Okay. Well, it's 3:34 P.M. U.S. Eastern, and we're gonna start now with SHARON AI, ticker SHAZ on the Nasdaq. Presenting today will be James Manning, Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO, and Ross Barrows, Head of Capital Strategy and Investor Relations for SHARON AI. Again, this is the RedChip AI Investor Conference. We've been going since 9:30 A.M. U.S. Eastern, and SHARON AI is our final company of the day. We appreciate everyone who has joined us today. Gentlemen, James and Ross, are you on?
It's only James, unfortunately.
Okay
You got the better-looking half is what I'd like to say.
James, great to see you again. Are you going to be presenting your investor presentation today?
Yeah. Well, we'd love to share an investor presentation. I'll walk you through that, and then maybe at the end, if you've got any questions or if anyone's got questions, we'll allow a little bit of time for that.
Absolutely.
At the end of the day.
We'll even run this a little bit after. I know we got you started late. I apologize for that. We'll run you till 4:05 P.M. U.S. Eastern, so about 30 minutes for you to get your full presentation in, plus some questions. I'm sure we'll be getting a lot of those. Speaking of questions to our viewers, you can click the Q&A button at the bottom of your Zoom window. A text box will appear. You can type in your question. We'd love to hear your questions for SHARON AI. Before I begin, gentlemen, let me just do the safe harbor statement. This segment may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995.
All statements pertaining to future financial and/or operating results, along with other statements about the future expectations, beliefs, goals, plans, or prospects expressed by management constitute forward-looking statements. Any statements that are not historical facts should also be considered forward-looking statements, and of course, forward-looking statements may involve risks and uncertainties. Gentlemen, the floor is yours. Please go ahead.
Perfect. Thank you and everyone. For those who don't know me, my name is James Manning, and I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of SHARON AI here in Sydney, Australia. I've spent 22 years working across tech, finance, and large-scale development, but the last seven years have been completely focused on digital asset infrastructure. Together with the team, we've built or deployed more than 300 MW worth of digital asset infrastructure across North America. In the last couple of years, we've been building what we think is Australia's leading Neocloud platform. Across the last year, specifically, we spent our time aligning this business very carefully to scale, and each step of what we've done has been focused on how we align that timing to maximize our market opportunity. Who is SHARON AI?
We deliver AI native, HPC-grade computing infrastructure so that enterprises, governments, research organizations, and other AI companies can train and run their models in these high-intensity environments. We do it really efficiently, we do it securely, and we do it with data sovereignty, and that's a really important point. We are similar in spirit to the other listed Neoclouds, your CoreWeave and your Nebius, but we're a little bit earlier stage, and I think we have two really important differences. One is our customer focus. While the CoreWeave's biggest customers are mostly the hyperscalers themselves, and we do have hyperscaler customers in the pipeline, our primary focus is the large Australian and Asia-Pacific enterprise, regulated industries, and mission-critical workloads. The other one, which I'm going to spend a bit of time, is our geography and sovereignty advantage.
While most of the listed Neoclouds that you'll hear about and talk to are very U.S.-centric, we're headquartered here in Australia, and we're focused on both Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. We've been built specifically for the data sovereignty needs in Asia and Australia, and in an environment where data sovereignty is becoming a non-negotiable, we have a strategic advantage in able to deliver customer solutions tailored to their needs. We like to think of ourselves as the trusted, domestic, and fully onshore alternative for your AI compute requirements. I often like to think about why SHARON AI has such a regional advantage. When I think about that, there's several reasons we think about. We believe SHARON AI is very well-positioned.
While this category is very large and very well-established in the U.S., in Australia and the broader Asia-Pacific region, it's still very early and somewhat constrained. The region's constrained on power, capacity, and access to the latest generation GPUs. Here at SHARON AI, we like to think we've brought this all together in a world-class high-density compute together with our partners, Nvidia, to give customers solution across both Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. When I look at the map that you can see up on screen, I like to think about why Australia has that advantage. It's largely geographic. Australia is a very large country with a population of only 30 million people. We're in close proximity to the Asia-Pacific region with phenomenal fiber capability into the space.
