Rumble's $RUM Q2 Earnings: The Future of AI

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another, I guess, specialty episode of The Matt Kohrs Show. As you could tell, we're in a slightly different setup today. We are in the Rumble offices here in Toronto. It's a beautiful sunny day.

First of all, my apologies for missing the morning show. I wanted to be there with you, but honestly, knock-on-wood type of situation. I just got off the plane, saw how the market was doing today, and I'm actually kind of happy that I missed today. So, hey, I hope you crushed it. I hope you made a buttload of money, and I want to break down a little bit about the overall market.

Yeah, we're going to talk about some of the earnings, what's happening, what's not happening. But obviously since it's a specialty show, you might be kind of figuring out that we are here to talk about Rumble, ticker symbol RUM. We are here for Q2 earnings of 2026. And this one in particular is going to hold a special place in my heart because we're here to talk about what's going on with Rumble and really the Quake AI side of things.

Now, for those of you who need a quick recap—and yes, I'm going to give you a summary of this in a little bit—but what you really need to know is previously Rumble was running with Rumble Cloud, and for a little bit there were some murmurs talking back and forth of what's going on with Northern Data. And if you don't know what that is, picture nine data centers, 250 megawatts of compute as AI is really ramping up.

So, maybe a better analogy—and I've used this multiple times, even sitting right here—is there's a gold rush going on. This particular gold rush is the AI gold rush. And we know in gold rushes that, yeah, some people strike gold and they do great. But you know who really crushed it? The people selling the shovels. And right now people selling compute—well, that's the modern era of selling the shovels in the gold rush. So we heard about this. I got really excited. Northern Data really liked what was going on.

And it was in mid-June—it was either June 15th or 17th, I want to say the 17th, but feel free to fact check me on that one—that the deal was done. So finally, Northern Data from a legal, corporate, fancy-schmancy business perspective was under the umbrella of Rumble. And now this is going to be that first earnings since that deal is officially done that we are going to get those numbers. We're going to have an idea of where this ship is sailing in the future.

And of course, for any of those of you who have specialty questions of what this means, what it doesn't mean, yes, we're going to be listening to the earnings, but after that, we have the opportunity to be sitting down with the founder, the CEO, the chairman of Rumble, Mr. Chris Pavlovski. So, he will be joining.

So, here's the plan, just so we're all on the same page. First of all, you should be smashing the like button. You should be sharing this stream. You should be getting your grandma to watch the show because this is going to be a very important one. We're going to find out really what the next AI leap is for Rumble. Really, we're talking about the future of Rumble. So, very excited about that. So, like it, share it, do whatever you need to. Carrier pigeon message, I don't really care, but get everyone tuning in.

From there, we're going to be talking about a little bit of the overall market. Just so you know, the Rumble earnings call is going to be at 5:00. And of course, we're going to be tuning into that. Just wanted everyone to know. And then right after the earnings call is when Chris is going to be joining us. So, to start off the show, like I said, just wanted to prep everyone up for what's happening, what's not happening. Then a little bit of a discussion of the overall market. More than happy to field any of your questions for individual companies. Hopefully, it's a little bit more AI-related, leaning one way or the other. And then from there at 5:00 PM, we're going to be tuning into that earnings call. And right after that, the CEO, Mr. Chris Pavlovski, will be joining us for your questions, my questions, and everything in between.

But I think this is a very interesting time not only for Rumble as a company, but what's going on with the AI trade. Just last week, we hit a new all-time high in the S&P 500, the overall market. The NASDAQ didn't technically hit a new all-time high, but it's awfully close. And then the small-cap sector did. So, overall, the stock market is looking really, really good. And unless you've been living under a rock, you know that this is being fueled by the AI craze. And then recently we've been getting some of these AI numbers—some of them really good, some of them made... I don't know how many times did we see the headlines of like "Is the AI trade over?"

So as more and more information comes out, we're all doing our best to kind of sift through this information to see what's what, who's who, and what's going on. But I want to go on record saying that I personally believe this AI trade is alive and well. I see that people like to call it the AI bubble. I think it's nothing like that. And then obviously they try to refer to the dot-com bubble. And if you ask me, those comparisons just fall flat because instead of just having magical, mystical, made-up revenue on paper, there's actual products. Actual things are being built. Actual services are being purchased. Actual products are being used. So in my mind, this isn't a bubble. This is just like truly the new age of technology. We're in the new chapter. And the question is just how big is it possibly going to get?

And that kind of brings me to what I think is going to be interesting about this conversation because recently, as in in the past two weeks of our life, we've been hearing a lot of these AI numbers. I mean, we all heard what's going on with Micron, what's going on with SanDisk. The memory play has very much been in focus on the larger scale. The chip plays—Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom—people have been focusing on them. So, we've been having a lot of upscale and downscale conversations here of what's happening. And I believe that this one today, why we are here, Rumble, is just going to be another one. Obviously, it's a bit more upstream in this world. It is the one selling compute. So, I'm excited to see where this is going, what the numbers are going to be. And obviously, I'm most excited to see if we can get any, I guess, indications of where this is going—kind of looking for those guidance numbers. Going to be very excited.

What do we have? What's up, Dorex? I do appreciate you joining in, folks. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And what time is it? About 4:15. So we have roughly 45-ish minutes to kind of break down the overall market situation. And this week is going to be important. If you woke up early this morning and then saw the market today, you're going to know that VIX was a little bit up, markets were a little bit down, oil was a little bit up. And this is all happening as we're basically waiting for inflation numbers. So the big question of the week for the larger overall market from a macro perspective: what's inflation? That's going to be it. So, we're going to find that out a little bit later on this week. That's going to be the major thing as it relates to the overall market and obviously monetary policy.

I need to remind you a lot of people are asking what's going on with the Fed funds rate. That's been the big thing. And remember, there is no Fed meeting in the month of August. Yeah, we're going to have the Jackson Hole Symposium, which is where a bunch of fancy-pants, fancy-schmancy people meet up in Jackson Hole to discuss it. But the next actual FOMC meeting is going to be in September.

Right now, because of the recent reports—remember on Friday of last week when I left you, we ended up getting those unemployment numbers. They were bad, which was then actually kind of good. So unemployment came in a little less than expected, but the jobs, we added less jobs than expected. So when there's concern about the strength of the labor market, well, that's the last time that the Fed wants to really put pressure on it. So they're probably not going to jack up rates.

And that's exactly what we saw a while ago. This was about one or two years ago. We kept talking about how we were in the "upside down" when we got bad economic numbers and it ended up being good for the stock market. We're not fully back in that mode, but we're a little bit back in that mode where if the market gets an indication that the Fed's not going to raise rates, which might be coming from the fact that the job market is a bit soft—which is what happens when you are not adding as many jobs as you thought you would—that's exactly then the situation where, okay, no Fed hike, which was more than a 50% opportunity or chance if you look at Kalshi/Polymarket.

Now that it's not so likely, well, all of a sudden, because of those weak job numbers, the Fed rate hike is less likely. And then, bada-bing, bada-boom, we rip to a new all-time high. And I guess this is just one of those sobering reminders that the stock market and the economy are very, very related, but they're not the exact same thing. I understand that it conceptually feels a little bit weird of you're like, "What do you mean the economy is weak and we just hit a new all-time high?" Yeah, that's exactly what I mean. The stock market and the economy are very, very related, but sometimes what's good for one is not necessarily good for the other. And it has to come to interest rates and inflation and the devaluing of the dollar.

And that's honestly going to be a multi-hour lecture that I think would be boring to you, would be boring to me. And also, we just don't have enough time right now. So, just wanted to give you guys an idea of the larger picture, what's going on in terms of I guess more of the medium-sized picture, if you will—whatever the saying would be for that. Right now it's obviously the AI trade, and then if we're going to get very hyper-specific, it would be about the Rumble earnings today.

So that's kind of the larger picture right now. I do want to kind of turn this over to you. We're going to dive into a couple specific things. If we could switch over the screen here, I do want to let you know Rumble earnings—obviously, that's going to be happening today. The call does start at 5:00. I have it ready to go. We're not going to be missing it at all. We're going to be tuning in live to that. Once again, that is at 5:00 PM. And then right after that, that's when we have the opportunity for me, for you, to actually have a conversation with Mr. Pavlovski, the CEO of the company.

So, whatever's on your mind, let it fire. But I have a sneaky, sneaky suspicion that this is going to be heavily related to what's going on in the world of AI because as you can see from Rumble's own investor relations page right here, Northern Data Group reports Q2 2026, including the advertised fair value movement of contingent consideration. Basically, the deal was done. We knew that happened in June. They updated it. They were obviously telegraphing it for a while saying, "Hey, the paperwork's being filed. We're waiting for approval. That's a done deal."

But now this is the first time—and why I'm so uniquely excited this time around—this is the first earnings where we have the real numbers to talk about. This isn't the hypothetical if it happens, oh, back-of-the-napkin math. It's not that anymore. It's a done deal. Quake AI, excuse me, is alive and well. And now we have the actual numbers to talk about. So that's going to be happening at 5:00 PM.

