Okay. Thank you for joining us. My name is Rohit Kulkarni. I'm the Internet Analyst here at Roth Capital Partners. But more importantly, thanks, Chris Pavlovski, Founder and CEO of Rumble. Rumble has grown into one of the largest independent video platforms globally, built on the foundation of free expression and owned completely vertically integrated cloud infrastructure. Over the past year, the company has expanded beyond its core media business into AI cloud and infra through the strategic relationship with Tether and the pending acquisition of Northern Data. Chris, great to have you with us. Maybe just to kick things off, you started this platform as a free speech platform. People thought of Rumble as kind of a distant younger cousin of YouTube at one point.
Maybe how has that identity evolved into the broader business and what you're building today, including cloud?
Yeah, thanks for having me. Actually, we started in 2013, and I would say in the early days of Rumble, the most popular content were like cute cat, dog videos, cute baby videos. That was kind of the politics that you found on Rumble. There wasn't much of any sort of politics on Rumble at the time. Fast-forward to like 2020, we started to see a lot of censorship online. Platforms were now preferencing and lifting specific content and, you know, suppressing other content and deplatforming a lot of different voices and creators.
At that point, we obviously started to grow pretty rapidly at the end of 2020 and into 2021 on the premise of really just kind of helping everybody have a free and easy access to a platform with no kind of bias or any type of censorship whatsoever. We never moved our goalposts like a lot of the platforms did during the election cycles and during COVID. We kinda kept the same terms and conditions that all the platforms really had back in 2010 and 2015. We were just very principled in not moving those goalposts at all. Come 2021, things kind of really get messy on the internet. A lot of people get deplatformed, including the President of the United States. Rumble was there.
We were the first platform for the president to join in June of 2021, and then we experienced rapid growth actually prior to that and up until now. We were about 1 million monthly active users in 2020, middle of the year, and then we hit in Q1 2021 north of 30 million monthly active users.
Wow.
Now today we're sitting at 52 million monthly active users in just the last reported quarter. One of the things that we did when we went public, it wasn't just a media and technology like a media platform, video platform play. We also said we were gonna build an advertising ecosystem to compete against big tech. We were also gonna build a cloud infrastructure to compete against big tech. One of the things that was existential to our business was that we had to build our own infrastructure on entirely our own rails, and we did that. We obviously service all of Rumble on top of our own infrastructure, and we launched our cloud about a year and a half ago, an emerging cloud business to the public sector to use as well.
That was something that we put in the vision of the story back in 2021 when we went public through a SPAC with Cantor Fitzgerald, and we've held that ever since. Since 2025 and post-election, things have changed quite a bit. We've taken in a $775 million investment from Tether in February 2025. That closed, and we've launched since then the Rumble Wallet, which was built alongside with Tether to allow creators to get paid and tipped in Bitcoin and USDT, and Tether Gold. We've also launched Rumble Shorts since Tether made that investment.
One of the larger announcements was that we signed a deal to acquire Northern Data in November of 2025, which is one of the largest GPU estates in Europe. They have over 20,000 H100 GPUs. They have nine data centers with a bunch of them that they own. They have up to 180 MW of energized capacity in Atlanta, Georgia. They have a data center in Pittsburgh, Sweden, Portugal, U.K., and the list goes on. That transaction is expected to close in Q2 of this year, and we're really looking forward to that. There's been a lot of transition and wouldn't say there hasn't been a pivot.
It's just the same vision that we had back in 2021, but a lot of execution since then.
Okay. A lot to unpack there, Chris. You stole a lot of my questions. Anyway, we'll go through piece by piece. On the core ads business, maybe just level set, what are you most excited about over the next 12 months when it comes to the team, the product or just overall growth in the core ads business?
It's like there's so many pockets of excitement. The advertising business is a huge excitement of mine because what we faced from 2020 all the way to 2024 was a boycott. Basically, the largest ad brands on the planet didn't wanna advertise with Rumble. They didn't advertise with Rumble. We tried, and they wouldn't even get close to us. They wouldn't even open the door to talk to us. The presidential election happens and everything changes. Like literally overnight it changed. In 2025 we saw Netflix come to us, we saw Chevron come to us, we saw Crypto.com come to us. It's not a lot, but it's a few, and it's gone from zero to like a handful of brand advertisers, which is like a huge movement considering we didn't have any movement whatsoever.
