How Bitcoin Mining Fixes the Grid with Executive Chairman of American Bitcoin Mike Ho

We believe that more Bitcoin servers and the equipment in the supply chain should be US, but simply today, since the beginning of Bitcoin mining as an industry, all the ASIC manufacturers have been international companies. What we're doing for for the space is we're actively looking at how do we onshore more of that manufacturing, how do we onshore more of that that technology. Well, I don't need to argue this because we do this every day. We do this every day. Most of our data centers, most of our sites are all in Texas.

One of our latest sites that we just launched, it's a 205 megawatt direct-to-chip liquid-cooled data center, and this is in Texas. This is behind the meter co-located on a wind farm. The reason that we're located in these areas in in West Texas and often times rural Texas is we're a buyer of last resort, and we're very agnostic. And a lot of the power from renewables were built in areas where there wasn't enough transmission built out to actually get the power to where the demand is. And what ends up happening is the power is congested, and often times these projects, these renewable energy operators, have to sell the power close to break even, a loss, and what that means is very low-cost power for us.

We're a buyer of power of last resort. We buy power when no one else wants it, and we effectively mine Bitcoin with it. But at times during peak demand hours, where the power is needed, during peak winter storms, very hot summer days, we have the software, and we curtail, we economically curtail that use of power, and allow that power to get distributed to where it's ultimately needed. And we do this on a daily basis. Yeah, well, the beauty of Bitcoin and the Bitcoin mining network is it's very distributed.

And although we play our part in driving hash rate domestically in the US, US today only makes up about a third of the global Bitcoin network. Only a third. And the reason why Bitcoin is such a secure network is it's secured by large-scale energy infrastructure. Today, the Bitcoin network is probably around 20 gigawatts of power. In order for anyone to have a massive advantage, you're talking about billions, tens of billions of energy infrastructure, energy infrastructure that takes decades to build.

You're talking about a supply chain of silicon for the servers that also take many quarters just to plan into the wafer availability at the semiconductors. The beauty of Bitcoin is it's already too big and it will remain distributed. What we would love to see is more traditional financial products. Uh, what that means is we would love to see more lending, a lower cost of capital, being able to borrow against our servers. These are servers that trade as a proxy to the price of Bitcoin.

It's a great asset. They produce Bitcoin. Would love to see more traditional financial products and the ability to hedge. We're already seeing this with Luxor with the hash rate derivative futures where miners can offset some of their their capex burden by selling futures to finance more mining growth. I think we're we're starting to see every cycle more financial products being available and for more lenders, more capital to come in.

And I think that this is only the beginning and we'll look to see a lot more access.