So yes, that means we do have a bit of time to talk about the other things going on. So just wanted to let you know that. Yeah, it's still the AI trade. I mean, I know the overall market not necessarily the best today, but we're not that far away from an all-time high. We made an all-time high on Wednesday of last week. And yeah, you might be complaining a little bit that we didn't continue today. But look at this ripper: the market saved itself at the end of July, absolutely exploded, new all-time high. And ever since then, we are just going sideways, aka consolidation, which means if you're selling premium, congrats to you. You're probably making a killing. But if you're still ripping calls or puts at this moment in time, well, nothing really that exciting is going on.

And if you want to know why, I could just show you here. I don't have this tab open, but hang on. Just to show you why everyone is waiting, it's just for later on this week, Wednesday morning. Right here—oop, let's get rid of that—you could come to investing.com. We also have it on the locals page, mattkohrs.locals.com, of all the major events, but you're waiting for CPI on Wednesday of this week. Everyone is kind of awkwardly stuck in this consolidation pattern.

Very quickly, just to kick off the new week, the second trading week of August, not much happened today. The S&P 500 slightly red. The NASDAQ 100 a little bit more red. I do want to call out that both of these still have these downside gap fills. The S&P 500, if you're trading S&P, downside gap fill to 7,610. For all my swing traders, that's very important for you to be paying attention to. We can hit that.

I want to be clear: me calling out these downside gap fills, that doesn't make me bearish. I think it would be crazy to be bearish in the market right now because we're literally at all-time highs. And if you've watched this show for any moment of time, you know that historically, I've repeated saying new highs beget new highs. When the stock market hits new highs, if you were to kind of look at the clustering of that data, that's exactly what happens. They're all clustered together. So, the fact that we hit a new high, I would assume that the data we have previously is going to play out once again: new highs get new highs.

So with that being said, I am bullish. It would be crazy not to be bullish in my humble opinion at this moment in time. But I still want you guys to know from a structural, technical perspective, there is a downside gap fill. So maybe a little short-term play there, or even better, be patient and wait for that to fill and maybe it's a long opportunity. Once again, these are just some high-level thoughts. I'm not your mom. I'm not in control of your money. Just something I want to call out to all of you.

And we see a similar situation in the NASDAQ. There's a downside gap fill on the Qs to 701. Once again, this is a strong move. It wasn't a new all-time high, it was darn close. Something to point out, obviously, the bulls are in control. We are trending up—higher highs, higher lows. We're on top of all the EMAs. Yes, the AI trade right now is still crushing it. We'll get into some of these individual stocks, of course, but I just want to let you know, yes, technically you could look at this downside gap fill.

Small-cap sector on the same day last week did hit a new all-time high. This will actually bode well specifically for Rumble. Remember, Rumble is now in the Russell 2000.

Very quickly, Bitcoin is doing absolutely nothing. It's been doing nothing ever since early June of this year. Going sideways, a little up, a little down. The hot story there is just Michael Saylor did sell some for MSTR, but beyond this, it's just not really moving. So, the news there is not much.

Obviously, the belle of the ball today is Rumble. As I've said a gazillion times in this show already, I'm personally very excited to get a better understanding of the actual numbers of what's happening with Quake AI, obviously their data center compute play. When this is happening is kind of an interesting time in terms of price because it's right at its breakout level. It's right at that 50 EMA. Will it turn the momentum around? Obviously, we're going to be finding out very, very shortly.

Obviously, in terms of AI plays, you have the granddaddy of them all, Nvidia—not at the all-time high, very close, downside gap fills, but overall momentum is strong.

SpaceX—I'm bringing this up because when I was doing some research on SpaceX, I know a lot of you tuned into the earnings call for SpaceX last week, and all of a sudden I started to really think about the similarities between SpaceX and Rumble. Now, I know when I say that at first, you're like, "Matt, you're just kind of being sarcastic. You're being a little bit facetious. I don't see what's going on. How are they comparables?" Just give me a second. I will kind of make it a bit evident. I'm not joking around. I think there's a lot of interesting things going on.

But the most interesting thing that I want to talk about with SpaceX is some of the commentary from Elon Musk, and specifically, how much is the compute actually worth? Like, per watt, how much money can we actually talk about? And he had some pretty high numbers. He was talking in the realm of maybe 30 to 50. And if you really dive into the numbers, well, that's quite a bit higher than what we saw in the previous numbers from not only Rumble, but other players where they're like, "Okay, per-watt revenue per year, maybe it's around 6 to 7."

So, all of a sudden, the numbers that people got excited about with AI—the new kid on the block, SpaceX (SpaceX has been around for 20-plus years, but obviously recent IPO, so that's why it's the new kid)—they're actually making the argument that even though AI is trading at a pretty high premium right now, their argument is that it could maybe 5x, 6x, 7x from here, obviously on the compute play side of things, which for potential hyperscalers, which obviously Rumble's leaning a little bit into that, now becomes even more exciting. So, a little bit of development there that I want to get a bit into.

Broadcom—I'm basically just doing my job to show you that SMH, which remember, this is the ETF that's going to be hyper-related to these GPUs, these semiconductor plays, it's sky-high. Is it at the all-time high? No, because a little bit of the recent drama has shifted to plays like Micron and SanDisk, more of the memory, but it's all wrapped up in basically the same thing.

So, right now, if I had to give you a ChatGPT summary of what's going on, things are very elevated. They're not red-red-hot; they're slightly below that. And we're coasting sideways as we're waiting for the next batch of numbers. I believe that's the most fair, honest way to describe what's happening as of August 10th, 2026: a little bit of a pullback from the all-time highs, and now people are saying, "Okay, what is the next move?"

So, with that in mind, we're going to find out the next move with Rumble, ticker symbol RUM, very, very shortly. And just to kind of show you where that one is at, I just had it up a second ago, currently trading at $6, just above $6. We know that it's at that 50 EMA on the daily, so we're waiting to see if it can actually successfully get that breakout. And I think that's going to be pretty apparent when we tune into this call here.

So, that's the skinny on the situation. I do want to talk a little bit about positioning and just kind of where the big money is at and what they've been deciding to do. So, for those of you who maybe felt a little bit of withdrawal from me showing you the big options positioning of the day, this is just kind of where we're at. I wanted to show that to you. Obviously, we could circle back to that. More than happy to answer specific questions on that.

But before I do, my apologies. I did miss a lot of your things. Very quickly, could we click on those Super Chats or the Rumble Rants there in the top so we can directly answer some of those? Can we? Yes, I just feel bad missing them.

"Remember when he wore duck shirts back in the day?" Man, that was the craziness of the, I guess, retail traders in 2021. You know, sometimes we have to upgrade from the duck shirt to the duck... Should I go for a full duck jacket? I'm willing to do it. I'm willing to do it. Shout-out, I appreciate that.

And what's this other one here? Oh, Rumble Rick gifted 50 subscriptions. Shout-out, Rumble Rick! Folks, everyone, say thank you. And if you were one of the people who got the 50 subscriptions, how lucky, how lucky, how lucky.

"Chaos, you're going to make the jacket, the blazer with the ducks." Hey, we can make it happen. I mean, it feels as if a little bit we should be pivoting to maybe like AI ducks, like maybe a little bit more of the Terminator vibe, but I appreciate that.

Okay, so with that in mind, I felt bad missing any of those Rumble Rants. Any specific questions before we dive into the call and some of these other, like I said, these positional things that I think are worthwhile to discuss? Any specific questions?

"What happened to TENX?" I don't know, are you just pitching another random penny stock? Yeah. Oh, a therapeutics... Oh, you're pitching a random pharmaceutical play. This is what happens. Just so you guys know, statistically, nine out of 10 FDA trials at whatever stage, they fail. So most of these pharmaceutical companies, unless you're a huge Pfizer, a huge J&J, where they have like this financial moat to protect it if they have a failed drug, a lot of these other companies are betting all on one drug, maybe two. So if they end up not passing FDA, like I don't even know what the story is, but I would assume it was just because of one of their drugs failed, if I had to guess.

I don't really care. This is the one subsector that for me is really outside of what I deal with. I have no particular edge. I cannot tell you when I read the documentation on if one drug is going to do well or not. That's just not my area of expertise. My chance of being successful trading pharma plays is zero to nothing. And if I had to play it, because I have no unique knowledge of what drugs will or won't do well, I would just short every single one because the odds are that most of these companies, whether good or not—I'm not saying if this is moral or not—most of them just do not pass. So for me, this is the one subsector that I'm the most far out of my depth on, and I end up not playing it. But just seeing these time and time again, this is kind of just how it plays out. So that's TENX.

XRP prices: Ripple, if you ask me, I've said it before, some of you took personal offense to it, Ripple's a test of intelligence. People who are still in it and think that it's going to redo the entire banking system are dumb and don't know what they're talking about. And then there's the other people who just avoided it, or the smartest people actually shorted it. But XRP, I haven't even seen it in a minute. They have futures on it, and now what's it doing? Yeah, it's just getting absolutely destroyed.