We saw like regulatory pressure start to happen. We saw that the FTC with the IPG merger is now requiring like they can't do any political bias when doing media buys. The doors are now opening. Everyone is now talking to us. Now it's a process though. It doesn't just happen like a waterfall overnight. It takes like a year or two to kinda build this out. We went out and hired a president of ad sales that's gonna be going to all the agencies. If you look at Rumble's, you know, MAUs, and you look at the ARPU that we have versus the ARPU that YouTube has, you can kinda see the type of growth that's available to us if we really monetize it and we get the brand advertisers to come in.
There's a lot of room to grow here, and that's something that we are really excited to try to grow. We just hired the president in Q1 of this year, and we're gonna be knocking on all these doors, and hopefully with the ad sales cycle that you see, we start to see traction with this in 2027. That's one exciting part.
Obviously, the Northern Data part brings excitement to the advertising business as well in that we now have GPUs, and we will have GPUs when we close this transaction, as a resource to really like also add a jetpack to the advertising business by allowing advertisers to create ads very easily using AI, being able to use AI to optimize their ads and really compete with the other ad platforms out there in a way that you need a lot of capital to do so, and we will actually have those resources. The application layer of advertising and AI in Northern Data is also very exciting. The ad business is one pillar of our business that is, I think in its very infancy right now.
Okay, awesome. Quick tactical question on ads. You do a lot of live streaming, and you've had historically kinda politically leaning advertisers. There are two events this year that a lot of investors are focused on. You have the elections, and you have the FIFA World Cup. Is there a framing that you would want to give to investors how to think about what this means to Rumble?
Yeah. Like, traditionally, every election cycle, Rumble's MAUs shown growth. In midterms of 2022 and the presidential election in 2024, we represented on election night roughly 17% of the U.S. stream market according to Streams Charts. That's like a massive number. YouTube was first, we were second, but YouTube had over like 60%-70%. We had 17%-18% according to Streams Charts. That was like a huge achievement on election night. Obviously, 2025, you know, we faced a lot of headwinds. It wasn't a presidential election year. We're coming off a massive presidential election year. We lost America's largest live streamer, who was Dan Bongino, to the FBI. So a lot of things happened in 2025 that we, you know, that were kind of a headwind against us.
Coming into 2026, we're now going into the midterm election season. Dan Bongino's back on the platform. We have all these products that we just launched, like, you know, Rumble Shorts, Rumble Wallet. We're seeing a bunch of creators that have never really used Rumble before. Like Asmongold just joined Rumble. He's like one of Twitch's top three streamers. We're starting to see a lot of movement now in 2026 because of just the way the market is going. Obviously, with the elections coming up at the end of the year, that's gonna be a big tailwind. 2026 feels like a tailwind year in comparison to 2025. That's pretty exciting for us.
Awesome. Fantastic. Switching topics to your Tether relationship. It started off as them being an investor, and now it has become more of a multidimensional relationship. Maybe you mentioned a few things as to what Tether means to Rumble, but maybe just unpack it from a ads perspective, from an AI cloud perspective, and just being friends with Paolo. How does all of that come together?
The Tether relationship has been an incredible relationship. Working with Paolo side by side since they invested in Rumble has been nothing but pleasant. It's been incredible. We signed the deal in December of 2024, closed it in February of 2025, and injected a lot of capital into the business. One of the things that we decided to do right out of the gate was, like, let's build a way and a mechanism and be the first platform to allow creators to tip in Bitcoin and Tether. We did that. You can download the Rumble Wallet, and you can see how seamless it is to tip to any creator on Rumble in Bitcoin or Tether. You can buy Bitcoin or Tether.
You can buy Tether Gold in there. We're keeping it very simple, so just a few stable coins and Bitcoin. Our audience is, like, as we were tipping people and we were seeing tips fly on the platform, some creators were like, "What is Tether? What is Bitcoin?" Right? There's a little bit of an educational thing that needs to happen with a lot of the users on our platform. As that progresses, I see that being a very important instrument in the future for the growth of the platform.
Aside from just, like, the Rumble Wallet and doing that in partnership with Tether, there was two deals that we announced in November that I think I feel like the market kinda missed it and, you know, didn't really pay a lot of attention to it. We signed a $100 million advertising deal with Tether, $50 million per year for the next two years. That starts to kick in in a material way in Q2 and Q3 of this year. It's already begun. That is to help, you know, advertise the Rumble Wallet and those Tether stablecoins in the Rumble Wallet and bring in new creators to the platform.
It's like a huge win for Tether, huge win for Rumble, huge win for the Rumble Wallet, and huge win for, you know, growth on Rumble. They're bringing in more creators with it. That, that's like a really exciting thing that we're doing with Tether. The other exciting thing is that we did another $150 million deal with Tether, as $75 million per year for two years. When the Northern Data deal closes, they will become one of our anchor tenants for GPU purchases with the Northern Data deal. You have the advertising deal, you have the Rumble Wallet, and now you have the GPU. We're now gonna be the vehicle that's gonna service Tether for their infrastructure on GPUs. Obviously the relationship there is like incredibly close.