What that translates to for us is the ability to export tokens, so we can install GPU compute workloads and export those tokens into the region. We have a strategic advantage as a country with a small population and a large natural energy install base to be able to sell, you know, install GPU compute, and our country won't consume everything we turn on. A great way to think about that is if you're looking at, say, South Korea or India, whatever compute they can turn on in the next 12, 24, 36 months, they're naturally gonna consume those tokens internally. Their domestic population, their domestic workforce, and industrial complex will need all the compute that they can use. Whereas in Australia, because of our small population and our large energy resource, we'll be able to export some of those tokens.
That's why Australia is becoming a very strategic strategically significant and advantageous region to build GPU compute out. The third thing is there are only three NCPs in Australia. Very different to the North American market, where there's lots of cloud providers, Neocloud providers, and lots of NCPs. The NCP is the NVIDIA Cloud Partner status. That means NVIDIA has certified the equipment you design and implement meets their standards. In Australia, there's only three. With that, there's a huge competitive moat because we are one of three unique businesses that have the scale and the opportunity to serve the region. All of this wouldn't be able to be done without our partners. Key partnerships is how SHARON AI has thought about building this business.
We like to think about doing our business in a partnership-driven model, and we've done it by leveraging the best-in-class expertise across our value chain. We look to find partners both globally and domestically across hardware, power, security, and connectivity to ensure that we deliver our end customer, which is where our demand's coming from, the opportunity to have the greatest computing solutions in the market. You know, I'm gonna talk about four key partnerships, and it's not all our partnerships today, but four key partnerships for us and our businesses. One is Nvidia, and I'm sure everyone's heard about Nvidia and they've all heard about the great things coming out of Nvidia GTC this week. I'm sure everyone before me has spoken a lot about Nvidia today, so I'm not gonna drill into the Nvidia relationship.
The next one, however, I will. The next one's NEXTDC. NEXTDC is Australia's largest listed data center operator, and they have a pipeline of over 3 GW worth of energy. We've fortunately secured 54 MW worth of energy this year for deployment with NEXTDC, and we're working to deploy our GPU solutions inside of their facilities. The next one is Cisco. Everyone knows that household name Cisco, but we partnered with Cisco to provide managed enterprise cloud AI solutions. Critically, the Cisco enterprise solution allows us to create what we call a secure AI factory. This is a really, really important solution, where you have a business that specifically has a high security environment, very important for things like government contracts or highly regulated industries like financial institutions and insurance firms.
This highly secure AI factory is a Cisco unique product that ties into existing corporate and enterprise networks. It's a phenomenal relationship for us. With that, Cisco have a go-to-market strategy where they're actively out there selling the SHARON AI compute solutions to their end customers. Finally, WWT. WWT is like the great company that no one seems to know. WWT for 10 years has been Nvidia's number one implementation partner globally. They're a very large organization turning around $28 billion a year, U.S.-based. They handle our procurement and deployment. They ensure that we buy the best equipment for the best price, whether it's from Lenovo or from Cisco or from Dell or Supermicro. They get it on time and deploy it into our facilities.
That's a really important relationship for us to make sure we can leverage their buying power, their expertise to get our compute online, so we can run our inference cloud. I always think it's really important to think about where we've come from and where we're going. 2021, we started this business. We started it as a cloud storage business. Back then, we had some A40s and 3090s. So, you know, we're talking almost five years of experience running GPU computing. 2022, we started to pivot that GPU workload into this emerging field of AI compute. 2023, 2024, we started to acquire GPUs specifically for AI use. So we started to acquire L40Ss and H100s. Those returns turned out to be incredibly attractive, and we really started to capture partner attention.
