Welcome back, everyone. Next, we have AIB Data Centers Inc., trades on the NYSE American under the symbol AIB. It is a developer and operator of digital infrastructure focused on AI hosting and high-performance computing workloads, whose platform combines access to reliable, scalable power resources with modular infrastructure deployment designed to accelerate the development of next-generation compute capacity. First, let's start with a video.
In the AI economy, power is scarce. AIB has it. Scalable, secured, built for what's next. AIB, the power, the people, the pipeline.
The VP of Sales, Gary Heitz, and the CFO, Jolienne Halisky. Welcome to the conference, you both.
Thank you for having us.
Thank you, Anna. Good afternoon to everyone, and thank you for having us and for joining us today. Before we begin, this presentation contains forward-looking statements, including statements about our development plans, power capacity, and commercial opportunities. Actual results may differ materially. Please review the disclaimer on this slide and the risk factors in our SEC filings. First of all, I'm just going to chat briefly about our corporate overview. Here's our business in a snapshot. We convert existing powered land and brownfield sites into AI and HPC-grade colocation facilities. Three things define how we do that. First of all is we're a power first organization. Every site is backed by an executed ESA and grid tied to available generation and transmission. We do not break ground on the hope of interconnection. Secondly, we're owner agnostic. Our tenants bring their own GPUs under modified triple net leases.
We carry no hardware risk and no residual value risk. Third, we have an AI-optimized design, 150 kW per rack, liquid-cooled, N+1 redundancy delivered in 9-10 months. The numbers on the bottom of this slide indicate that we have our scoreboard of 65 MW of contracted power, about 140 MW under development, and about 570 MW of total identified capacity. Now we'll talk about our market backdrop and why does power first matter? Because the constraint in this industry has moved. Data center power demand is compounding at 38% per year through 2030. Grid additions are growing at only 2%-3%. This is not a gap you close with capital. $720 billion of grid investment is needed, and interconnection queues in primary markets already run five to six years. Meanwhile, North American data center vacancy is at only 1%.
Hyperscalers are committing more than $1 trillion to development. U.S. capacity goes from about 15.5 GW today to a projected 95 GW by 2030. The scarce input is not land, and it's not capital, and it's not GPUs. It's a signed agreement with a utility that can actually deliver. This is what we go and get first, being a power first organization. Gary will now spend some time talking about our pathway to success, then I will take you through the quarter, and we'll open it up to questions.
Thank you so much, Jolienne. We have three differentiators that we feel really separate us from the market, people, power, and pipeline. People, this is important to understand as a new data center operator, AIB does not have the pedigree of operational excellence. However, our team does. We put strategic stakeholders in place, whether it's 30 years of experience from our GCs, our project managers, our procurement team, working with companies such as AWS, working with some of the biggest REITs such as Digital Realty. Individuals like myself that's had over 10 years of experience working with all the major hyperscalers and neo clouds from a sales perspective. It's just not the team that we have built internally, but it's also important to note that we are putting key strategic vendors in place as partners to help us execute on our goals and our mission.
We have the best in class when it comes to hiring engineer firms, design firms, GCs, and even operators such as CBRE, JLL, T5, just to name a few. Moving on to power, Jolienne already spoke to this. We are a power first strategy. We are not going to offer any land to any potential customers where the power is not already secured. We are not marketing theoretical power. We are developing sites that already have the power purchasing agreements already in place. Because at the end of the day, the bottleneck is not the land. It is the utility agreements. It is the transmissions. It is the delivery schedules. Ensuring that we are a power first strategy and we have the power already in place gives us a leg up on the market. Finally, pipeline.
I have been very fortunate over my career to have cultivated, and so has many other key stakeholders and execs on our team, relationships with the top hyperscalers and really what our target market is, the Tier 1, 2, 3 neo clouds. When we talk about pipeline, it is not just understanding what neo clouds, what AI companies need power, but it is understanding what their capacity roadmaps are. We have visibility to who their off-takers are, what those SLAs are, what their capacity roadmap looks like. How many gigawatts of capacity are they behind schedule over the next 12- 24 months? Which one of those customers is easier to do business with? Which ones go straight past an LOI and go straight into contract negotiations? Which ones have outside legal counsel?