I mean, the arguments with Ripple, it's just random stuff. It's horrible. The security is not there. They've changed the ledger. They're not redoing the banking system. I don't know who needs to hear it. And hey, if you're in it, I'm not rooting for you to lose money. I'm trying to help the people who didn't put money into it to not put money into it. If you're in it, I hope it magically bounces one day, maybe on a political update, and you could get out maybe with a little bit of green, maybe a little bit of break-even. I'm not betting... Well, I wish I bet against you. I don't have a plan on it. I don't have a horse in this particular race, but just understand it's just another crypto thing.

I mean, right now crypto's been under a lot of pressure. I would say if we looked at it in terms of the odds of which has the best chance of surviving this quote-unquote "crypto winter," it is Bitcoin. Bitcoin has the highest chance of survival. Does that mean it will survive? I don't know. That's not how odds work, but it has the highest chance of survival. So, anything that's not Bitcoin has lower odds. Now, we don't need to break down a full stats class right now. Bitcoin has the highest chance. If you're saying you think another one's going to survive, it's higher risk, higher reward. If you are right, you have a bigger payday, but understand you're also taking on more risk and the chance of survival is that much lower.

So, maybe you agree with that, maybe you don't. In my heart, I think Bitcoin has a real shot just because I think people are getting tired of fiat currencies and the endless devaluation, debasement. Like, yeah, I think that there's a good reason to have a currency outside of the control of government. But I don't necessarily think that means that we need 500 of them, which is why I think deeply that Bitcoin has the best shot. We have to wait to see how it comes out of this crypto winter. Fingers crossed that it can survive, it comes back even stronger. But obviously at this exact moment in time, it is fighting an uphill battle.

But I do believe—I want to go on record saying this—that if you were to wait about a year from now, if we were talking in late summer of next year, I do think it's going to be trading at a higher price. But once again, that is specific to Bitcoin. I think there's a lot of other quote-unquote meme coins or just altcoins that are not going to get out of this. I just don't think that they're going to survive this. And I think the communities who were supporting it, they're not going to be able to withstand the hit. And all of a sudden, so many of these are community-based. We saw that previously with AMC that when the community just leaves, the price doesn't recover. So we saw that with AMC. We saw that with GME. When the community is gone, the price just does not come back. It's really, really... I mean, even think about Doge or Shiba. It's extraordinarily difficult to capture lightning in a bottle one time, no less doing it a second or a third time.

And from a retail perspective, I find that people try to do that time and time again. They're like, "Well, AMC did go up, Dogecoin did go up, so like they should go up again." Folks, like the perfect storm that you had to have come together on the first time, like if we just look at the odds of it, extraordinarily rare. And then to say that it should be a second or a third time... Hey, I hope if you have money in it, I hope that in the future one day you could come into chat and say, "Matt, you were wrong. Haha, I made a bunch of money." I hope that that happens, but if we're here just to play the basic odds of it, it's probably just not going to.

"I did already trade Adobe." JBYC, I can't say your name, that will probably get me cancelled somewhere, so we're just going to use acronyms from now on. You love trading Adobe. I'll look at it because it seems like you've been making some good money. Oh, Adobe actually is looking... This is a stock that I never look at, I never consider. There's just too many stocks to always interpret all the time, but this one's been on a nice run from 190 to 270. You're crushing it, and I hope you make even more money off of it.

"Should I sell all of my Hawk Tuah coins?" You know, I might be proven wrong here live. I said that Bitcoin might have been my only favorite crypto play. Hawk Tuah has a real shot, folks. Maybe put it this way: if you haven't yet invested in your kids' college fund, maybe you should take all of your money and put it in that. And I don't know how many of you are interested into doing a third, fourth, fifth mortgage on your house, but if you haven't already, I mean, maybe you should and put it all into Hawk Tuah coin.

I try to really stray away from giving financial advice, but I think that's just a layup. Like back in the day, you got core stocks: Apple, Microsoft, GE, Caterpillar, stuff like that. I would say that Hawk Tuah is probably the modern age Berkshire Hathaway, not only in potential returns, but also in just pure sex appeal. I know that's a hot-topic thing to say, but Warren Buffett, Hawk Tuah, it's probably those two. There's no difference in my mind between those two whatsoever.

All right. Are there final questions on today? I do want to break down a little bit of the flow, the positioning, maybe a setup for the rest of the week, some of those interesting opportunities. But more than happy to take some of your individual questions. I know I missed you in the morning, and I know some people come in and they have important questions. So, I do feel a little bit bad.

"How many mortgages is too many?" Probably double digits. You probably shouldn't mortgage your house above 10, but if you're nine or below, I think Dave Ramsey would agree with that. I'm pretty sure he would agree with that, but I don't know, maybe we should ask him. Maybe we should call into him.

"Was gifted a membership by Rumble Rick." Shout-out to Rick, and congrats to CJR. Folks, very, very helpful to have those memberships. 50, that's a big one. Honestly, I think that might be the biggest one on this channel. We'll have to fact check that, but we'll have to send Rick a fruit basket or something, folks. And obviously if you did that, you should thank him.

All right. More people I can see on the numbers here coming in. Just so you guys know, Rumble—we're here for Rumble's earnings. That will be at 5:00 PM Eastern. So we have about 20 to 30 minutes before we really shift gears to Rumble. And I want to be hyper, hyper-specific about this, diving into what in the world is happening with Quake AI. Quake AI is the combination of Northern Data and Rumble Cloud right now. Yes, I know Rumble is commonly thought of as a free speech video platform, and that is 100% what it is, but now there's other pillars to the business that personally really excites me.

Obviously, I'm hyper-supportive of free speech and everything that that entails. Honestly, at one point—well, actually three points, four points—when I was terminated three or four times from YouTube, Rumble was obviously a very welcoming home for me. So yes, that will always have a special place in my heart. But for traders and especially for investors, you might be thinking: what's the next big thing that has the potential to really be impactful on the stock and the stock price?

And in my mind—and maybe I'm right on this, maybe I'm wrong on it; I think by the time history is writing the books of this one, I will be right—Quake AI, very, very excited to know what's going on with the 22,000-plus GPUs that Rumble has under its control, the business agreements with Tether, where AI in general is going. Very, very excited. So, once again, that call is at 5:00 PM Eastern. If you're tuning in for this, we will 100% be doing that. We're just obviously doing a little bit of a larger market breakdown as we are waiting.

"Is MK coming to interview with Chris? If not, request it." Don't know who MK is, but MK is interviewing Chris, and I feel like we're only one letter off, so if we round up, I think that one's going to be good.

All right. Maybe Turf Shog. Those are some choice words that you feel like saying to the YouTube audience. "I barely started using to make thumbnails for my channel. At least Rumble suggests a kind of stream for people." With that, I mean, obviously it feels like right now in one way or another, all roads come back to AI, but actually we had some conversations here that Rumble is continually using AI to improve the algorithm, the suggestions, so it'll just get better and better. Shout-out, that's cool.

Polish. All right, cool. I don't want to miss anything. Let's talk a little bit about what happened today. Actually, before I do it, how did you guys do on these sim accounts today? I want to ask. To be completely honest with you folks, I think if I had to trade it, maybe I would have been able to catch this short at 10:50, but just like in a moment of transparency, honesty, whether I was trading TPT or Tradeify, I think I might have tried to go short too early around 10:10 and maybe I would have gotten caught up.

So, like, as much as I wish I could tell you that I would have absolutely destroyed this short at 10:50, absolutely destroyed this short at 12:30, there's a chance that I would have been a little bit of an overeager beaver here at 10:20, got blown out just for it then to go my way anyway, and then I probably would have got tilted and really, really angry about that. So, maybe I should actually be happy that at that moment in time I was on a little bit of a plane ride and that particular plane ride did stop me. So, I wanted to break this down. I wanted to kind of be honest. Like, I want to say that I think I would have caught that, but like I would have just been so excited by the sell-off in the morning that any pop I would have gotten into, and at 10:20, I would have thought it was really smart and I would have been trying to ride it just for it to be a fake-out at 10:30, 10:40. So, I hope you guys were better than me. Honestly, I hope you guys somehow avoided this. I don't know how it did or didn't do for your accounts, but just trying to be honest about it.

"RUM stock has been dead money for 5 years. If you held, we'll just trade RUM in and out for future trades." Well, that's the thing about expansion and consolidation. A lot of stocks will do nothing until they do everything. And right now, I mean, that's a fair criticism. The stock has been going sideways. But also with that, that's actually a perfect opportunity to sell premium. I know that's a bit more of an advanced topic, and if you want to get into the details, I do have that on the channel. We talk a lot about it in the Discord.

But on that note, there's people I know—shout-out to Sean if you're in here right now—who their net basis on Rumble is actually a negative value because they've sold so much premium. Remember, I know it's thought initially when you don't know anything about the stock market that you can only make money when it goes up. You learn a little bit of things here and there and then you realize, "Oh, I could actually also make money when something is going down." And then the people who are really getting into the game, they realize that they can make even sometimes more money when a stock is going sideways.