In late 2024, however, that's when we became an NVIDIA Cloud Partner. That recognized the fact that as an organization, we had the largest install base of GPUs for public cloud consumption in Australia. 2025 was the year the whole business changed. In early 2025, we started to build Australia's first NVIDIA reference architecture supercluster here in Australia with NEXTDC in their M3 facility on H200 GPUs. By mid 2025, we'd started to see that cluster started to attract real serious enterprise interest. In late 2025, the whole thesis was validated when we won Canva as a customer. That was a really interesting win for us because winning Canva, they're a very large AI-native business. They do a lot of their compute on AWS, and that was a very competitive process.
In that Canva conversation, they wanted to benchmark our organization and see how our compute stacked. What we came out was with great compute performance results. We were 30 times faster the first token and 40 times faster on storage. We got a contract with Canva successfully awarded to us around our ability to deliver high-performance computing. We think about how we win these and do all of these things, and it's all through these partnerships. It's through partnerships with our storage providers, VAST Data. It's through Nvidia, it's through NEXTDC, and this is how we create a diversified and long value chain that ultimately enables us to secure world-class customers like Canva. 2025, we didn't finish just there. Late 2025, we raised $100 million in a convertible note.
That enabled us to acquire a B200 cluster and a B300 cluster. We didn't stop there at the end of 25, and that was late December. In the last weeks of December, we sold our interest in TCDC. That was an investment we had in connection with New Era AI. They're another RedChip customer, and you may have heard from them today. You know, we initially invested $3.5 million in that project. We subsequently sold that for $70 million back to New Era. We anticipate getting those proceeds from that sale between March and June this year. We then signed a $500 million debt facility with USD.AI, and we signed off on $200 million revenue share with Digital Alpha and Cisco.
All of that was about $770 million worth of non-dilutive capital back in the business that enables us to focus on our core thesis, which is being an AI-native, Neocloud business serving GPU compute. Since then, however, we've worked through the procurement of how we think about in our Sydney S6 facility. Subsequent to that, we did a capital raise on Nasdaq with Lucid Capital Markets in February this year, where we raised another $125 million. Since then, we've been working actively about how we now build and deploy our next phase of our business, which is on a GB300 in Sydney's S6 facility. To give everyone a bit of a feel for that's approximately 10 MW worth of computing power.
If you look at the sensitivity table, 10 MW equates roughly to the second row, so 4,608 GPUs. The second row there. What we're seeing is, you know, and we like to think about how we model our business. We'd like to see our GPU rate per hour around $4 an hour. That's how we think about when we model our business. I'll give you some economics around that. You can see those on the screen. 4,608 GPUs, 10 MW worth of power. It's about $440 million worth of CapEx to build something like that today. It generates about $161 million worth of revenue at a GP of about 80%.
A highly profitable business model when fully deployed and sold to the right customer. You know that $4 an hour is a really good base case scenario. You know, the CapEx profile is, you know, how we're using these proceeds. When we did our Nasdaq capital raise, where the funds are going to. We partner that with debt and, you know, I previously just spoke about the USD.AI and the Digital Alpha facility. We're currently in the market looking at other components of how we, you know, finance and scale the business out. Always useful to see the capital insights in a single slide, and this one really does it for us. All up, the company's got about $305 million worth of, you know, capital available to it for deployment in this AI vertical.
That's $100 million convertible note in December. The sale of the New Era stake for $70 million. We've got $200 million and $200 million for Digital Alpha, $500 million for USD.AI, and then a $125 million cap raise. Underlying capital $300 million, plus the debt $700 million. North of $1 billion worth of capital available to the business to deploy for the right customer, the right experience, fundamentally. It's always good to talk about the Texas transaction because the team at SHARON AI have a lot of experience building digital asset infrastructure. Part of that is the ability to identify early sites, work through the engineering and the approvals process, and get them all the way to the point at FID.
At its core, SHARON AI is a neo-cloud, and we're focused on our GPU business. You know, when we partnered with New Era AI to build what we call Texas Critical Data Centers, we started in January 2025. We had some uncertainty about the project and the site, but you know, we committed to the land. By June, however, you know, we'd done enough diligence and enough engineering work to sign a non-binding LOI. We then subsequently worked through all the engineering processes, firmed up you know, energy supply, firmed up design, and ultimately entered exclusivity in November 2025.
