're going for Bitcoin mining, which is what we saw for there, okay, we acquire a property. Right now there's eight and a half megawatts. It could go up to 32. We figure out what's it best served for. Is it using our own miners to be deployed there? Or would we be better off just putting together the infrastructure and making the spread by putting it out to hosting? Right now for us, we decided for the first eight and a half megawatts, we're going to do our own mining. And then from there, we're going to move forward and possibly do hosting with the remaining amount. If we don't think that we want to put in that investment, we could say, okay, instead, we're just going to add the power infrastructure ourselves, which we either know how, build a substation to add additional power, and then either sell the property right away, or we could rent it out to others that want to go through and build their own pods, buildings, or whatever to mine Bitcoin. If we decide it's not worth either of those two things, one, to the property, we could just sell it immediately. And so that's what we're doing in Columbus. We bought this property for $1.45 million. We're putting our own pods there, but we're also subdividing the property because it came with a 77,000 square foot warehouse that we're subdividing and we're going to try and then sell the warehouse because we're building completely pods outside. So the hope would be, in addition to being able to use the property, we could possibly sell it and recruit most of our investment. On the other side, which is where there's even greater value, would be the development of a GPU data center for AI or high-powered computing. And there our option tree would be, one, Do we want to add the power infrastructure and build this data center ourselves, which would require a significant investment where we'd likely at this point have to partner with others to do that? Two, do we just want to add the power infrastructure, build the substation and sort of the connections to actually bring power to the site and then try and sell the site? Or three, do we just want to get access to the power and sell it right away? So we're open, we're pretty much agnostic to any of those options, but for us, that seems to be the playbook that we should be following going forward. I mentioned before, the reasons why we can execute this playbook is we have experience running power plants and in the mining industry. We have good access to low-cost power and a growing footprint. We've improved our balance sheet significantly, and right now, as I'll touch on the next few slides, we're developing this capacity for AI. When you look at us compared to our competitors, one of the benefits is we run across many different areas that our competitors don't. We do self-mining, we have hosting, we offer to help others build out their own sites and use our own resources that are skilled at this build part of the whole mining operation to build for others. We're working on AI, a pilot program, AI data center, And then we have our own power, and we're working on pod sales ourselves, which could be a good source of incremental profitable revenue. In recent times, so what we've been focused on recently is progress on our AI initiatives, where we have a partnership with Infinite Reality, which creates immersive experiences for companies such as Warner Digital, and a host of other companies. And as they grow, we're going to grow with them because we have a partnership where we have to serve their infrastructure needs. For us, again, we want to diversify through these acquisitions and doing build-outs for ourselves or others. And some examples would be in South Carolina, we'd expanded our site by 30 megawatts and deployed 8,300 miners in three months. In North Dakota, in horribly, horribly cold climates, We were able to construct the site and get it deployed within two months. We keep working on improving our own pods to get better efficiency, which we think are industry leading. And lastly, as mentioned, we're working right now at building up our site in Mississippi. As mentioned, we did erase that $85 million of debt and, again, reduced our SG&A going forward by about $7 million. And all of that leads us to the ability to continue with site purchases, to look at future partners for either mergers or partnerships, and keep going with our future access to power. As everyone has likely been seeing in the news, everyone's talking about AI and the growth of data centers, how much power it's going to use. And it is sort of staggering the numbers that people are showing. for how much power will be used by AI. Eventually, it will dwarf the power that's used by Bitcoin miners. And that's why we think for our growth and development in the long term, our best bet is to find sites that have availability of massive power so that we can then take advantage of that. And we don't know what side of the process we'll be in, whether it's finding these properties and selling them right away, building substations, adding the power, or actually building out the data centers, and then if we had enough cash to actually build the data center and buy the GPUs. But for us, it's scaling up properly and not taking on additional debt as we've done in the past. With Infinite Reality, we like this agreement we have with them partnership because of the fact that it allows us to grow with them. Since we're partners with them, we started off with building this pilot program whereby we're going to start serving their needs and determine their needs as we grow out our capabilities. One of the problems with AI data centers is if you build out an AI data center, you need to rent out all the space. If you do a long-term arrangement, you cut your margins. And if you have a short-term arrangement of rentals, you need to keep finding those customers to rent it out. So you hear of all these companies that are building out these huge data centers The problem is if they don't find the people to actually rent it out, they're going to lose a ton of money off it. So for us, we want to do this in a calculated way to grow with infinite reality to be able to serve their clients. Right now, their clients are using Amazon Web Services. If you ask anyone, Amazon Web Services charges an extraordinary amount for GPUs. There's significant margin that can be taken from others. And that's where you see people fighting for to try and drive into this stronghold that Amazon Web Services has. We also think that the multiples on data centers is far higher than what we look at in the Bitcoin mining space. So for us, it represents an area that we can grow, but we want to do it in a smart way. For us, again, our big calling will be we want to keep going with buying, leasing and finding facilities with access to power. Mentioned in North Dakota, we have 7.5 megawatts. We have the ability to get additional megawatts there, which we could either then use for hosting or self-mining. Spartanburg, South Carolina, that to me is our most important property where we have the ability to