登録して招待リンクを共有すると、動画再生報酬と紹介報酬を獲得できます。

mon
@moninvestor
Independent Analyst. Writing about Finance. Not Financial Advice. DYOR. Subscribe for deeper insights into my portfolio.
参加 April 2022
641 フォロー中    55.6K ファン
I think consolidation across the data center sector is inevitable over the next few years. There are simply too many companies sitting on valuable power portfolios for every one of them to independently become a major AI infrastructure company. Look across the former Bitcoin mining sector: $IREN $RIOT $MARA $CLSK $KEEL $WYFI and several others. These companies spent years securing land, power and electrical infrastructure for Bitcoin mining. AI has completely changed what those assets can potentially be used for and how valuable they are. But owning the power and developing it are two completely different things. Turning 500 MW or 1 GW into an AI campus requires billions of dollars. You need data centers, substations, cooling, networking, GPUs and everything else required to actually bring that capacity online. $WYFI is a good example. The company has a large development pipeline, but it has just announced a proposed $250 million convertible note offering. The stock has fallen heavily over the last two days following recent financing announcements. This sector requires an enormous amount of capital, and not every company sitting on valuable land + power has the balance sheet to develop it themselves. That is where I think consolidation comes in. A hyperscaler, neocloud or large infrastructure company has access to billions of dollars of capital. Instead of spending years finding suitable land, securing power, entering grid queues and going through the permitting process, acquiring an existing company or individual powered site could make far more sense. And the value of already secured power should only increase if bringing new capacity online becomes more difficult. Pennsylvania is a good example of what is starting to happen. More than 100 data center facilities have been proposed across the state, and Pennsylvania has now introduced stricter requirements for large developments. Developers need local approval, large projects must meet the state's GRID requirements before certain permits can move forward, and data centers have been removed from the Permit Fast Track program. This is also why investors need to pay attention to how companies describe their GW numbers. Secured power and a development pipeline are not the same thing. A company can have several gigawatts in its development pipeline without having secured the underlying power. Getting from a proposed site to an energized data center can take years, and there is no guarantee every project gets there. $IREN is a good example of the difference. IREN has historically been very clear about separating secured power from the wider opportunities it is pursuing. It spent years securing land and power before AI data centers became the opportunity they are today, and it has now shown with Horizon 1 that it can convert that infrastructure into actual AI capacity. That helps explain why IREN has separated itself so dramatically from the rest of the former Bitcoin miners. A few years ago these companies were largely valued on Bitcoin production, hash rate and mining economics. Now the market is starting to place a much higher value on something they accumulated along the way: land + secured power. I don't think every company on that list will independently make the transition. Some will build. Some will partner. Some will sell sites. Some will be acquired. There is a huge amount of valuable infrastructure sitting across the former Bitcoin mining sector. The companies with the capital and execution to develop it will become much larger. The ones that don't may still be sitting on exactly the assets somebody else wants to buy.
もっと見る