Really, at that point, you started to realize the business was at FID for an end customer, and SHARON AI realized from its perspective, it was better to enable to exit the transaction at that point in time and focus on its core business, which is GPU compute. Hopefully, the New Era AI guys go through and finish building out the facility. It's a phenomenal opportunity, up to a gigawatt site, and we'd love to be a tenant of theirs one day. But for us, it was a strategic opportunity for us to exit the project and realize $70 million worth of value. You know, great return on equity. We invested about $3.5 million in the venture. We were receiving $70 million in proceeds.
We believe in the venture, and so we've actually taken scrip in New Era AI as part of the transaction. We believe they'll execute this transaction out in the future, and we wish them all the best and luck in the transaction. Finally, I'd just like to wrap up a bit about our team. You know, I've spoken about me today, obviously, CEO, co-founder. Andrew Lees, ex-Macquarie Bank. He has a lot of experience running a MSP prior to this role. Nick Hughes-Jones, he spent the last seven years alongside me building digital asset infrastructure in North America. He was part of that team, along with Tim Broadfoot, our CFO. We built north of 300 MW in North America. We've subsequently on-sold those projects.
You'll see sites that we initially, the three of us, built. You know, they're currently owned by Bitfarms, they're currently owned by CleanSpark. Dan Mons comes from a higher education university technology background, where he's built some of Australia's leading supercomputers. Phenomenal executive team. It's not just the team. There's so many more people I could add to this slide today. The team's expanded. They've got a lot bigger. We've got a lot more depth as we look to execute out on our model. Finally, just a couple things about our board. Peter Woodward. You might know, people might know him from his business TSS, another Nasdaq-listed company. They're Dell's number one integrator in North America, so lot of expertise and experience in compute.
Alistair Cairns comes with a lot of management experience, he's ex McKinsey & Co. Phenomenal board member. Lots of insights in, you know, best practice in running and scaling a business. Lastly, Drew Kelton, who's had a phenomenal career, and currently sits on the board of an Australian company called Superloop, where they're building out the fiber and fiber infrastructure and telecoms around the region for AI companies as they grow. With that, and keeping to the time limit, that's the end of our presentation today. I'd love to switch back now and stop the share, and we can go through some questions. To summarize, SHARON AI, very, you know, phenomenal Neocloud opportunity in Australia, servicing the Asia Pacific region, listed on Nasdaq with the code SHAZ.
Thank you very much for that, and I appreciate you being cognizant of the time, James. The questions for today. We've got plenty coming in. The Blackwell question, you are one of the first companies to deploy NVIDIA's Blackwell Ultra GPUs. Since these chips are in such high demand, does having them in your data centers right now give you a massive pricing power advantage over other providers?
Great question. We like to think of our business as being customer led, and so what we're seeing in the market is phenomenal demand for all the chips. There is more customer demand for chipsets than we can actually deploy. So yes, you do have the short answer is yes. You know, if you have chipsets, and they're available, and they're online, you have phenomenal pricing advantage over someone that has to deploy those chipsets in six, 12, 24 months' time, whatever their timeframe is, whether their facility needs building, or whether they're just, you know, got the lead time on the equipment. You know, so we do have a pricing advantage is the short answer for chips that are available online. You know, it's, you know, we are regularly working through contracting out all our equipment day to day.
James, we get a lot of questions about finances, of course. Path to revenue. You just raised $125 million in your IPO. How quickly does that money turn into chips on racks and actual monthly checks from customers? Go ahead and start with that, and then he's got a follow-up.
