ClusterMAX 3.0 is here! ClusterMAX 3.0 debuts with a comprehensive review of the neocloud industry, covering 77 providers. We increase our market view to cover 323 providers, up from 209 in ClusterMAX 2.0, 169 in ClusterMAX 1.0, and 124 in the original AI Neocloud Playbook and Anatomy article. We have now interviewed well over 200 end users of neoclouds as part of this research. We update our itemized list of criteria across 10 categories, and update our direct descriptions of our expectations for Slurm, Kubernetes, Standalone Machines, Monitoring Dashboards, and Health Checks. All of this content is live on our website. We encourage providers to use these lists when developing their offerings. We still consider these lists as an amalgamation of our experience interviewing end users, making them representative of the features that end users expect from their cloud providers. Nebius joins CoreWeave in the Platinum tier. While CoreWeave still sets the technical bar for others to follow, Nebius is now established as a provider that consistently commands a premium pricing over others. Strong business decisions by Nebius have put them in a position to serve an entire class of neolabs at seller’s prices. Google Cloud joins Oracle in the Gold tier. Azure moves to Silver, Fluidstack moves to Unavailable, and Crusoe drops to Bronze. Lambda, Firmus and TensorWave remain in Silver, while GMI moves up to Silver from Bronze. Many companies drop from Silver (or Gold) to Bronze or lower. We raise the bar this round as only 19 neoclouds globally achieve a Medallion rating. We establish a tier between Bronze and Underperforming: the Participation Ribbon tier. 15 providers join this rating, which more accurately describes our opinion that they do the bare minimum to get by.

$IREN isn't complicated...Or...maybe it is 🤔 IREN is many things. One of the most under appreciated or misunderstood things is its power pipeline. More accurately might be to say its undisclosed power holdings. How can we know this? This is something only a few of us truly understand and we have learned this by observing every move of the company for years. They incorporated in late 2018 but did not ipo until November 2021. Personally, I watched with only vague interest from the sidelines from around late 2019, when I heard about a tiny company with large ambitions that wanted to ipo. This was just as Covid struck Wuhan and the world was beginning to go into a mindless panic. I only heard they mined bitcoin, which didn't particularly interest me so it took at least a year of them trading before I acquired any, or even paid much attention. A few of my close friends were bitcoin nuts right from its inception and (are v wealthy) and one of them (a whale) was very very very excited about IRIS ENERGY. I thought he was still just being crazy. It turns out he was not very well informed about IRIS but that didn't matter because I began studying them and became an early fanboy under a pseudonym on stocktwits and eventually educated my friend who still holds all his shares. They priced their initial shares at $28 right at "The Height of the "Crypto Bull Run": IREN went public at the absolute peak of the pandemic-era tech and crypto bubble, driven by unprecedented retail investing and loose monetary policy." Here is the nugget that you were waiting for but it requires faith in IREN and the founders, therefore a ton of research, and if it continues to pan out as I expect it to...a degree of luck. The thing about luck though is often hard work is confused with luck so maybe its just hard research and an unteachable 5th sense? In my informed opinion, IREN is a misunderstood and massive power supply option. I have felt this way from the moment I made my first share purchase and it is unwavering. After years of keenly observing the company, it is my strongest opinion that all the way back to incorporating in 2018 and all throughout Covid, that the Roberts brothers had an almost unmatched vision about what would unfold in the power markets. I shared that vision from back then as I watched the green warriors try to push everyone into a Tesla and force them outof their reliable gas powered vehicle. In this time of panic, the brothers were busy travelling the globe in search of power assets for IRIS. Much of this is documented and should make a decent movie one day after IREN breaks a trillion market cap. This is where it becomes interesting. Every once in a while, IREN discloses a new blockbuster MW/GW electrical site that is nearly full permitted. These sites take huge effort to convert into real generating sites. The brothers don't seem to be particularly keen on disclosing the depth of their pipeline except to admit it is far larger than anyone knows. What if its another 50GW?...or 100GW?...or 250GW? Their cash generation flywheel is finally beginning to spin. We will learn of many more sites which they will be able to internally fund without debt. 1 trillion...here we come!

Finally, Bitcoin has been on the move after holding the $60k support zone for almost a year. That’s how long a typical Bitcoin winter lasts, so I’m sensing that a new 4-year cycle bull market is underway. Note that the Z-score of BTC/gold has turned positive after being -100%. In the past that has generally been confirmation of a bottom. What does all of the above suggest? We are in a new secular regime of a higher cost of capital, which suggests that governments will respond with that oldest trick in the book: financial repression.