Having the opportunity to work with many of these neo clouds for over half a decade now, we really understand the structure, workflows, and processes of how they select sites and how they move forward through the sales process themselves. That gives us great visibility in understanding our pipeline, which also then allows us to go out and strategically get sites with three or four AI companies or three or four potential customers already in mind for that specific site. Jolienne, would you like to talk more about our management team in greater detail?
Sure. I will just add a couple comments here. Briefly, Jerry, our CEO, has spent 20 years as a senior executive in global banking and infrastructure development. So he is that rare combination of an executive who has banking and finance experience, commercial real estate, and he also understands power and the data center industry because we have had a successfully operating data center since 2021, and Jerry was involved every step of the way of that construction.
I myself am a CPA with more than 20 years of senior finance roles, starting my career at Deloitte and working through Siemens Energy and Weatherford before I landed with Jerry and his team. Chris Iannacone is our Director of Construction, over 3 GW of data center construction experience. Gary talked about his experience with Google and Dell. Alex Ocello brings nearly two decades of data center leadership from Digital Realty, Switch, and ECS.
But the point isn't the logos, and the point is that nobody is learning as we go. We bring decades of diverse and high-level experience.
I can take this. So talking about the power, it's all about speed to market and having a credible path to deliver. There's thousands of data center projects right now, but a small fraction of them can actually deliver the power. And how are we able to navigate the speed to market and, quite frankly, the demand for power right now? And it goes back to the relationships that Jerry has built. We were- He-
I wonder if-
Energized assets that were previously crypto mining entities, and giving us the opportunity to have a first look and visibility into many potential sites that aren't on the market yet. And because of Jerry's relationships in that space, we've been able to build out quite a capacity roadmap that gives us RFS, ready for service, dates for several hundred megawatts of power before the end of 2027 or the H1 of 2028. And as an industry as a whole right now, if you're just talking about the Tier 1 neo clouds and the hyperscalers, they're about 26- 29 GW behind power capacity. So any power that you can have ready for service in 2027 or the H1 of 2028, there's going to be a large demand for that.
And us having the capacity and having the opportunity to find sites with energized power before a lot of our competitors and other developers gives us the opportunity to have quite an advantageous capacity roadmap that you can see right here in this slide, where we are able to have a lot of power energized and ready for service before the end of next year. We focus on mid-market. A lot of our sites that we are looking at acquiring is anywhere from 50- 150 MW. There are several reasons for this. Normally, these sites fall outside moratoriums, which is there is an ever-growing political and social climate that we have to be very aware of and have boots on the ground when it comes to local legislation with new data center developments.
Typically, these sites at that size fall outside any type of potential moratorium for new data center builds. Also, it is much easier and much quicker, again, we are talking about speed to market, to build a site that is 50- 150 MW versus a 300, 500, maybe even a gigawatt campus. And those sales cycles are much quicker as well. And it is all about, again, speed to market and being able to deliver power before the end of next year. And we have seen our sales cycles when we are talking about the mid-market size assets, I like to say more like mid-size institutional, we see typically those sales cycles be anywhere from three to six months. Anything more than that, you are looking at a year out. So we are really focused on the mid-size assets that we are acquiring and adding to our ever-growing portfolio.
Jolienne, do you want to talk about the commercial dialogue here?
Absolutely. So when we look at what we are proposing in terms of our commercial dialogue, we have six active counterparties shown anonymously because these are live negotiations, and our counterparties require it. GPU cloud platforms, sovereign AI infrastructure platforms, bare metal, GPU marketplace, AI silicon, and hosted imprints platforms. One is in lease negotiation right now for 65 MW of utility load, 50 MW of critical IT load. Typically, when we look at the terms of the lease, you are looking at an initial term of 10- 12 years with two five-year renewal options, modified net terms, meaning power is a passthrough. There are certain costs that, as the landlord, we would pick up in terms of property management, taxes, but the biggest cost being power is a complete passthrough, and credit-backed tenant evaluation.