Yeah, no, no. That's great. We have revenue. We have revenues. We have contracted customers. But to give you a good example of the time from raising some capital to actually deploying, when we order equipment, we have approximately, you know, 10-16 weeks to turn that equipment online. That's the lead time between initial order of equipment and deploying it, assuming we've got the data center space organized. We have a pipeline of data center space that we think about, and we match that to our, you know, we've been very strategic about how we map that. From our perspective, we've thought about, you know, when we raise capital in the market like we have recently, it's been around a specific end goal, around a specific customer contract.
What I think you'll see from us is, you know, as we come to market around a customer contract, what that customer contract is and where the deployment's been. You're on mute.
Sorry. Thank you very much. James, a lot of people are asking why Australia and the broader Asia Pacific. Could you reiterate why it is such an attractive market?
Yeah. I think Australia's the right spot for a couple of reasons. Our proximity to Asia. The Asian market is huge. The population base there is phenomenal. The requirement for compute is really large in region. You know, when you think about that, the TAM, or their total addressable market, in Asia Pac is huge. From an Australian perspective, we're geographically remote, that we don't have to worry about all the geopolitical issues that are going on in rest of world all the time. We're a very safe and secure place to put a lot of compute online. With that, we have the opportunity to.
A small population and lots of natural energy and large energy base, we have the opportunity to be able to, you know, deploy here in Australia and service the region. That's why we think Australia's in a great position to ultimately service that Asia Pac region and be the GPU powerhouse for Asia Pacific.
Thanks, James. Strategic partnerships, how do they reduce execution risk and strengthen your platform?
Yeah. Great question again. WWT is a really good example of that partnership. They're a global, you know, technology provider. They have, you know, they turn over sort of $28 billion a year. They have access to, you know, incredible supply chains, four deployment centers around the world. By way of example, let's say we buy some equipment tomorrow from arguably, you know, Supermicro or Dell or Lenovo. They will take delivery of that gear. They will bring it in their factory. They will test that in their procurement timeline and process. They will rack it for us and then ship it to us racked, pre-configured, so that we can roll it into our data center facilities and turn it online.
It's about speed to execution, as well as QA, a quality assurance process, to ensure that the equipment we've got is working and it's gonna come online, so that we can get to end customer online in a faster period. You know, that's a great example of a partnership that we've got. You know, similarly with our data center providers, you know, those partnerships give us access to the energy, and we take contractual views, 10-year views on those leases. We've got long-term, long duration on those assets, and access to that power over the long term. When you combine things like access to energy with a great procurement and supply chain, you know, and a phenomenal sales team like we have in our partnership with Cisco, you know, it's a really powerful organization.
You know, Cisco's out there selling for us. They're selling GPU compute. There's 250 salespeople in Australia alone in the Cisco team actively out there selling SHARON AI Compute. We've then got deployment partners and data center partners. We bring it all together, and we run that with our own inference layer over the top.
We appreciate you answering those questions so quickly, James. We got one more here. A lot of people are asking about, you know, the near future, the next 12-18 months. In your opinion, what developments could most improve the investors' understanding of SHARON AI's long-term strategic value in the next, again, 12-18 months?
Yeah. I think from our perspective, the thing that we'll be able to lead investors to is large customer contract wins. We're near term looking at some you know, how we bring to market those customer contract wins, telling customers about our opportunities and what we're selling in market, and as we continue to look at building out the GPU compute base, you know, MW are going online, computers going online, and that'll be very, very important for customers and investors to understand how powerful the growth trajectory of our business is.
Thank you, James. Thank you very much. Again, it's SHARON AI, trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol SHAZ. James, thank you very much for joining us today.
Thank you very much. Have a great day.
Okay. You too.
Bye.
If you'd like more information on SHARON AI, reach us at 1-800-REDCHIP or email us at shaz@redchip.com. Now, that does it for today's RedChip Virtual Investor Conference. Thanks to our many thousands of viewers today and, of course, thanks to our many presenters as well. We've been going since 9:30 A.M. U.S. Eastern. It's been a long day and a very, very interesting one for everyone, we hope. If you'd like more information about any of the companies presented today, just write us at info@redchip.com. Of course, you can look at our website at redchip.com. Thank you very much.