So once again, if you like Rumble the way I do, I am not an active trader of Rumble. And I guess just for transparency's sake, I want this out there: I am invested in Rumble. I have Rumble shares. I don't know the last time I played calls or puts. I don't even know if I ever have, but if I did, it was years ago. I do have Rumble stock, but remember, on that stock, you could always sell premium. There are people who have a net negative basis because they've sold so much premium and they've taken all that credit against their Rumble shares that they're just sitting pretty no matter what's going on. So yes, you can make money when a stock is going sideways.

But I have hope that this sideways grind that we're seeing in Rumble is hopefully the market's about to reward it with what it's doing in the world of AI. That's what we're sitting here to kind of listen to, to kind of figure out, and to obviously ask...

The guy who's at the helm of the ship, when Chris will be joining us a little bit later, roughly an hour from now, of what's going on, what's not going on. And yes, he loves fielding the questions from you. So, a unique opportunity to directly speak with the CEO, and I suggest if you have those questions to definitely be asking in chat today. If you've never been involved in one of these before, what Chris likes to do is we chat a little bit about the recent numbers and then we turn it over to all of you guys where you could ask what is on your mind. So if that's something that interests you, it'll be happening right after the earnings call today. So just wanted to put that on everyone's radar.

I know that we seemingly keep coming back to Rumble right now and that's obviously for good reason because that's what this one's all about. But because we have a little bit more time, I guess before I get into kind of the positional update and what did or didn't happen today, not related to Rumble, are there any specific questions? What does it mean to sell premium? Premium is a term in the world of options trading. You have call premium and you have put premium and that's just either the price, that's the value of it. That's how much it costs to either buy or sell at that moment in time. So it's specific to the world of options traders, but then you can use that. People sell call premium against their shares or if they have cash secured puts, they can sell some puts and things like that. It gets a little bit complicated and it's not necessarily the premise of this show because we'd have to get into the weeds of what it is to actually be trading calls or puts and what side you want to take it from.

But just in general, if you need a little bit of homework, if you get absurdly bored tonight or maybe this weekend and you want something to look into, yeah, look into selling premium. If you come from the world of sports betting, the best analogy without getting too deep into this is basically equivalent to over and unders. If you want to sell puts, that's equivalent to over bets. If you think the stock will be above price X by whatever date, you would sell puts, and that's equivalent in the world of sports gambling to over bets. And then if you sell calls it would be equivalent to under bets. So just by whatever date, whatever price, if you think it's going to be below that price, you can get paid if you are right on that announcement. And so for the under bets you would be selling calls. So once again, sell calls for the under bets, you would sell puts for the over bets. And that's probably the best analogy I can come up with real-time without getting too steep into it.

How do you set up option profits to go against share price? There's various ways to benefit off of options regardless of the stock. Again, share price—well, you just do the opposite one. If you think a stock is going to go up, you would benefit from either buying calls or selling puts. So then obviously the opposite is going to also be true. If you think something is going to go down, you would benefit from buying puts or selling calls. So you can express whatever opinion. That's actually one of the coolest things about the modern era of brokerages and everything in between is whatever you think is going to happen, you can express that. You can make money off of any directional move or no directional move on anything except for going backwards. And at that point you're talking about some Marvel level time dilation. I don't know, that's outside of my purview.

But if you think something is going up, down, or sideways, or a little up or a little down, or within a certain range, you can make money off of all that. If you think it's going to be within a certain bound, you can make money off of that. If you think it's a big move in one direction, but you don't know the direction, you're like, "No, it's either massively up or massively down," you can make money off of that. You can, in the modern era, especially with all these products between futures and options, and you could do crazy stuff like iron condors and butterflies, this, that, the other thing, you can make money off of any potential directional movement besides literally just backwards. That's the only one that quite yet we just haven't figured out. So just to, I guess, break that down.

What's the play? Well, the play for right now is paying attention to Rumble. In terms of interesting setups, I'm still a big fan of what's going on on any AI-related thing. Recently, I thought there was a solid risk-reward setup on Broadcom. This is the second biggest processing chip play, the biggest being Nvidia, but Broadcom, I just like this breakout and the hold. Palantir, it's getting some life. Back to the conversation when someone said, "Hey, Rumble's just going sideways. It's a bit boring." Look at what's going on with Palantir. Sometimes stocks are very boring until they're not. Palantir just going sideways at $140 and then out of nowhere exploding from $105 up to $174.

This has nothing to do with AI quite yet, but let me show you what's going on with Texas Roadhouse. Texas Roadhouse, another stock that was just doing nothing and then all of a sudden it explodes. So stocks can be dormant. If you subscribe to this Wyckoff theory of investing, it's referred to as accumulation. You're looking for accumulation followed by some sort of distribution, continuation, blah blah blah, the boring words. But look at Texas Roadhouse: just nothing, nothing, nothing. And this whole time they were slinging those golden buns with cinnamon butter this entire time. But then it was just more recently that the market rewarded it for obviously running a pretty solid business and it started to explode from $160 to $207.

So necessarily going sideways, I wouldn't in my mind assume that that's a good or a bad thing. It just is what it is. Price is going sideways and there's no larger market force, whether on the aggressive bull side or on the aggressive bear side, to get it to really break out of that particular range. And for those of you who know about Donchian trading or maybe you read the book Turtle Soup, that's what people look for: they look for a bunch of sideways movement and then on the breakout or the breakdown, they look to play it. Kind of an old adage is the longer that it remains sideways, not doing much, well, that means that the next move is going to be that much more explosive. So actually, I kind of take back what I just said of it not being good or bad.

Well, actually, in the case of something like Rumble where we have a lot of sideways accumulation, obviously if the team surrounding me right now can execute well on this AI play, that's a lot of, I guess, potential energy that is hopefully converted into kinetic energy to the upside. But that's what we're going to be diving into in this particular chit-chat. So I hope that makes sense. Obviously, if I confuse anyone, feel free to ask a follow-up. "Texas Roadhouse went up because I got a FOPic." Just you, bio man, like you specifically bought so much Texas Roadhouse. You know, for all of us Texas Roadhouse investors, we should say thank you. I don't know what you're talking about, but if you're correct, you should be right.

I think I missed that one. I meant based on stock price. Not every stock is expensive. If you're new to the world of trading, it's not appropriate to compare Rumble's $6 to Nvidia's $217 because not every stock in the world has the same amount of shares out in the world. So really, the fairest, the most fair comparison is market cap. Something could be $10 and could be overvalued, and something could be trading at $200 and can be undervalued. Now, maybe you were just never told that before and at first you might think, "Wow, that other one is 20x," in just this hypothetical situation, $200 versus $10. But that's not how we compare things in the world of the stock market. In the world of the stock market, you should look at, obviously, just total market cap.

And the quick computation for that is the amount of shares in existence, known as the float, multiply that by the share price. And it's just because it's not stagnant. It's not like every company in the world has the same amount of shares in existence. So sometimes the float is huge and sometimes the float is really, really small. So in terms of is something cheap or not, it's not based off just the share price. You would want to see how many shares are in existence, and then honestly you can get into kind of a deeper, I guess, philosophical discussion from there and start looking at things like its revenue, its price-to-earnings, and really know is something overvalued or undervalued. And that's probably why you've heard about terms such as PE ratio, the price-to-earnings, to know if something is over- or undervalued. And that's just like one way to do it. But don't fall for the trap of just assuming because something has a low value that it's cheap and something having a high nominal value is expensive. That's just not a fair comparison for the market.

I got screwed like that four weeks ago. If you roll it, you short a lot, gets renewed for 100 except if it assigns. That was a reverse split; you only get a small portion. So when there is a stock split, which honestly depending on the direction you go, that could be a good or bad thing. Historically, Tesla has splits because it got so expensive that they wanted it to be a cheaper nominal value, that they did splits. So all of a sudden, if you own one share at $500 and they did a 5:1 split, well, you would then have five shares at $100. So you still have the same nominal cost investment, but you just have more shares. It's equivalent to splitting a $10 bill into 10 $1 bills. You still have the same amount of overall value. You just now have a different amount of bills, but they still add up to the same thing. So that's a split.

A reverse split is exactly what it is: the reverse split. So all of a sudden, you could have 10 $1 bills and it goes to one $10 bill. So even though you have the same value, generally the market actually treats reverse splits kind of not so positively. Generally, when a company is doing a reverse split, it's doing it so it doesn't get delisted. There's a lot of companies that when they fall below the $1 mark, they're at risk of getting delisted from the NASDAQ. So they end up doing this reverse split so the nominal value goes higher because that's just one of the rules to stay listed on the NASDAQ, and then NYSE has equivalent rules. So it's not always true, but a lot of the times when you hear reverse stock splits, it's not a good situation.

But to your question of what happens when you have options on that and then they announce it, the process is referred to as being made whole and that's actually when they do properly update the options contracts as well. Just to share that with all of you. So, okay, good questions. I think we're getting a little deep in the weeds here in some of the specifics, but of course at one point people just don't know it and then someone has to teach it to you, and then from there on out you do know it. 100 shares equals one lot equals one contract. In the world of options, yes, that is as of now—and I don't know why we don't have micro option contracts that maybe represent something like 10—but yes, one options contract, whether a call or put, represents 100 shares of the underlying. So if you buy one RUM call, you're in control of 100 shares of Rumble. Same thing with puts; they represent 100 shares of the underlying. Sometimes you have non-normal contracts and that can happen with splits, but that's actually a very, very rare thing.

