IREN has 4.5 gigawatts, but construction sets the pace

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:21:29

   And that's your big partner, Microsoft. Yes, Microsoft's one of our early partners. We signed a $9.7 billion contract with them late last year. But as I was explaining to you before the show, that's 5% of our capacity. So things are busy at the moment. And when you do these build-outs, the big conversation today is no longer the number of GPUs putting in. It's just power. Power is the constraint today, yeah?

2. 1:21:59

   Look, for many of the industry, it is. But for us, because we started eight years ago tying up all this land and power, it's not. So we've got four and a half gigawatts. For context, that's almost as much power annually as the Bay Area uses in its entirety. Wow. It's huge. So for us, the hurdle or the constraint is really time to compute. And that's emerging across the industry as well. And time to compute means tradespeople coming to West Texas, living in a trailer that you set up to then break ground on a data center, build foundations, build water cooling systems.

3. 1:22:38

   Like this is hard manual labor going on. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And this is the whole real world challenge to respond to these digital exponential demand curves that are unconstrained by the real world in terms of their appetite. And it just compounds. You need thousands of people out in these locations that haven't supported it. You put stress on supply chains. We're seeing what's happening with the memory, every aspect of it. So it's just permanent whack-a-mole, permanent solving fires to try and bring online this compute. And you get to spend time there.

4. 1:23:10

   what's it like when you set up a town or you bring a thousand people or two thousand people to what's a pretty much remote small town you i'm assuming that like when you bring a thousand there might only be 500 living there right now so what are those towns like i'm it sounds to me like something out of like the gold mining era when people first you know uh went and were prospectors Is it a prospecting town?

5. 1:23:37

   Pretty much. I mean, the barbecue's great. That was the draw card. But apart from that, look, we've always had a policy of hiring locals, supporting the local community. This year, we're hitting a million dollars in community grants, cumulatively. That's things like local playgrounds, supporting the fire departments. But we will hire locally. Once we can't find that trade locally, we will expand the radius by 20 miles and hire out of that, and so on and so on.

6. 1:24:00

   That's very thoughtful. Yeah. And these folks are coming, say an electrician or a construction worker, they're coming, having built houses or, you know, maybe building corporate offices. And now they come for a tour of duty here and the salaries go up massively, but they got to leave their family for a three month tour or something. Yeah. Yes. And no, because typically where we relocate is where there's heavy electrical infrastructure. Where there's heavy electrical infrastructure is typically where old manufacturing and industry has closed down. So we go in, leverage that sunk CapEx, rehire, retrain local workforces and bring a new industry to town in these data centers. Has that workforce now been completely depleted and we need to train another generation, a younger generation to be generation two belt and really embrace the trades?

7. 1:24:56

   A hundred percent. We're partnering with universities, trade colleges. Absolutely.