It's also important to note that Tether will become the single largest shareholder once the Northern Data deal closes of Rumble. I'll be the second-largest. Right now we're about a third each, but they're gonna go, you know, close to around 50% once the Northern Data deal closes. The cap table will look a lot different. Obviously, you know, I think in the AI world, now that we're gonna be so deeply entrenched in it with the acquisition of Northern Data, Rumble sits in a very, very unique position. This isn't a CoreWeave play or a Nebius play. It's part of it, but we have a lot more. We have data on the Rumble platform. CoreWeave doesn't have that. Nebius doesn't have that. They're more like a bare metal play.
We have a ton of data, but also what we do have that a lot of these other guys don't have is that we have expertise for the last four years of building super low latency streaming products across the United States. In fact, you know, a couple creators have tested it. Our latency on streaming is about two seconds faster than YouTube's. That's to put that in perspective, they're four seconds and we're two seconds on delivery with our live streaming product. That is a significant advantage in live streaming, and I also think this type of cloud expertise that Rumble has is gonna be a significant advantage for AI and inferencing as well. Marrying both, you know, now we'll have a huge bucket of resources of GPUs and data centers and power.
We're also gonna have all this data that we have on the Rumble side, plus there's data on the Tether side as well, and you're now gonna have this engineering expertise to really do, you know, serious work on low latency delivering for inferencing. I think like that competitive advantage that Rumble will have in the AI GPU as a service space is gonna be very significant. Then you level this up by, you know, building application layers on top of the GPU as a service that I think we can have a huge competitive advantage with using those datasets. You know, we're like super excited. Obviously, Tether and myself have, like, huge ambitions. I've always wanted to compete against YouTube since 2013.
Everyone, I remember the first time I went into VCs. Actually, yeah, I think I went into a whole bunch of VCs. Every single one of them kicked me out of the room when I told them we're gonna compete against YouTube. Here we are. We're not shy to say that we're gonna compete not only against YouTube, but we're gonna compete in the advertising business. We're gonna compete in the hyperscaler business. We're going for all of it right now, and we have one of the greatest backers out there, an anchor tenant like Tether to help us go do that. I'm pumped.
Awesome. I know you talked about AI cloud and what is the secret sauce that investors need to focus on when it comes to competing with companies like CoreWeave or Nebius, or there is just another. I was at NVIDIA GTC last week, and I think every corner there was an AI cloud company. What would the combination of Tether, Rumble, and Northern Data what is the secret sauce that you think is going to differentiate you from a lot of the other AI cloud companies and what would create the staying power over the next not just 12 months but beyond?
Yeah. I think those, you know, those things that I mentioned, plus there's another thing here I'll touch on, but definitely the low latencies, the datasets that we have between Tether and Rumble, these are things that our competition doesn't have. These are Rumble's datasets exclusive to Rumble, Tether's datasets exclusive to Tether. So, you know, putting all this together creates a really incredible marriage. But I also think it's about the vision of where we're gonna go. What is Rumble, what is Rumble gonna service? Like, what are we chasing? Are we chasing after those LLM models? Like, what are we really, really chasing? The more we look at it and looking at the low latencies that we have for inferencing, looking at the datasets that we have, where is the market gonna go?
I don't know if you saw this, but Peter Thiel invested in a farm-based company just a couple days ago that's like at a $2 billion valuation, and they're AI-based collars on cows. I think they call it a Cowgorithm or something like that. They basically are using AI to like herd cows to the right spot, so they don't need fences and all this. All that's done with AI. We're now seeing the next generation of AI coming into play in the economy, not just for LLM models, but actual like use cases on the farm. We're talking about farming businesses now using AI. They got like 600,000 cows collared, right? So this is gonna permeate through every sector of business.
Every mom and pop's shop is gonna start having some type of AI integrated into their business to create efficiencies and more profitability. That's what we wanna target. That's what we're going after. I think we're gonna be able to develop a product that's gonna have such low latency, that's gonna be so great for inferencing, and we're gonna target that market that is not really there yet, but we wanna be in position to take that. That's like one of the go-to-market strategies that we're looking forward to.