Just so you guys know, we have 10 minutes to go until we hear from Rumble and their earnings. How's it doing in post-market? Nice recovery at one point. Someone sold it down to $6.05, but we're bouncing back up to actually above where we closed. So, waiting on those numbers now. And actually, let's go to their Twitter page. I want to just see if we have any updates from Rumble. Rumble Group reports record second quarter in 2026. Revenue is up 61% year-over-year. All right, let's dive into these details, prep up a little bit. Let's see if we could hit the major, major things that happened.

So once again, if you are invested in Rumble or have considered it, this is going to be very important. So, record revenue $40.4 million, up 61% year-over-year. Record revenue for Rumble excluding Northern Data, 21%. So that's even stronger. The fact that they hit a record—of course, they were going to hit record revenue with the acquisition of Northern Data because it's basically printing money, but even without that, they still hit record revenue. So that's very strong. Closed the acquisition on Northern Data. That is now basically what's being referred to as Quake AI, additionally approximating 250 megawatts of unmonetized 2027 target. That's potentially a lot of money. If you dive into their estimates previously, they thought basically on an annual revenue basis per watt was anywhere from like $6 to $7ish.

If you listen to Elon Musk, and we're definitely going to be getting into this conversation, he's arguing it's worth anywhere from $30 to $50. So if you do the conversion on that, that's potentially $250 million annually of revenue. Targeted capacity revenue is ending $3 billion plus ARR. Forming guidance beginning—so, okay, we now are officially going to be getting guidance from them. Initiating formal guidance beginning the third quarter of 2026, revenue outlook of $87 to $93 million. This is a large, large jump. If you have paid attention to any of the previous earnings numbers, generally it was in the realm of, okay, we're talking about 20, 25ish. So now clearly we're seeing a massive, massive increase.

All right, so here are the key highlights: closed the acquisition of Northern Data AG on June 17th, 2026, securing approximately 85% of Northern Data's outstanding shares. Renamed the parent company RUM Group, and now Rumble Cloud, as you probably heard it, with Northern Data is referred to as Quake AI. And for those of you who need a quick recap on why the Northern Data deal is such a big deal, well, it's because it has 22,000 GPUs. And on top of that, already very nice business agreements with Tether, the crypto company, representing over $100 million. Record quarterly revenue of $40.4 million, up 58% quarter-over-quarter and 61% year-over-year. Northern Data contributed $10 million from the date of acquisition already. Wow. From June 17th to I don't know the exact end date, probably as of either today or maybe last week, already $10 million. So we'll have to ask a little bit more about that, but very impressive no matter how you slice it up.

Record revenue of $30.3 million on Rumble Video Business, up 19%. Very impressive. With the close of the acquisition of Northern Data to provide greater visibility and insight, the company is initiating formal guidance beginning with revenue outlook for the third quarter of 2026: $87 million to $93 million. This is a large drop—or a large, large jump, excuse me, huge jump. Almost $100 million. Wow. Quake AI now has approximately 250 megawatts of unmonetized capacity targeted for 2026, which we believe represents a $3 billion plus annual run rate opportunity. That's crazy, cuz even 250 at $1, that's $250 million, and then depending on what multiple you think it's going to be at, I mean, that could be a big, big amount of money. So I mean, even at four bucks, you're talking about a billion. So they must be doing, I guess, like we could do the backwards math on that, but I mean, if you believe Elon and what he was just saying about the Rubin, it could honestly be even quite a bit higher. So this particular line is one that I'm very interested into asking Chris about and getting some of the details of this number. And really, I would think that there's a pretty compelling argument that it honestly could be even more. So very excited to talk about that one.

Signed a multi-year agreement with Together AI to deploy Nvidia B300 GPUs cloud capacity. Okay, once again really committing to this AI play. Personally, I think that's incredibly strong. Quake AI continues to have stronger performance and demand for its existing GPU estate with utilization of approximately 85% for the quarter. 85% is roughly going to be the max. I mean, if your goal, if you're thinking, "Oh, they're going to scale it up to 100," that's not really just how data centers work. There is always going to be—you're not going to really hit 100% capacity. This is sky-high, pretty good. Maybe they can move the needle a little bit there, but that's pretty much maxing it out. So 85%, that's impressive.

They've already made $10 million since the acquisition was formally agreed to by regulators. 250 megawatts of unmonetized capacity targeted for next year, for 2027. Wow. Wow. So they're thinking $12. That is honestly—I mean, depending on who you believe or who you don't, if you do this math out, they're basically saying that they're getting $12 per watt. And some estimates, and when I say some, I'm talking about Elon Musk in the SpaceX earnings call for everyone who listened to that, he's thinking that it could be anywhere from 30 to 50, and basically just he's really leaning into the Jevons paradox there for anyone who needs something to search as we're waiting for this. But what a jump. Look at this for the three months ended in June, so comparing quarter-to-quarter: this time last year we were talking about $25 million, this time $40.4 million, an increase of 61%. That's very, very impressive.

All right, what else do we have? Yeah, the cost is going to go up. Okay, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I guess at this point, I don't know how there's any way to not say this so directly or to think anyway. Rumble very much, yes, it is still a video platform. Many of you are watching on Rumble right now. But I think we now have indisputable evidence that this is just becoming a straight-up AI play. It's an AI play almost with a video platform as a kicker. I don't know necessarily which one you think comes first in this. Obviously historically, chronologically, yes, the video platform came first, but I think in terms of potential exciting stock movement, this is video platform meets strong AI infrastructure play. I mean, these are some big numbers. 250 megawatts of unmonetized capacity targeted for next year. So not only is that a lot, maybe $3 billion plus is their estimate. I think we're going to have a good conversation of I think that could potentially be more, and we're talking about it pretty soon. Pretty soon for 2027.

All right. Well, just so you guys know, that's the skinny on it. I'm sure we're going to hear some of these, but we're going to get a deeper conversation from this call, which will be starting in about one or two minutes, two minutes and some change. So if you are tuning in, we actually have some other numbers as well coming across the board. Let me just double check some of these. UPWK, Upwork, double beat, going down on the double beat. There's some other earnings that are hitting the wire right now. I just want to share it just in case. What is this one? OpenAI has completed a $7 billion buyback of employee shares ahead of the potential IPO, so they know what's going on. Rare Element Resources, double miss, as I see some of you in chat. That was a double miss as well. Hims, apparently their international revenue just exploded. QBTS, so for my quantum plays, miss on EPS and sales. Archer, they hit expectations; sales beat, but EPS was at expectations. Hims actually dumped on the double miss there, but I guess their international sales. Rocket Lab looking interesting as well. Plug had a double beat. And I think those were all the major earnings as of today. Yeah, those were all the major earnings. So not as many massive mega-cap reports as we had last week, but still very, very important ones.

"Can Chris get me that 10K I was back when Rumble and video won? That was like five years ago." I don't know what you're talking about on that one, that back when Rumble had the video win. I don't know what that competition was. I have no idea what we're really talking about. "WTF, good numbers and the price isn't doing squat." Well, remember stocks don't react to what happened historically, and that's what earnings are. Earnings are a snapshot of what just played out if you're looking at the most recent earnings. The stock is a forward-looking mechanism. So that's why the guidance discussion is so much more important. We've seen it before where stocks beat on both numbers and go down. We've seen it where stocks miss on both numbers and go up. And the answer to why that happens is the stock price does not care about what happened; they care about what's about to happen. Very, very important.

But with that being said, let's turn this on. All right, we have a little bit of the, I guess, elevator waiting room music, but the earnings call will be underway. And of course, we're going to be playing that very quickly. Can you guys hear this? Everyone in chat, whether you're on Rumble chat, YouTube chat, MySpace chat, whatever chat you're on right now, can we get a thumbs up, thumbs down? I just want to make sure the volume levels are coming through, and then of course we can readjust for you when they actually start the call. But it's going to be starting momentarily. And then of course, we're going to have the stock price up as we are listening to it to see what kind of happens in real time.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to RUM Group '26 earnings conference call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Monday, August 10, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Shannon Devine, Investor Relations for RUM Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Chris Pavlovski, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of RUM Group, and Mike Massey, CFO. A press release detailing our second quarter 2026 results was released today and available on our Investor Relations website. Before we begin the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made on this call may include predictions, estimates, or other information that may be considered forward-looking. All forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this call and should be considered in conjunction with the company's cautionary statements in our earnings release and the factors included in our filings with the SEC. Future company updates will be available via press release and the company's identified social media channels. I will now turn the call over to RUM Group's Founder, Chairman, and CEO, Chris Pavlovski.

Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. This was a landmark quarter both operationally and financially, and let me start by walking you through the high-level financials. First, revenue for the second quarter was $40.4 million, an increase of $15.3 million or 61% compared to $25.1 million in the second quarter of 2025. Taking a turn to our expenses, we continue to make strategic investments to best position ourselves for high growth in AI. Cost of services were $30.6 million, up from $26.5 million a year ago, driven by higher programming and content costs as well as the incremental data center expenses from the Northern Data acquisition.

