AI compute is 'critical infrastructure' like railroads & steel: Hut 8 CEO

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Hut 8 (HUT) CEO Asher Genoot compares AI compute buildout to historical infrastructure booms like railroads and steel, projecting $1.75 billion in annual net operating income as new data centers come online.

00:00 Speaker A

industry needs different mechanisms of capital and if you look at what Corrive has done recently, for example, they've had chips that are years old and when people originally over underwrote them, they thought those chips wouldn't be usable anymore. They just signed another multi-year deal on these A100s. And so, as you look at compute itself, compute is really going to be the foundation of the next generation of industry. And so I believe right now we're building this critical infrastructure in the US, very similar to the railroads, very similar to the steel industry, very similar to the energy and electricity industry that were built about 100 years ago.

00:27 Speaker B

You know, so, you know, really for the past 18, let's say 18 months, almost a little over two years, a lot of the hyper scalars like a meta, and Alphabet, they've uh used their own cash to fund whatever they are planning to do or are doing on that data center front. Is it likely we're to see more, you know, banks team up and help these companies uh with debt and financing packages to to help deliver their vision?

01:03 Speaker A

I believe that these projects are all large scale infrastructure projects and you have dedicated infrastructure funds that want to invest that have a lower hurdle that they have to achieve in terms of what their investments are because they're more stabilized assets. Historically, a lot of these technology businesses were really capex light and you're seeing that paradigm change and so I think you'll see a lot of different pools of capital come in that have a different return and under uh thesis of investments and you'll see you already see that happening and you'll continue to see that going forward.

01:42 Speaker B

When the projects you are currently building, when they come online, how do they change the financial statements of a of a Hut 8?

01:52 Speaker A

Massive. I mean, the the three projects we've announced thus far will bring an additional $1.75 billion a year in NOI. And NOI is net operating income. Because these are triple net leases, we don't have costs of running these data centers. So really from a project basis, it falls through as profit and then we have debt servicing, interest and amortization, but they're massive evolutions and I think you've seen that in our stock price and that's just based on three projects. We have so many more that we're building right now.

02:27 Speaker B

What's the one uh that is likely to come on one will one come on next year?

02:32 Speaker A

Yes, we have two coming on next year. Uh in in our project in Louisiana and Texas as well.