Marbles

Rich to poor people, poor AF to rich people, shit-poster, $IREN, Bitcoin, stonks

[Marbles @marblesats]

I read somewhere that if we were to service all of the consumer inference demand and exclude energy required for AI-training, we're still at an enormous gigawatt shortfall which implies this supply / demand crunch persists longer than everyone thinks. This is a pretty interesting bottom up analysis: (https://t.co/2clo25WLD2).

With stuff like this I'm beginning to view $IREN now not as a multiyear hold but a 5-10 year old.

I think it's becoming increasingly dubious that enormous gigawatt shortfall we have to service AI demand will be able to serviced.

$ORCL / $CRWV, for instance are probably going to lose a lot of customers in their backlog. If everyone including your mother (Hut8 + Bit Digital / White Fibre) can obtain colocation deals for their gigawatts, it means:
- hyperscalers are so desperate for power that they would sign with companies with absolutely no track record of operational excellence
- market is not discerning at all between good operators and bad operators (just like it didn't do so for bitcoin mining)

What this means over time is that:
- the bad operators are going to become very apparent over time
- backlog from these operators will be back onto the market and will find their way to the best operators ($IREN, $CIFR, etc.)
- market will panic in the short term such that $IREN's stock price will crater
- market will understand that $IREN is amongst the best operators that has scale
- $IREN achieves scale such that it can afford to finance with little debt and no dilution Capex heavy projects related to its IaaS platform while incumbents with no scale will struggle to compete due to massive, upfront CapEx
- market understands that $IREN has probably one of the best site procurement teams (extremely underrated fact) in the world such that they are perceived not as an outsider that will jack up electricity prices, but a friendly counterparty that is beneficial to the community
- intense re-rate of $IREN stock price bringing it up to a multi-hundred billion dollar valuation

There's a world out there where this crunch extends beyond what everyone, even within this group believes which means:
- US is unable to solve the gigawatt shortfall with much disdain from $NBIS bulls who assign too high of a probability that their software will outcompete tech giants like Databricks, AWS, GCP, Azure overnight and who massively underrate the difficulty of developing infrastructure, securing power + sites, building next generation AI Factories that have never been done before in the history of mankind such that the only ways these datacenters will work is that if you have liquid cooling to service rack densities at 80 kw+, 130 kw+ , 200 kw+, 300 kw+ over time. I'm pretty sure very few companies, if any, in the world have a datacenter that will be able to service rack densities of 200+ kw by end of Q1 2026, $IREN will have that.
- energized power at multi-hundred megawatt scales is valuable such that you can continue to build greenfield datacenters without tearing down old ones which will turn out to be economically viable for inference
- because of $IREN's vertical integration and its superiority at fostering relationships with communities, securing power, securing land, having energized power and land, developing infrastructure with impressive speed / efficiency (including securing long-lead items), developing AI Factories, it will outrun both incumbents + existing hyperscalers over a long-time horizon.

There is a chance 2026 / 2027 $IREN obtains escape velocity such that it's status as a datacenter company of the AI Era will be unrivaled.

This is obviously making a lot of assumptions and ignores things like investor willingness to fund AI companies with no clear path to profitability + the overall demand side picture continue to play out + many other assumptions, but what if this does play out? What is the likelihood of this happenning?

No one can be 100% sure, but my view is that the probability of this awesome but ridiculous scenario playing out over time has increased.

[Matt Dratch @DratchCap]

Recently spent time updating an older analysis on where AI demand is actually going and came away still thinking we’re massively short compute (~8–50x short) on consumer inference alone. Big range (future is humbling), but even the low end makes the point.

I dropped a link to the fuller write-up for anyone inclined over a slow week. It also hits a few popular debates / my steelman AI bear case. Some of this may be optimistic (or wrong). I’m a dreamer, so be kind :)

Consumer is easiest to parameterize. If we’re massively short just on that, you start to understand why the biggest players are building so aggressively.

Framework: tokens are the kWh of knowledge work and demand scales as price drops, leading to new workloads and moving us from 100-token prompts to agentic loops + multimodal + “robotic episodes” that can consume orders of magnitude more tokens.

Supply: we’ve installed mid-teens GW of frontier compute using Jensen’s rule of thumb. Other accounts suggest it may already be closer to the mid-20s GW. Either way, it sounds huge until you realize cluster-level effective performance is ~5–10% of chip specs once you net out site power overhead, MFU, and fleet mix.

Steelman bear: AI creates massive shadow output gap, but much of it is competed away or shows up as deflation/consumer surplus rather than immediate EPS gains.

More detail in the write-up: https://t.co/9Lph4Nd6aI

Appendix (topics covered):
• TPU vs GPU
• China/Huawei
• Robotics + world models

$nvda $orcl $crwv $nbis

[Shanu Mathew @ShanuMathew93]

"More than 95% of the Grace-Blackwell GPUs have not yet been deployed, even though the chip has been shipping since December 2024. (h/t Air Street Press)"

Seen via @azeem @ExponentialView

[Marbles @marblesats]

@mikealfred Yup.

[Marbles @marblesats]

@jiahanjimliu Why would you need to rent an instance of GPU’s when you can just do this? 😉

[Marbles @marblesats]

@jiahanjimliu awesome.

More of this kind of stuff!

[₿itcoin ₿utcher 🥩 🐑 🐷 @bitcoinbutcher1]

Another week in the books.

@FransBakker9812 welcome outside perspectives and feedback but when we see a pattern of the same comments from the same people, that does not promote any progress in our $iren related conversations.

If you find yourself constantly questioning your allocation percentage, trim.