General and administrative expenses were $16.3 million, up from $11.7 million, again primarily driven by Northern Data, which contributed $5 million of payroll and other administrative costs. Excluding Northern Data, the remaining increase reflects higher payroll and other administrative costs, partially offset by lower professional fees. Research and development expenses were $6.8 million, up from $4.8 million. Sales and marketing expenses were $10.4 million, up from $7.9 million, attributable to higher marketing and public relations spend, increased payroll, and other sales and marketing related expenditures.

Adjusted EBITDA loss for the quarter was $16.6 million, an improvement from a loss of $20.5 million in the second quarter of 2025. Net loss for the quarter was $80.3 million or $79.1 million attributable to RUM Group Inc. compared to a net loss of $30.2 million in the second quarter of 2025. The year-over-year increase in net loss was primarily driven by $28.3 million of acquisition-related transaction costs associated with the Northern Data close along with higher non-cash depreciation and amortization following the acquisition. We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $220.5 million, consisting of $203.3 million in cash and cash equivalents and 293.14 Bitcoin valued at roughly $17.2 million.

Before I get into guidance, I want to talk you through an important change in how we will report going forward. This will be the last quarter we present MAU and ARPU as headline metrics for the company. Those numbers described a single video audience business and following the Northern Data acquisition, that's no longer the full picture of what RUM Group is. Beginning with our third quarter report, we plan to move to segment reporting: Rumble Video and Quake AI, each with its own revenue and profitability metrics. I think that's a far more useful way for all of you to understand where we're allocating capital and how each part of our business is actually performing, and it's the reporting structure I'll be building around as I get further into the seat.

So that brings me to guidance. For the first time, we are issuing formal revenue guidance. For the third quarter of 2026, our first full quarter reflecting Quake AI, we expect revenue between $87 million and $93 million. We've heard directly from many of you that formal guidance would help you better understand this business, and now that Northern Data is closed with strong contracted revenue, high utilization, we felt this was the right moment to give you that visibility. Over time, as our forecasting visibility continues to improve, we plan to build this out further, including longer-term views. Building a disciplined, credible guidance process is something I'm personally focused on as we establish our track record with all of you.

So in summary, this was a transformational quarter: record revenue, both including and excluding Northern Data. We closed Northern Data and established Quake AI as a leader in AI compute-as-a-service. We signed a marquee agreement with Together AI and we are now focused as a team on converting our 250 megawatts of unmonetized power targeted for 2027 into what we believe is a $3 billion plus annual revenue run rate opportunity. I was excited when I came on board at the end of March, and today I'm more excited about where RUM Group is headed, and I look forward to updating you on our progress. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we are now ready to open the line for questions.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now begin the question-and-answer session. To ask a question, you may press star followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you're using a speakerphone, please pick up your handset before pressing the keys. To withdraw your question, please press star two. One moment, please, for your first question. And your first question comes from the line of Tom Forte with Maxim Group. Please go ahead.

Hey, this is Henry Dair filling in for Tom Forte. So I got two questions. Firstly, Chris, there's some debate amongst investors as to what happens for the pricing for AI when capacity catches up with demand. I would appreciate your thoughts on that matter.

Okay, thank you. And this may be too early as you just finished the Northern Data transaction, but I would appreciate your current thoughts on your strategic M&A strategy and types of companies you'd consider adding moving forward.

Okay, thank you.

And your next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Please go ahead.

Hey everybody. Congrats on giving guidance, and I never say congratulations on a call, so glad we hit this milestone. So just first to dig in some of the questions I think folks have is so when you think about kind of getting what you need to get the compute going, obviously you've gotten the cash now. Just help us understand the challenges around getting the chips, racks, cooling, all the parts you need for the data center. How much has already been contracted, like it's signed, and just help us understand timing of when that comes online. And then just if you want to weave into that, because I think most people know that is challenging to get all of the equipment to get the data centers open, have you thought about potentially doing the TeraWulf playbook where basically you run the infrastructure and then the customers bring the chips and the racks? And then I've got a follow-up on advertising back.

Yeah, no worries. Hey Jason, this is a record-setting quarter. We hit record revenue and record number of congratulations from you, so it's wonderful. So to your question on capex, I think when we look at agreements like something what we did with Together AI, we don't sign the contract in the agreement until we have strong line of sight to be able to secure the right amount of equipment and capacity to be able to put that one online. So to answer your question, you can see from our cash flow statements that this past quarter we had a large uptick in our investing activities, upwards of almost 47 million in investing activities, which is unusual for us. That really went towards a lot of the purchases of that IT capex that's going to be necessary to execute that AI compute-as-a-service deal. So think of that as the start of that process. We feel really good about where we are in terms of our ability to get supply to be able to ultimately fulfill our obligation for key deals, including the one with Together AI. In terms of your question about the TeraWulf model, which not to be specific about them as a name, but we sometimes in the industry call this the power-and-shell model. So the idea if you have capacity for power in the way that we do, you build the data center and then you lease it out to somebody on a long-term lease for them to be able to do AI compute as a service. So we actually address some of this in our investor deck. It's a worthy business model, but what we found is the unique ability to deliver AI compute as a service is something that's been differentiated in the industry. It's one of the things that's really interested us and we think is a huge value add from Northern Data. They've been doing AI compute as a service for a number of years. And so just to make that real, we put this in our investor deck, but you can think of doing power-and-shell is monetized at roughly anywhere from 1.5 million to 2 million per megawatt per year. Delivering AI compute as a service just on the Blackwell generation, we show that that delivers at almost 11 million per megawatt per year. So you're talking about orders of magnitude of almost 5x in terms of the value creation when you deliver that AI compute as a service. Now, it's not without cost to your point of the ability to be able to secure effectively the AI compute hardware, the capability to be able to actually operate some of the most complex machinery in the world, etc. But to me, as a company, Northern Data and RUM Group have really earned that right over a number of years in partnership with Nvidia, and so we're really happy to be able to take advantage of that 5x monetization opportunity. We feel like that's our business model moving forward is really AI compute as a service.

Okay. But I mean the main point you're saying is that whenever you make a public announcement, you've already secured basically the hardware to do that. So that's how investors should think about modeling this kind of building as you go with these announcements. So is that going to be the policy, though? I guess in a way it's almost like a guidance philosophy. So should we assume like every major customer win like that you're going to announce and then that's how we can think about the timing of the scaling of the model?

So first of all, what I described is really how we're going to seek from an operating model perspective. So don't take this as a commitment or a policy. I would struggle with those words a bit. But to your point, as a leadership and management team, our first job is prudent risk management. So we would not enter into contracts that we didn't feel like we had the ability to fulfill. So ultimately having things like supply allocation and certain execution is part of the way we do our diligence before we would sign up for a deal. And then remind me the second part of your question.

Oh, no, that's fine. That covers that. And then just on the ad business, kind of a nice acceleration on a year-over-year basis. Can you give us how much did Tether, I guess the Tether ad commitments, impact the quarter if you're willing to break that out? Thanks.

Yeah, we do have this. I know it's pretty quick turnaround from when the Q came out, but we actually do have this broken out in the Q to show you how much was related to Tether during the quarter. We had roughly 6 million related to Tether or, sorry, about 4.88 million related to Tether in Q2.

Got it. Appreciate it. Thank you.

And I'm showing no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, this now concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

All right, it does not conclude it for us. In fact, we're just getting going because as much as those boring fancy-schmancy analysts from Wall Street got to ask their questions, you guys didn't get to ask your questions and that's what's about to happen. So when things get squared away with that official call, in due time the founder, CEO, and chairman of Rumble, Mr. Chris Pavlovski, will be joining us here. He will be here in person. I have a couple questions. I was taking notes throughout that, like some things that I think would be interesting to dive into, get some clarification on, and then from there we're going to be turning it over to you guys. And we have all these nice monitors set up so he'll be able to see the chat in real time. So if there's something that you want answered, basically feel free to spam the chat and if you catch his eye, if he finds it to be an interesting question, I'm sure he will be more than happy to answer that.

So yes, it is important and I think that there's some CEOs who do this the right way. I think there's many more who do it the wrong way. A lot of CEOs just cater to the analysts, while I'm on a personal note very, very impressed with Chris wanting to talk with you guys directly. He cares a lot about retail and the communication lines with you guys to let you guys know what's going on, to be as transparent as possible, to take the feedback, the criticism. I honestly truly, truly respect it. So that will be starting momentarily. So obviously get your questions ready. We're going to be doing that. But just to kind of go over some of these notes that I have so you guys know where my mind's at as I'm heading into this conversation to get us going. The first thing that jumps out to me is this concept of what's referred to as the Jevons paradox. If you want to look that up, that's going to be a big focal point for me: J-E-V-O-N-S paradox. Look that one up. But overall, I mean, obviously, they crushed it. Record-breaking in terms of revenue.