1/4 I have been trying to explain for a long time why $IREN is playing a different game. Credit to @mcF_dan for the inspiration for this thread. When I first met $IREN co-CEOs Dan and Will in 2019, that was obvious. They didn’t know everything. What I could see was how fast they could learn. That is the rare part. Not a perfect map on day one. A learning rate fast enough to outrun the problems and still land exactly where they needed to be. They built from first principles: secure the scarce physical layer first, keep as much optionality as possible, learn from people who had already been through it, then go further, way further than the starting playbook. That is why the strategy can look slow if you only watch deal-by-deal headlines. In a tightening market, waiting can mean better counterparties and better economics. Don’t get lost in one contract. Watch the whole stack in the age of AI.

Before you say it’s not “fair” that you’re poor, answer these questions: 1. Do you save half of your income? For my entire life, even when I was mowing grass for a living, I saved half of my after-tax income. How? I didn’t have my own place. I didn’t have a TV. I didn’t have a cell phone. I drove a 1983 Honda Accord with 225,000 miles on it—a car I bought from a friend for $2,000 when I was 19. I didn’t have a credit card until 2001, when I was 29. I didn’t have my own place to live until I was making more than $1 million a year. I bought my first stock—Coca-Cola—in 1992, when I was 21. I bought my second stock—Amazon—in 1997, when I was 26. Whenever I had excess liquidity in my checking account, I bought gold coins—almost every year—and I’ve never sold a single one. I’m not a slave. I don’t save their worthless money. 2. Do you work every day of the week, at least 12 hours a day? For the first decade of my career, from 1996 through 2007, I worked seven days a week, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. That didn’t include the reading I did when I got home. I started taking weekends off after I had my first child. Even today, I still work seven days a week. I write every day. This year, I’ve written a daily e-letter five days a week. I write two investment newsletters each month, and I’ve written two best-selling books. I run a business with more than 100,000 customers and roughly 30 employees. I also recently had my fourth child and am building a new house in Winter Park, Florida. I cook dinner for my family every night. That’s my hobby. 3. Did you get an education? In America, anyone can become almost anything they want professionally in about seven years. If you don’t have valuable skills, go acquire them. I got my first job in financial research by agreeing to work for free. I didn’t have a degree in finance or accounting, but learning the necessary skills wasn’t hard. I used the library. I read every letter Buffett ever wrote. I read Rothbard, Hayek, von Mises, Bastiat, and thousands of SEC filings. Use the library. Find a mentor. Today, it’s even easier because of the internet. There’s no question that if you save half your income, work hard, and educate yourself, you can become financially independent. Is it hard? Of course. But it isn’t as hard as being poor and ignorant. Here’s a big hint: No one can tell you how to succeed. And if you believe what they tell you, you will end up with only what they give you—nothing more. You have to find your own path. If you do what everyone else does, you’re only going to get what everyone else gets. I’m sure you can imagine what my friends and family said when I told them, after I got out of college, “I’m going to build the most respected financial advisory firm in the world over the next decade.” I’m sure they thought I was nuts. Finally, if you have a good income but never seem to build wealth, learn to use credit the right way. I constantly use low-cost credit to fund assets that appreciate—farmland, securities, my business, and real estate. Poor people use credit to buy things. Rich people use credit to buy assets. Remember what Ayn Rand said about the poor: “Don’t be one of them.”

Goldman's CommTech conference, San Francisco. 48 hours of @IREN_Ltd investor meetings, and the mood has shifted meaningfully. Key takeaways:

March 2020. 👇 Six years later, the vision is very much alive. @MichaelDell 👊

As someone who’s been through the peaks and doldrums of the Bitcoin market for 10 years, this seems like a great time to take a position/expand or DCA. A bunch of metrics based investors will tell you that because vol has declined, bitcoin may not have eccentric and overheated bull markets going forward. I disagree. In each cycle since 2020 I’ve felt that new highs would undershoot expectations simply because retail expected it. Now that expectations are tempered this is the first time I’ve felt we have the potential to wildly overshoot any expectation. Also, the fiscal debt situation is finally reaching a point of no return that bitcoiners have hypothesized for many years. The Fourth Turning will almost certainly include Warsh/Bessent at war with the long end of the curve. Not many understand the implications of such a thing. Lock in, fren. Game time is almost here. Will delete if wrong. bitcoin:native

Right way to think about it. Two layers here, think of them as IREN DC and IREN Cloud. IREN Cloud pays IREN DC for capacity, same as any neocloud leasing from a data center owner. So lenders would underwrite our data centers the way they'd underwrite any DC with a neocloud tenant. i.e. on the credit standing behind the lease agreements. At Horizon, that includes Microsoft on a five-year term. Data centers unencumbered today with GPU debt sitting on the Cloud side of the ledger. The first facility will answer rate and leverage better than I can here but hopefully that's helpful.