There is also an escalation factor incorporated into each of our leases at 3%, or the greater of 3%, or the CPI factor, and there is 12 months of prepaid rent included as a deposit. The last part matters. We are structuring for the fact that some of these counterparties are fast-growing but still young businesses, so those prepaid rent deposits and the passthrough energy costs protect us on any downside and provide those terms for protection, and we underwrite to those terms rather than pretending the credit is something that it is not. Here is our growth trajectory. It is laid out clearly in a path over the next multiple quarters ahead of us. The left-hand side and the first three portions in gray are events that have already happened.
In the first quarter of this year, we announced the repurposing of our Bitcoin mining site, a 40 MW energized facility for AI and HPC purposes. In March, we began trading on the NYSE, something we were very proud to achieve, and also signed a letter of intent to lease 26 MW within that energized site. In May, we signed an ESA that expanded our power access to 65 MW, and from there, entered into the lease negotiation for the whole 65 MW. Afterwards, we have the acquisition of the DFW land site, a powered, secured site in Minnesota that we are working on. We have a site in Denver that we are also looking to acquire, and then Huntsville, and then the Carolinas Phase 2 sites that we are also working on. In terms of our CLT site, we will expand on this portion a bit.
This is an existing asset and successfully operating site, previously cash flowing 40 MW Bitcoin mine, that we now have the utility capacity increased by 25 MW with that ESA that was executed in May. Basically, what we have here, our built-in advantages for our turnkey AI colocation campus is that we can move fast. We have clean, low-cost utility power backed by strong regional base load generation. We are pre-zoned for industrial and data center use. We are outside of flood zones, low seismic risk, and carrier-neutral connectivity with multiple fiber providers. This is why we can talk about a 9-to-10-month delivery. We are not greenfielding. We have the power, and it is already at the fence. When we talk about the power of execution, we have three integrated capabilities that compress our timeline.
First of all is our power network that gives us a fast path to deliverable megawatts through pre-screened sites and executed ESAs with utility counterparties. The modular build is 10 MW data halls, pre-engineered, deployed in phases with civil work running in parallel. On the supply chain, we lock in equipment procurement before notice to proceed. Long lead electrical gear is secured early, transformer and generator letters of intent in place with site selection, and nine key vendors already secured. Net of all that, we underwrite 9- 10 months against an 18-month-plus for traditional data center builds. Next, I will move to talk about our valuation gap. Across the operators building in this space, in the AI HPC space, the market is paying a median of $26 million of market cap per operating megawatt.
In this space, there is a range of $15 million- $137 million of market cap valuation per megawatt. AIB is roughly at $2 million. We understand we are at an earlier phase than every name on this chart, and the discount is appropriate. What we would want to defend is that the 13-fold discount to the median is not a judgment about our stage. It is a judgment about whether the market has looked at us yet. What sits behind our number is not a plan.
It is not a dream. It is not a hope. It is an executed 15-year ESA for 65 MW at an energized pre-zoned site in a market where interconnection queues run five to six years. This is a scarce thing, and it is being capitalized at about $2 million a megawatt. We do not think that gap closes necessarily because of anything we talk about today.
We know it closes upon lease execution. Let me show you now what our quarter actually looked like and what we did with the money raised in our successful follow-on offering in Q2. These are our Q2 2026 results at a glance. What we have here, I just wanted to highlight in terms of some of the decisions that happened in the quarter that drove our decision. On June 5th, we decided to de-energize substantially all our Bitcoin mining operations. Bitcoin prices had fallen far enough that we were buying power at $0.066 and reselling it at $0.063. We were losing money on every kilowatt- hour on that contract structure written for a business that we were planning an exit. We switched off. In the same quarter, we raised $63 million with institutional investors and netted $59 million.