But what's interesting, it was record-breaking in terms of revenue even without Northern Data, without the new Quake AI business pillar. So, I find that to be very interesting. I want to dive into not only how they were able to pull that off, but I want to get into a lot of this $3 billion figure because that's a huge jump. We're talking about a company that last year they were in the realm of 100 million for the year. That was the revenue we were dealing with on a full year, four quarters put together. And that's a large jump to 3 billion. But maybe you caught it there. It sounds like Chris and I were listening to that same earnings call with Elon Musk and SpaceX where the multiple that he's putting per watt is quite a bit higher. So even though 3 billion is obviously a large jump from 100 million, it actually might be under-appreciating. And I know that's a crazy thing to say cuz that's a jump of like $2.9 billion. But if you believe in Elon Musk and his multiple on Rubin and what a per-watt compute is actually going to be worth, that's a multiple of 12. I mean, it's just back-of-the-napkin math there. You have 250 megawatts that are targeted to come online next year. So the math there is basically saying it's $12 per watt for the entire year annualized. But then that's not even half of what Elon thinks is going to happen. He's calling out 30 to 50, and he just said that last week. So I kind of want to break that down. And actually that might be where I really want to bring it.

But then also kind of like the Jevons paradox, as one of the analysts was talking about this idea of what happens when capacity really meets up with demand. I actually don't think it will. So, those are the things on my mind and we're going to be kind of going from here. And I guess are there things that you guys like specifically? Like I'm reading chat right now. Anything I just said that maybe sparked a little bit of thought that you're like, "Matt, please would you ask Chris this? Would you please intertwine it in your conversation?" Like I said, we have 10 million per watt, we have to think 200 watts at Atlanta site, so that's 2 billion if added correctly. What is the cost of revenue? How profitable will it be? But well, hang on. Are you talking about megawatts or gigawatts? Because we have different multiples. But remember, mega is a power of six there, while giga is going to be nine.

"How many fingers am I holding up, Chris?" I would assume three, but that's not really in this conversation. "I wish Rumble had a stream advisor that could help figure out what I need to increase views on videos." With that, I mean, I'm not an advisor for Rumble on streaming, but I would say just from my career in streaming, you've got to make content that people care about—engaging content. What's the trending stuff? Remember, if you are replicating what you've already seen someone else do, well, the fact that they're already doing it kind of tells you you're probably in the wrong domain because they have that time on you. They've already been doing that thing X, so they're probably better at it or probably filling out the space, just from my own notes in streaming. I always got the best benefit in the content side when I did something that I saw other people were just not doing yet. So, just a personal tip, I suppose.

Oh, shorts. Yeah. So, actually, I did look that up during the stream. The short interest as of market today was 19.3%. So, basically, how many shares are out on loan? 42 million. They're assuming 25, so that could almost double, so not really up to 40, but maybe 35%. So Ortex is estimating that the short interest against RUM, against Rumble, is 19%. It theoretically could be all the way up to 35%. The utilization is almost maxed out. If you don't know what utilization is, it's a ratio, it's a percentage. Basically, out of all the shares that could go out on loan, how many are out on loan? And the answer is 97%, so pretty much maxed out. But remember, when I say out on loan, to take a legal, legitimate short position, you first have to take shares out on loan from someone else who owns the stock, then you short it. So just because you took it out on loan doesn't actually necessarily mean you had to go short. Maybe you took it out on loan just in case you wanted to go short. Maybe you heard something in the earnings like this and then you're like, "Oh, no, actually those were good earnings. I don't want to go short anymore." So, just to clarify, just because you're out on loan doesn't actually mean you're short, which is why the shares on loan is coming in at 42 million, but it's estimated about 26 million are actually short. So, that's the discrepancy there.

Short interest is super high; it's 19%. The market average is sub-five. It is considerable. It's not the highest we've ever seen. I mean, we've seen stocks get above 50, 100, 125. It is possible. And sometimes people get shocked when you go above 100. You're like, how could you have more shares short than there are shares in existence? And the answer to that, it's called rehypothecation. That's like the very fancy financial term, but maybe in more of a colloquial term, it's referred to as daisy chaining. Because think about it: when you want to take a short position, someone owns the stock, you loan the stock from them, you sell it back to the market to take a short position. You create the position by going short. Well, now there's a new owner. That new owner could put those shares out on loan, and then obviously the process just repeats and repeats and repeats. That's why I'm calling it daisy chasing, but like the actual financial term is called rehypothecation. So basically it's the same set of shares being recycled through this loan-short-ownership, loan-short-ownership process time and time again.

So right now, could it go above 100? It could. Fortunately for Rumble, it is not above 100 because that's a lot of money betting against it. But you are right to point out that it's still considerably above the market average, which—this is just my personal opinion—that's a very dangerous thing to do. 20% short interest when you are, I guess, basically battling with a company that is fully in the world of AI. This is now very much a hyperscaler play, in my opinion. It's a new hyperscaler play, and I think the market thinks, in my opinion, of Rumble as exclusively a video platform, and I believe it is being underappreciated as an AI play. Once again, this is my own analysis of the situation. Maybe I'm right, maybe I'm wrong. I have a feeling that I'm right on this one.

But I think the market, Wall Street as a whole, they know Rumble, they think of it as a video play, and then that was just kind of it. The conversation stopped for them there, not really keeping up to date on the more recent news such as the fact of maybe 250 megawatts of AI compute to be sold starting ideally next year. They're targeting next year, maybe looking to go from a yearly revenue of 100 million to potentially above 3 billion. I know this is a lot of potential, but remember what the stock market is: the stock market is a mechanism that is betting on the potential and the odds that that potential is met, missed, or maybe even exceeded. So right now I think this is one of those—once again, I keep saying in my opinion, I just want to be very clear, this is my opinion—I look at it as a diamond in the rough. I think there's a lot of people who just don't know about this stock, aren't talking about it as an AI play. And I think right now in the larger AI world, I don't think it's going anywhere. I know some people think it's a fad that's, whatever, in a year or two going to go away. I think it's completely wrong. I think AI is honestly just getting started and it's just going to be a very common way of life, and I think it's actually going to be even more of a way of life. So that's my breakdown on it. I don't see it going anywhere, but we'll see how it plays out.

I think I missed some of these. "What is Rumble doing to detect bit error rate and throttle AT&T frequency throttles? Rumble T-Mobile has it." That would be a question for Chris. I cannot fairly answer that one. "Show and tell your stock chart, please." Which one? Rumble's been going sideways, it's just above $6, and I'm hoping that in the future as it executes on this AI play, the long-term investors are going to be paid handsomely. "Got any layman's language for all the mega wattage?" Well, it's a power of six, so it's a watt, but then a million more—a watt, but quite a bit more. "Is Bitcoin climbing back up or no?" Actually, similar to Rumble, it's just going sideways, and until it does something, you've got to focus your energy on stuff that maybe is going a bit more.

The chat, you guys are talking a lot, so it disappeared, but I saw some numbers about Chris not having ownership. I want to be clear—and this is all in the public, this is publicly accessible—Chris controls the full vote. The shares he has has super vote majority. So Chris, not only in title but also in terms of vote, he is clearly at the helm of this particular ship. And you don't have to take my word for it. Go look into the filing and you could see the breakdown. That type of stuff, you can't hide it. If anything, it has to be very easily publicly accessible. So go look into the filings or go trust whatever, speaking of AI, go to whatever AI you trust the most and ask for that breakdown. So of course there's other equity investors. As soon as you own one share, you're technically an equity investor in Rumble. But the way that the shares kind of break down and also the vote breaks down, Chris is very much in control. "The big problem with Rumble chat is you always get all right weirdo losers banned from everywhere; it's an issue." Remember, also per community, though, you're in control of it. So when we have, as you're referring to, the schizo weirdo losers, we just end up kicking them from here because per community we get to decide how we want to do it. Chris controls 85%, like I said. In terms of the vote, he is the guy who decides how things go. Yes.

"Show chart history and explain the ups and downs." I mean, the ups and downs for the entire chart history for any stock for any time frame is the same explanation. Every single time a stock moves on any time frame is just because of where buyers and sellers meet. If buyers and sellers meet at a higher price, it goes up. If buyers and sellers meet at a lower price, it goes down. In terms of retail trading, I find that as soon as someone explains it to you, it makes sense, but maybe you just haven't thought about it this way: there's no such thing as just selling or just buying. For there to be a seller, there has to be a buyer; if not, the transaction doesn't go through. Same thing with buying: for there to be a buyer, there has to be a seller. If a buyer and seller does not agree, a trade does not happen. So the only thing for any stock, or crypto, or future, or option, anything that causes things to go up or down is just: are buyers and sellers agreeing at a higher price, i.e., buying aggression, or are buyers and sellers agreeing at a lower price, i.e., selling aggression? That's the only difference: it's just where do buyers and sellers agree?

Maybe a better analogy or maybe a real-life example is think about it in terms of a house. If you buy a house, someone's selling a house, do you agree on a higher price or a lower price? And if you come into agreement, the transaction goes through and then that's what the house actually was sold at. That's what the house traded at. Same thing with shares. I think it feels a little bit different because shares happen in the digital space and it's not obviously necessarily a physical good, but that's all it is: do people agree on higher prices or lower prices? And that's what it is, and that's what makes the market so great, because you have people who are as quick as high-frequency traders trading in microseconds, literally trading thousands of times before you could click a mouse or blink your eye or something like that, and then you also have long-term investors.

