Hut 8 CEO: 'Space data centers are still a ways away'

Hut 8 (HUT) CEO Asher Genoot joins Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor Brian Sozzi to outline how the company is innovating data center buildouts to cut delivery times in half, unlock a $1.75 billion annual EBITDA pipeline, and overcome supply chain and energy constraints to meet surging AI demand.

00:00 Speaker A

space data centers are still a ways away, and there's still a ton of opportunity to innovate and build on Earth as well. I think at Hot 8, our real opportunity that we're looking at is, we've built traditional data centers, which are the deals that we've announced, traditional financings, GCs, design structures, but we're also working on how to innovate into that chain as well. How do we design these more efficiently, more quickly and bring compute online to support the needs more effectively.

00:32 Speaker B

How do you, how are you innovating?

00:37 Speaker A

We're looking at the criteria of what matters. If you look at data centers historically, you're really focused on the highest reliability and redundancy and you focus on a really slow innovation curve. So it'll take you six months to design a data center, then take you another six months to great break ground. And by the time the data hall actually comes online, you're about a year and a half or two years into the project. Is there a real a way to really think through how to bring data centers online in 6 to 12 months, and instead of multi-years. And so we're working with end users who are interested in trying to solve that problem set by rethinking the criteria of what's necessary in the world we live in today and how to bring capacity online faster.

01:25 Speaker B

What's your biggest roadblock to building these faster?

01:31 Speaker A

That's a really good question. I would say, I would say it's people. It's people on how we think about innovating and scaling at scale. So today when we think about the supply chain, a lot of people talk about the supply chain is difficult, there's not enough energy. All these are solvable problems. From a supply chain perspective, think about your long lead time items, how do you design around the issues that may exist? From a energy perspective, if front of meter is slow, how do you think about behind the meter solutions? And the tenant demand and the end user demand is there. And so for us is bringing in great builders to continue to scale at an accelerated rate. We've brought in over a gigawatt of infrastructure that we've announced thus far in the last call it year. That's about $1.75 billion in yearly EBITDA on a go-forward basis for the next 15 years. And how do we continue to grow and scale that platform?