add significant power, and we have the potential to work it in two phases. First, 60 megawatts that we'll be getting by June 2025, and then the ability to get at least 250 megawatts longer down the road. So that could appeal to someone who wants to start their build-out now of something larger, or it could be done in two different phases. And for us, one of the keys is just diversifying our revenue mix and making sure that we have a good baseline for how we go forward. As mentioned on there, right now, about half of our revenue comes from hosting, a little under 40% from self-mining. And then the remainder comes from selling back energy to the grid. For us, we feel this helps us because of the fact that we're not entirely beholden to the price of Bitcoin. And for us, it's about taking actions as we go forward that further reduce reliance on Bitcoin pricing, but still gives us that upside when Bitcoin does rise and the hash price does rise. As I mentioned before, as you could see, our debt was cut from $157 million down to $72 million over the past year. And we're going to continue to look to ways to reduce that further as we go forward. So really, when you look at the company today, we've reduced the debt significantly. When you look at us going forward, we're going to have about $7 million less in SG&A spending. We have a much more diverse and improved real estate portfolio. And we also have a significant inventory from back in 2021 of various assets that we can use and equipment that we can use for future build-outs, such as various transformers, other electric equipment, which we could either use for future build-outs or we have the ability to sell that going down the road. And for us, it's about also evaluating different opportunities where we can buy or lease more land. So for us, we feel we're well-positioned for growth through either using AI, GPU, hosting, infrastructure services, and then the development of properties. And with each property, we're then going to decide what's the best use case for this property. Is it best for us to do mining for ourselves? Is it best for us to do hosting? Should we be trying to sell it or develop it for an AI or HPC data center? Should we just sell it right away? Can we also perform EPCM services? And then incrementally, can we put together some green pod sales to provide incremental revenue? And lastly, when you look at us compared to our competitors, looking at a total enterprise value against the megawatts that we have, see that we're significantly undervalued there. And for us, our whole goal is we want to keep increasing the megawatts that we have under our control and then develop. So that to us is the approach that will yield best value for shareholders. That's about it for us. I don't know if anyone has any questions, but happy to answer any. Yeah, so I would say normally it's been that the hotter the temperature is, the more additional or excess power that you're going to have to use in those areas. So, you know, if we look at North Dakota, when it's cold. we're actually running below the actual megawatts that we would have thought the miners would run at, right? So that's just something that you have to be mindful of. And I think that's where, at least on the Bitcoin mining side, where our pods come into play. Like when I first joined the company and first started looking at these pods, I sort of said, what's the difference between these pods? It's just a, you know, it's like a little mini building that you just throw them in. Who cares? What's the difference? Why don't we just get the cheapest ones? And then they showed me the difference between the cheap pods they had bought years back and what they had done. So a lot of it is how do you design the airflow of the entire system, right? Where are you putting the actual fans to bring out the actual hot air? Because if you throw a bunch of miners in just a box and you don't have proper airflow, They're all going to either die or be less efficient. So, yes, it matters. And I would say when it gets to be a hotter temperature, you do lose efficiency. But that's where you have to find the right team to be able to put together the right infrastructure to be able to balance that out and make sure that you don't lose efficiency or minus because of that. So. That is true. So I think we've seen a shift and there will be a continued shift towards this immersion technology. We've toyed with it a bit, like we have some miners that are running on immersion right now. I think that you will see that shift, but there are other ways with the sort of older miners as we move on that you can still get some reasonable efficiency by putting them in low power mode, doing programming on them. And when you shift them to low power mode, they draw maybe 80% of the power, but it would increase their efficiency. So for us, I'd say for right now, it would be run the course of life of the miners they have while they're still profitable using sort of air air cooling technology and at the same time we are working on developing how we would shift over to immersion because yes that is where the space will eventually go uh it it depends uh depending on the site you look at the 10k or i can speak with you afterwards but it depends site by site it's sort of different and and it in some cases Depends on, say, in Dresden, New York, it will depend on the gas price. In North Dakota, we have a fixed lease, so it depends site by site. But the basic premise would be that we have much lower cost of power than competitors. So you're in North Carolina. Most sites are LNG. Is it depending on the price of LNG? You're in North Carolina. Oh, wow. It's moving. Yeah, so it's not North Carolina, it's South Carolina. In South Carolina right now, we're actually not, I only have one minute left, so I need to wrap it up. But in South Carolina, we're actually not running any miners right now. Right now, we're getting access to power, and that's going to be shifted towards AI or GPU data centers. And I would say for them, one key difference is for them, they just want to access the megawatts. It isn't as critical to get the lowest power price as it is for Bitcoin mining. So our theory there would be not to run Bitcoin miners, but to use that for an AI GPU data center. The actual site build out would cost more than the GPUs would, but it's not as intensive on Bitcoin. the power side in that, say, for every Bitcoin miner, Bitcoin miners use significant power compared to the cost then. Whereas for a GPU data center, most of the cost relies on buying the actual GPUs themselves and running them. So it's more intensive on actually the equipment. Yes. Yes, and for us, I have to cut it short. I've been told there's no time left. I'm happy to talk to you afterwards. For us, we'd be focused more on energizing the site and working with other partners to be able to actually develop the data centers rather than actually buying the GPUs and building it ourselves. Okay. Thank you all for the time. Appreciate it.
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