Obviously, you know, Rumble Cloud just did a deal with the government of El Salvador, so we're looking at doing a lot of work with governments like the government of El Salvador, and I think there's room to grow there. But I also really think, like, that medium-sized, small-sized business is a place that no one has really focused. Everyone's focused on the LLMs, and here, the opportunity is to go after those algorithms, those type of businesses. The Eight Sleeps are gonna be powered by AI, and Tether, I think they invested in Eight Sleep as well. So, like, there's a lot of these type of businesses that will all be powered by AI, and we wanna be the infrastructure for that.
Awesome. One key source of investor kind of pushback for not just Rumble, but just overall AI cloud companies, is that this can very quickly become a capital-intensive business. You build data centers, you put GPUs in them, you get power. It could become billions of dollars' worth capital intensity. How do you think about over the next two to four years, how do you feel about investing in the AI cloud business creating more capacity, and how should investors think about the capital intensity in the business?
We're gonna be very aggressive but very smart on how we do it. Obviously, we have one of the biggest backers out there in Tether. You know, I keep saying they make more money than Tesla and Oracle combined on the bottom line with profit. I think they're north of $10 billion in profit. We're gonna be very cognizant about how we do deals. We wanna line up the deals with contracts in place before we start deploying capital. We wanna make sure that there's gonna be a return on everything that we do, and that's the way we're gonna approach the market. We're not gonna be irresponsible in any way that we deploy capital. We're gonna be very responsible in how we deploy that capital.
Yes, it will be intensive, but we're gonna approach that in a very responsible way.
Okay. I know the acquisition hasn't closed, so I don't expect you to give me specific kind of near-term things. Assuming the acquisition closes, next 12-18 months, what are the key milestones you feel investors should monitor for the combined entity?
One of the main immediate milestones is, like, what's the utilization gonna be with Northern Data? You know, I think they ended the year with around 65-ish. It's in their latest operating report, they had a utilization number there. We wanna get that as close to sold out as possible. That would be something in the next year that we would like to see all the data centers, all the megawatts that we have, we wanna be selling that, and we wanna be sold out. We wanna be sold out as fast as possible with Northern Data. That's, like, number one thing to look at. The next thing to look at is, like, how much are we pushing on the gas?
'Cause if we're sold out, come say by summer, and we have a $150 million Tether deal to complete, that means we gotta invest, and we have a contract for it already. I think those are the main things you wanna look for, is to see what that utilization allocation looks like and then see how fast we can aggressively grow. We're not doing this to be, like, you know, a $500 million company. We're doing this to be a $100 billion company plus. The intention is to go as big and as fast as possible in a very responsible way.
Yeah. Love the ambition. Love the various different things going in your favor. In terms of the next kinda 12-18 months, beyond Tether, beyond the contracts, what does Northern Data kind of customer base look like, and what are the various options that you have to grow those into more contractual customers?
Yeah. Like, I think I touched on a little bit. Obviously, we wanna really expand government relationships across the world, like the Salvadoran government. We've also said in our earnings release we've submitted tenders for other countries as well. We really wanna push on the government relationships. I really think the future of AI is gonna be in inferencing, and it's gonna be in those Cowgorithms. I think that's where the opportunity lies. Now, if a hyperscaler comes along and there's a good deal on the table, we're gonna be very opportunistic about that as well.
It's not like we're saying no to anything, but I do think that the sweet spot and the high margins are gonna be in those businesses like Eight Sleep and that farming company. I think that's where you're gonna see some really nice margins in this business better than what you're seeing with our competition.
Last question probably around how you balance growth versus profitability. Is there a philosophical approach you take, or how should investors think about the kind of medium-term profitability potential of the company?
Yeah. Right now, you know, that's kinda changed a few times in our company. At one point when we went public, it was just, like, foot on the gas, growth, growth, and just focus on that. Then we kinda flipped to, "Let's get to EBITDA positive," mentality, and, that's something that, you know, I kinda like a lot. I really wanna see that happen. Then Tether came along again, and then Tether's ambitions are growth, growth. But I have this EBITDA positive mentality. There's a little juggling to do there. I think that, we wanna see. We definitely wanna see a Rumble in one or two years from now that's driving towards, like, really good EBITDA, right?
Like, that's something that I would like to see, and I think that's the most compelling story for Rumble. Like, if there are growth opportunities that are gonna get us to EBITDA positive in a couple of years, like, one year later, and then there are massive deals, we're gonna be very opportunistic. We're really gonna make sure we do it the right way.
Okay. Fantastic. We are almost at time. You have been a great sport. If you don't mind, first word that comes to your mind. This is a simple word association game. Don't think, don't blink. First thing that comes to your mind. YouTube.
Censorship.
Elections.
Trump.
CoreWeave or Nebius.
Northern Data.
Rumble.