Frederick Thiel1:06
The AI industry, similar to Bitcoin, needs a lot of energy to operate. If you go back to the late teens in Bitcoin, the challenge was turning on power to sites so you could deploy miners. And that was the big challenge back then. And granted, Bitcoin miners use a lot less energy than AI does. Though, if you go back again, the WEF said that Bitcoin was going to burn up the planet and use all the available energy that ever existed. Still hasn't happened. Now it's AI. But essentially, AI needs power. And if you look at the dynamics in the AI marketplace, it's about market share. It's not dissimilar to Bitcoin. It's how much energy can Anthropic versus OpenAI versus CoreWeave versus whomever Microsoft, AWS, etc. get so they can plug in their compute, so they can deploy their models, so they can operate inference for their clients, so their clients can get benefit of AI. To be fair, up until not too long ago, training was the primary use of AI data center. Now clients are doing inference. Inference is when you're chatting, when you're running agentic frameworks, that's inference. You're getting an answer from AI. That's what generates value out of AI. Training doesn't give you any real value as a customer. And so as agentic frameworks were launched earlier this year, you saw a huge uptick in token demand. And you just look at Anthropic sales numbers. They have surpassed OpenAI at this point. Huge uptick. And they are all capacity constrained because every model they released requires a lot more capacity to operate as the number of enterprise customers grows and as the growth within each enterprise customer grows, you have an exponential curve on the demand for tokens. And just look at all the news headlines about tokens or companies are spending way too much money. 3 months earlier it was about token maxing. Then they got their bills and it was like, oh my goodness. We got to watch out for this. And all that's being driven by a constraint in capacity. And so if you have constraint in capacity, it means all of a sudden, where is the constraint point? The constraint point is energized capacity. It's locations where you have land, you have water, you have energy, the energy is turned on and you just need to build a data center building. And the AI industry, just like Bitcoin, has always been constrained by what we call the three C's: capital, capacity, and compute. It was no different in 2019 when Mara was busy growing to become the biggest miner in the world. It's the same thing today in the AI industry. You go raise money, you go find capacity, and you go buy a bunch of GPUs and plug them in, compute. And that's the basis of what's going on now. So the challenge is if you were to go do greenfield sites, like some of our peers have chosen to do, then you get into queue for power. You have to get permits. It can take you 3 to 5 years. That is too far out from what the AI industry is thinking about today. They need capacity to come online in the next 2 years, or they will lose market share. And so it's a battle, and they're willing to pay fairly high prices.