AIB Data Centers Inc.AIB
Recorded

AIB Data Centers Inc. Emerging Growth Conference 97

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Transcript

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Operator

Welcome back, everyone. We have an update from AIB Data Centers Inc., trades on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker AIB. It is a developer and operator of digital infrastructure focused on AI hosting and high-performance computing workloads, whose platform combines access to reliable, scalable power resources with modular infrastructure deployment designed to accelerate the development of next-gen compute capacity. Happy to welcome CFO Jolienne Halisky. Nice to see you, Jolene. Whenever you are ready, we would love to hear your update.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

Awesome. Thanks for having me today, Anna. We have lots of good updates for everybody that I am excited to share. First of all, I want to just give everyone who was not on our last presentation in July just a quick company overview. We are a power-first organization. We focus on power, people, and pipeline, meaning we do not approach any projects unless power is secured. We do not engage in any land acquisition where power is a maybe. That is what we mean by power first. We have our gateways to acquisition to make sure that power is contracted and it is firm. We have also, when we speak specifically to the people, we have the team in place. I am going to walk through some team updates as well. We have the team in place and execute, and we have the pipeline, and over here, our portfolio at a glance.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

Since we last talked, we have expanded our portfolio up to 120 megawatts. We were at 65 megawatts before. We have acquired another piece of land in Texas. We have contracted under, right now for critical IT load, 50 megawatts. We signed our first lease with our first customer for an initial 12 years, and we are also going to talk about that a little bit more. In terms of how we are also positioning ourselves, we view ourselves as a right-size developer, situating ourselves in that 40-90-megawatt size. That allows us to engage and focus on small developments. We are scrappy in our approach. It allows us to be very speedy in bringing our developments online, and I often say we are going to build a multi-gigawatt platform, 50 megawatts at a time. This next slide has also changed since our last update.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

AI market demand and demand for the whole AI industry has also grown since our last update. When we look at 2025 AI workloads, we are at 82 gigawatts. By 2030, the projections are up to 220 gigawatts. What is interesting in this as well is the expansion of the AI workloads within that demand for that power. In terms of trying to frame that, 70% of AI data center demand is expected to be for AI workloads by 2030. Cumulatively, there is expected to be $1.7 trillion of data center investment spent globally through 2030 as well. We are not seeing any demand diminishing, where we are seeing some constraints that always existed was power, chips, and GPU processing power.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

There's obviously a shortage for those equipments or a high demand for those types of equipment to power the AI data centers and power to even initiate the data center. That piece is our issue, the power. What's more important is there's a third constraint that has entered the market, and that's capital, and that's the debt financing and funding to secure the projects. I'm going to talk a little bit about the lease that we secured with Nebius. Nebius is a global neo cloud developer. They are publicly traded, $50 billion in market cap, so a huge neo cloud player. They are next to investment grade, so a great tenant for us to secure. We secured the single site that we have, our anchor site, the whole 65 megawatts they took, 50 megawatts critical IT load. It's a 12-year contract. There's two 5-year renewals, and it's a modular construction, so there's two data hall developments.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

This gives you a little bit of the economics behind the lease. Because of confidentiality, I can't disclose the exact commercial terms, but when I compare to where other contracts are situated, you're looking at the 1.8 to 2.1 revenue per megawatt per year. We're above that in terms of the life of the contract. So, it's above market, where we're situated in terms of the location and the critical IT load. What else can I say? It's just such a strong lease. The lease is what's financeable, and when you have a tenant like Nebius, that's of paramount importance. I also wanted to talk a little bit about our progress in terms of what we've done. We founded the company in 2021.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

We have a successfully operating Bitcoin data mining data center since 2021. In Q1 of 2026, we were publicly listed. In May 2026, we signed our first utility agreement, so it was a 15-year agreement for 65 megawatts at that same site. It was an expansion to that ESA. In June to August, we continued to build out our platform, both internally and externally. We were able to, for example, expand our commercial and executive leadership. By commercial leadership, those who we're partnering with in the market and our vendors. In September 2026, two major events. We acquired another piece of land that brought our contracted power capacity up to 120 megawatts, and we signed our first tenant agreement for 50 megawatts of critical IT load. Q4 2027 will be our next big milestone.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

There'll be a bunch in the middle, but in relation to that contract is when we expect the delivery of those data halls and for those data halls to be energized and revenue generating. In the meantime, the way the contract is structured, Nebius has contracted us to build out their white space, what they're responsible for. We actually will start revenue generating a lot sooner in the development cycle, which is not typical in a data center development, but just wanted to mention that we will start generating revenue probably in month four or five of the contract. I wanted to show everyone as well our site portfolio and an overview of where our footprint and what our footprint is looking like. We have secured the DFW site, and that's a 55-megawatt site.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

This just kind of gives illustrative of what that site will translate into for an annual revenue figure, then a total contract value if we're thinking it's the 10 to 12-year initial term, which is very typical in our industry. We have DFW2 is under exclusive LOI. We hope to close on that site within 45 days. GS01, we also have under exclusive LOI with the right to purchase that piece of land, and that's at 90 MW, then give the detail on the revenue and then the total contract value. MSP1 is in Minnesota. We also have that property under exclusive LOI, and they're all just being evaluated to determine if this is pieces of land that we want to bring into our portfolio for further development. I wanted to also highlight to everybody some changes in our leadership.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

Jerry Tang, our CEO, has been our CEO since day one. There's myself as well. I've worked with Jerry for the last 2 and a half years. We added Jason Burnett to the team this week, and he's our new Chief Operations Officer. It was announced this week, a PR was sent out, I believe, yesterday. He comes to us with 20-plus years of leadership experience, senior operational executive experience from DataBank, Cologix, Hivelocity. We're thrilled to have him join the team and to really start utilizing his expertise. This still demonstrates where we're at from a valuation perspective. We are still, because we're a small, scrappy developer, we focus on small developments. We're new to public markets.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

That valuation gap still exists in terms of what our market cap is per megawatt that we have energized or under contract and how we compare to our peers. That gap will close at some point. We also know that we're unproven, so we're a little bit unknown. We're gaining in terms of we're gaining recognition in terms of our ticker and our investor base. That valuation gap will close as we start to demonstrate solid signs of execution. We have to sign tenant lease. Excellent. Financing will be our next step, securing financing. That's the steps that we need to close that valuation gap. The last thing I just wanted to summarize, we talked about our power, our people, our pipeline.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

We talked about our progress and also the potential that we have for the future and with these contracts in place and what you're going to see in terms of execution in the upcoming months, and that we'll be closing that valuation gap. I think that's all I had to discuss today with everybody, unless there's any questions.

Operator

All right, perfect. Let's see if we can get one question in. On your modified triple-net model, what rent per megawatt in annual escalators are you signing, and which costs sit with AIB versus the tenant?

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

Okay. I cannot give the exact rate.

Jolienne HaliskyCFO

Okay. I can say that there's a 3% escalator, and just because Nebius has asked that remain private information, not publicly disclosed.

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