We ended June with $52.8 million in cash, and most importantly, no traditional debt. Not reduced debt, no debt. The one thing I want to put on the table, rather than have you find in the filing, is that the site, as I mentioned, was de-energized since June 5th and has not been resumed to date. We know there is a revenue gap in front of us, and we sized the June follow-on offering raise knowing that, and that we would have no debt service to carry through it. When we talk about our balance sheet, there is just a couple things I want to highlight here, mostly being the cap table. We have just under 76 million shares outstanding, roughly 89 million fully diluted.
That includes 1.5 million representative warrants at a $1.81 exercisable, 7.5 million authorized under the equity plan with nothing yet granted, and 3.9 million earn-out shares that I would like to comment, likely will not be issued as the earn-out shares are tied to a 2026 EBITDA of $25 million. When we look at our summary P&L, just a couple of things I want to highlight here. When you look at the kilowatt per hour table on the right, that kind of summarizes our quarter in three lines. Basically, this substantiates our pivot away from Bitcoin mining into an AI HPC leases that we are negotiating at the modified triple net with energy pass-through to the tenant, so we do not carry the risk of rising energy costs going forward. The other thing I would like to highlight here is our SG&A costs tripled to $2.7 million.
That was representative of us being a fully public company for a full quarter. You have got your legal, D&O, investor relations costs. That is where we saw that grow, not to mention the development team we needed to assemble to actually deliver upon our first project. That is basically. I am going to hand off to Gary for our summary, and then we will jump into questions.
Thank you, Jolienne. As I had mentioned before, just going over the strategic highlights. Power, people, pipeline. That is the key three differentiators that we know we are going to be incredibly successful. We have built such an incredible team around us, and we are putting all the right strategic partners in place in order to ensure that we meet all the SLAs and we operate very efficiently. Then pipeline. We have a tremendous visibility to all the AI companies, all the hyperscalers. We understand their power strategy, and that allows us, when we are looking at power and we are looking at land and assets, we are very strategic with. We have customers in mind already for every single piece of land that we are evaluating and that we look to acquire.
We have three to four customers that are already chomping at the bit to acquire that and lease that land from us because we have such great relationships with our prospects and because we really understand the marketplace.
Awesome. We are ready for questions now, Anna.
Okay, perfect. Thank you both. Let's start with Gary. Why should we believe a Neocloud will sign with a company that's never delivered an AI data center? What differentiates AIB?
It's all about building credibility in the marketplace and building consumer confidence, and that's what we've done. It has a lot to do with the team that we've put in place, myself, the broker relationships that we have. Most of these AI companies, they work with consultants that are highly trusted advisors. Having personal and professional relationships, both myself, Chris, who is our project manager, Jerry, we've instilled confidence. They've instilled confidence in this team, and they see who we're bringing around from a design standpoint, from the engineering standpoint, having entities like JLL and CBRE be involved. There's high confidence that we'll be able to execute, and we're not going to overpromise and underdeliver. We have realistic RFS timelines, and we do everything very thoughtful and a lot of insight to ensure that we meet those SLAs and those timelines.
How do you build 65 MW with $52.8 million of cash?
That's a great question. I'll grab this one, Gary. Basically, we do not intend to build a data center of this magnitude off our balance sheet, and we never intended to. on June 23rd, we formed AIBCLT1 LLC as a special purpose project entity to hold our real property interest. The ground lease, the anchor customer contract, the construction and equipment procurement contracts, and any project-level financing. We've been working with our investment bank to secure those debt funders and have an optimized cap stack to deliver upon the funding that would be required to construct a data center of this size. The structure exists precisely so that capital sits at the project level. It's secured by long-dated credit-backed lease rather than at the corporate level. Corporate cash funds development, deposits, long lead equipment, and the development team, and the project funds the build.