So when people ask why is something going up or down, of course you could properly cite the most recent news, and then logically you could say because of the recent news people are reacting to it. But in reality, to know why something is actually going up or down, you would have to go ask all the people who transacted in that time period and ask them, "Why did you buy or sell? Was it intentional? Are you a long-term investor? Are you a leverage player such as Leopold getting blown out? Was it a fat-finger mistake? Are you just doing your monthly purchasing?" There's so many variables. It's literally effectively an infinite amount of variables, which means you're never going to know why everyone is doing it. "How important is formal guidance?" I personally find it to be incredibly important because really that's—if you had a correlation of what moves the stock, whether you're looking at EPS or revenue or something like formal guidance, formal guidance has the highest correlation because formal guidance is the company. You know, all those people with the insider knowledge of what's happening with their company, it's their bet on where they see it going in the next quarter or the next year, rather than what happened in the last quarter or the last year in terms of EPS or revenue.

And right now for next quarter, if you guys missed it, they're actually betting on a very, very large increase in the realm of $9 million in revenue, which is crushing it. Remember, this is a company that as of last quarter, this quarter last year, we were talking about 25 million, so that's a multiple increase right there. So guidance, massively, massively important. "What's taking Chris long? Is the elevator broken?" Well, remember after these calls they do an analyst thing. Wall Street is calling in with more specific questions and then after that we get to turn it over to the real show with you guys. If you're new here, don't forget to hit that follow button. Yes, of course, hit that follow button if you are watching on Rumble. Follow away and turn on those notifications.

"My knowledge is low regarding stocks, but I keep hearing people talk about on Webull about a short squeeze. How would a squeeze affect Rumble?" A short squeeze is a phenomenon in which a stock rips higher, and it's because so many people were betting against it. Think about it: let's just talk about a hypothetical stock XYZ. XYZ is trading at 100 bucks and someone bet against it, as in they bet it's going down. They created a position by selling a stock and they have to close it out by buying it back. So it's the inverse of what most people do. Most people buy to create the position and then they sell to close it out. You could go short and be bearish by doing the opposite: you could sell it to create it and then buy it back, and you hope it goes lower and you profit that difference. If you sell something at $100 and buy it back at 90, congrats, you profit the $10. So anyway, if there's a lot of people thinking it's going to go down, but then the stock does the opposite and it starts to go up, those people are under pressure, and they might be under so much pressure that they need to get out of the position. All of a sudden, it goes from 100 to 110 to 120 to 130. So these people who went short at 100 are now down 30 bucks, so they need to get out before the loss gets worse.

But like I just said, how do you get out of a short position? Well, you get out of a short position by buying it back. Coming back to what we were just talking about, that's more aggressive buying, so it causes the stock to go up more, and before you know it, it's a snowball effect against the shorts. And when there's enough shorts and this phenomenon plays out, it's called a short squeeze. If you really want to have your socks blown off, you should search a term called gamma squeeze, which is another large natural buyer in the market, but it's prompted because of options positioning and not necessarily short positioning. And sometimes, like back with AMC and GME, you have these play off of each other. You have a short squeeze kind of ramping up a gamma squeeze, and then the gamma squeeze gets ramped up so much that you have a bigger short squeeze and it just goes back and forth. So a gamma squeeze is specific to the positioning of options, while a short squeeze is people just literally betting against the stock and then they get it wrong. But once again, they play against each other. So it can get really, really interesting when you have a high short interest and the stock starts going up, and then you have a bunch of people buying calls that end up going in the money, and that's where you kind of get them ping-ponging against each other. And that's when you get huge, huge movements like AMC going from $2 to 72, like GameStop going from eight bucks to over 500 if you count pre-market—crazy stuff like that.

Remember, people, it's kind of interesting. You're asking this cuz you're saying, "Okay, maybe Rumble will have a short squeeze." That's not necessarily the best thing in the world. It's exciting in the short term because the stock goes up, but remember fundamentals generally end up winning out. So if I could wave a magic wand, a magic pen here, and actually make something happen, I would actually like to see that slow grind higher where just fundamentally it's continually improving and then Wall Street is rewarding it for improving. In terms of these squeeze plays, they're very, very exciting to trade. I've done it in the past. It's a fun thing to do, but eventually fundamentals, gravity wins out and fundamentals are important. And basically you get this pop and then it comes back down to reality, and then you're there at reality. That's fun as a trader, but not for an investor. As an investor, which is what I am in Rumble, I just want to see it fundamentally improve, Wall Street reward it for that fundamental improvement, and then you just continue that grind higher and higher and higher. Like I said, if I could wave a magic wand, that's exactly what I would be doing, but I don't have a magic wand; it's currently on backorder from Amazon.

"Question for Chris: at some point in the future, if things go terribly wrong or if they go fantastically well, would Chris consider selling RUM if he was made an offer he couldn't refuse?" That's a question for him. In the past when we asked him about that, he's made it very clear no, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it seems as if he cares a lot about defending free speech, so I don't think that that is likely. But you're going to be able to ask him yourself. Mr. Chris Pavlovski of Rumble is joining the show as we speak.

Congratulations. Congratulations. I was here trying to take notes, and before you know it, I just kept writing record-breaking over and over again: record-breaking without Northern Data, record-breaking with Northern Data. The guidance is a record-breaking number. It looks like fast-forwarding to 2027, that's a record-breaking number. Like I said, too much record-breaking. So before we get into it, and there's a lot of people who have questions, there's a couple things that jumped out to me, if you don't mind if we kind of dive into that. But some of your quotes directly from that call was that Rumble itself has the data, the rails, and the community, and that's kind of the TL;DR of how you summarize a potential $3 billion opportunity. Can you just dive into that for maybe the people who missed it, or expand on a couple of the things that maybe you think the retail audience should appreciate a little bit more?

So if you don't mind, I want to summarize this a little bit because I think to someone like you, obviously you're in the world, but maybe then there's a retail investor who's like, "Okay, there's megawatts, gigawatts." To summarize, you have AI compute as a service and the base term here is going to be a watt, and it seems as there's a big conversation of what is a watt worth on an annual basis. So it seems like some of these power-and-shell ones, they're looking at one or two; in your previous investor decks, you were in the realm of like six to seven to eight; but then Elon's coming out with these terms of like, "No, maybe $30 to $50 per watt." And if I do back-of-the-napkin math of how you got 3 billion on these numbers, you guys are coming in roughly around 12. So some would say that's maybe conservative at $12 when maybe some people are looking at 30 or 50. So I guess my first question is why do you think there's such a disparity in what people think this is going to be worth? Is it because it's a new field? And I guess also maybe shed a little of the light of like how you guys came to be comfortable with the number that you're at.

Yeah.

I could definitely tell you and the rest of the team are very, very excited, and it's for good reason that you guys are helping write the rule book. This is a blue ocean thing; we don't know the waters we're getting into, and you guys are seemingly getting prepared to navigate it and hopefully navigate it well. But you're already kind of turning my brain here of like, yeah, I could see robotics. And you were saying, even on the call, you're like, "Okay, it was trained on Reddit, so just written stuff, so it was not in the 3D space." And then robotics is the next thing. But then, of course, there can be things that robots can do that we can't, so then there's like a whole another level to it. And when you guys—and I've said this so many times to you directly—when you guys are selling the shovels in the gold rush, you're like, "Cool, let's just see where this can go." Obviously, you had some very interesting commentary, but then even the questions you guys were getting asked from the analysts, he was talking about capacity meeting demand, and I get it. He's a fancy person working for Wall Street. But from what I can see and just seeing how some of this has played out historically, I actually don't know if it will. So there's this term that I actually learned from a Rumble short. It's called the Jevons paradox, and it's this concept that we would think that as something is more efficient to use, it's going to go down. But in reality, it goes the opposite way. When we get efficient with a resource, the usage explodes. Historically, people would talk about books, and then you have the Gutenberg press. They would talk about coal, and then all of a sudden locomotives. Now we're here with AI, that as it goes up, it's probably going to be almost self-perpetuating. And I just read the stat of how much more code is being written. And then you're kind of pointing out like, okay, if you guys are helping with agents, then agents are creating other agents to do all this stuff. It just explodes. It's a massive, massive multiple. So I guess I can understand why you're up at night, just because as you're diving in, you're like, "Well, this is possible, and that's possible." So I, as an investor, I'm excited, and I hope a lot of people listening to this could kind of see how this truly is a big deal. I understand people are like, "Oh, AI is just an app." It's like, I don't think it's a fad. I think this is just the new way of life and it's the biggest thing.

Yeah, not only to assist with health, but also, I could take the moral standpoint of doing that, but also very, very cheaply. You just have to have a phone and be able to ask it questions or do whatever. So there's people who maybe, very unfortunately, couldn't get that help, and now it's just a phone conversation away. That's so impressive.