You have six anonymized prospects and no signed lease. When does one convert?
Would you like me to take that one, Jolienne, or do you got that?
Yeah, sure. Go ahead, Gary.
Okay. Ask the question again. I am so sorry.
Yeah. Six anonymized prospects and no signed lease. When does one convert?
That's a great question. These MSA negotiations can take up normally to a year, and I can confidently say that we've pushed through several of them within three months. Again, that goes back to already having credibility with the prospects and already having that established relationship and understanding the workflows and processes and what their SLAs are in order to get a deal done very quickly. Our goal is not just to sign a lease agreement. Our goal is to sign MSAs with most of our customers right now, which is a more due diligence, will take a little bit longer. That way, as we continue to build out our portfolio and our current customer base wants more land and power, it's as simple as signing a new service order and not renegotiating an MSA from start to finish. That's our strategy.
We're looking long term, and we are ahead of the curve when it comes to the industry standard to negotiate these deals.
Perfect. Thank you for that. What is AIB doing to instill confidence to the identified TAM, and why should we own AIB instead of the others out there, TeraWulf, Cipher, Applied Digital?
Do you want me to take this one as well, Jolienne?
Sure.
Absolutely. Again, it all goes back to we understand what our portfolio is. We have the power. At the end of the day, power is the bottleneck. Do you have the power? Do you have the ability to execute and have realistic RFS dates set, and can you hit those? You have the team around you that can hit those. We've established credibility with many of our customers within our TAM that we can do that.
Your deck-
And-
Yeah, go on.
Quite frankly, we're having conversations right now about assets, about power that won't even be live until Q1 2028, but we're already negotiating those lease agreements. That's how far ahead we're looking at this, and I'm very excited about what we're going to be able to present to the marketplace and the deals that we're going to be closing in the next one to two quarters.
Your deck says $0.07 per kilowatt- hour firm, but you reported $0.066 average energy cost in a quarter where the spread was negative. Can you clarify?
Sure. I'll grab this one. Those figures are consistent, and what the 6.6 represents is our realized all-in energy cost for the quarter, and the $0.07 is the rate that we underwrite to as we're negotiating our leases. The problem in Q2 wasn't the cost of power. The problem is the price that we were able to charge a Bitcoin hosting customer for it because of the price of Bitcoin. At the $0.07 delivered, an AI colocation lease at market rates is a very good business. At $0.07, delivered into a Bitcoin hosting contract at the prevailing Bitcoin prices is not a business model at all, hence the reasons we're pivoting.
Perfect. Well, thank you for clarifying. What does happen to your economics if the AI build-out slows and neo cloud demand softens?
I can grab this one as well. When I think about it, our downside is better than most in the sector for one structural reason, is that we don't own any GPUs. Our tenants bring their own compute, so we're not exposed to a hardware cycle or a residual value issue. What we own is the power and the shell and the long-dated assets, the leases incorporated to those assets, which is the most defensible layer in the stack. Our sites are 150 MW and under, which means we can stop after a 10 MW data haul rather than committing to the whole gigawatt campus. These are the protections we have in place. As in any industry, you're going to have economics that cycle up and down. These are the protections that we have built in place.
Perfect. Well, either Gary or Jolienne, what closing remarks do you have for our investors listening today?
I would say it's been an interesting Q2. We were very pleasantly surprised with the success of our follow-on offering and the level of institutional investors we were able to attract that have confidence in our business model and the business plan that we've laid out ahead of us that we're executing upon. I don't have one negative thing to say. Being in this industry is that no two days are the same, and it's a journey of excitement. Every day, we're traveling down a new path and executing with a team that we know can deliver.
Perfect. Well, thank you both for this presentation. We certainly would love to have you back on and continue with your progress throughout the year. Thank you both.
Awesome.
Thank you, Anna. Appreciate your time.
Thank you, Anna.
All right, everyone. Stay with us. We will be right back.