We acknowledge how hard it is to hold in this environment but some people need to reevaluate how they allocate funds and decide if they are momentum traders or investors and most importantly, put in the work to accomplish the strategy.

There are no shortcuts.

[₿itcoin ₿utcher 🥩 🐑 🐷 @bitcoinbutcher1]

https://t.co/67IBsRX5Pi

[Marbles @marblesats]

@bitcoinbutcher1 cool stuff!

Been building a small position here.

[Frans Bakker @FransBakker9812]

$IREN Weekly Space 6/14 @ 9 PM ET

Join me and @bitcoinbutcher1 for another IREN themed space.
We will also talk about the news topics of this week, including the Anthropic export ban, data center scrutiny in Texas, and more.

Will be recorded ⏺️

https://t.co/3Xc6pBTnaL

[Marbles @marblesats]

@LandoInvests 💯. This was not an announcement from a position of strength.

Announcing this against the backdrop of being pushed out of Wyoming is a weak look.

[Marbles @marblesats]

I just want everyone to know that my company has contracted 45 GW+ of grid-connected capacity coming online.

That is, after checking every bureaucratic box, sitting through the interconnection queue, working with the utility to upgrade high-voltage transmission lines, having the utility build a new substation, and building my own bulk substation, I'll have this power ready for you in 2045.

So I'll just pay a gazillion dollars for Bloom Energy cells and air turbines.

Wait, nevermind, lookings like I don't need those BE cells anymore. I won't be needed in Wyoming.

But it's okay, my private market valuation is still 40 billion.

Thank you for listening to my Ted Talk.

[Marbles @marblesats]

@Name_Is_Paul @mcF_dan 😘

[Marbles @marblesats]

@bitcoinbutcher1 😆😆

[Marbles @marblesats]

@mjt2582 😂

[Marbles @marblesats]

Thanks for posting this.

"May require additional substation and transmission reinforcements; broader Nordic grid constraints could influence timelines or costs."

This reads as energization won't commence to at best 2 years from now most likely 3+ if significant transmission lines needs to be built.

This seems to highlight how Nebius is not well positioned to to energize any capacity in the near term without BTM.

Let me know if I'm understanding this correctly.

[Marbles @marblesats]

@jwp626391 Sounds about right

[Marbles @marblesats]

This whole $IREN vs $NBIS argument is actually pretty simple.

If you literally believe $NBIS will become the next AWS which means:
- it becomes a vertically integrated hyperscaler that not only provides next-gen compute GPU clusters but also services the long-tail of customers who just want to plug into an API for open source models and build applications on top of its platform

Then yes, you should invest in Nebius, even at this price.

I don't believe it has enough differentiation from AWS, GCP, Azure. And I fail to see why customers already locked into those contracts will want to take the humongous effort of migrating their entire tech stack to another vendor when open source models also exist on AWS, GCP, Azure.

I also am doubtful a ton of value when migrate to watered-down open source when it's pretty clear all of the value today is largely captured by Claude and then GPT. Keep in mind that if Anthropic / Open AI wanted to distill their models for more efficiency, they could just ... do that.

Also just look around in enterprise:
- nobody who codes use open-source -> it's all Claude or GPT (Meta / Google all use Claude instead of their internal models)
- in enterprise workflows it's really just claude. everywhere.
- the solo-pretreneur might use open source but open source does dominate enterprise. Claude /GPT (mostly Claude) does. Why do you think Open AI / Anthropic are starting to hire all of those FDE's?

Levels of customers:
- layer 1: Hyperscalers - these are the googles, Microsofts, Amazons of the world who just want bare-metal
- layer 2: AI Labs like anthropic + open AI, also just mostly want bare metal
- layer 3: Jane Street, FireworksAI, TogetherAI, Tik Tok, Palantir -> Some want bare-metal-like performance with a managed Kubernetes/Slurm layer; some want full managed AI cloud primitives; some might just want pure bare-metal. (Here $CRWV > $NBIS > $IREN)
- layer 4: larger enterprises from finance / tech companies / real estate like JP Morgan to Salesforce to DR Horton. Salesforce uses all of AWS, GCP, Azure. Specifically, it builds a number of applications on top of AWS Sagemaker.

My view is that most of the value will come from layer 1 to layer 3 because the vast majority of the value from layer 4 will be captured by AWS, GCP, Azure.

And since this is my view, $NBIS can be reduced to an infrastructure play. Seems reductive, but I largely think this will be true over the next few years.

And if you view Neoclouds largely as an infrastructure play, then you're better off investing in $IREN.

And because that is my view, no amount of genius mathematician programmer CEO, or mid-tier software engineers will really make a difference will lead to higher-quality infrastructure + faster data center development timelines.

I'll also mention that the smartest engineers in the world don't go and say "I want to work for Nebius". They work at these places, in higher to lower talent density (all high):
- anthropic -> today, everyone wants to work here
- open AI
- cursor
- databricks
- fireworks AI
- google
- meta
- stripe
- ramp
- decagon
- etc.

It's actually pretty simple.

You can say your a CEO is a genius at programming, you can say you have smart engineers, you can see Yandex is awesome, you can say you have cool subsidiaries, but it doesn't matter when you're engineers really aren't world-class and when that has nothing to do with your core-business: building real-world infrastructure to power AI workloads.

What has happened so far is that Nebius has done a good job of plugging in GPU's for Microsoft, even if they haven't come from Vineland. I applaud them for that. At the same time I think it's sus this compute is not coming from Vineland.

But that's the easy part of their portfolio. Someone tell me how they will deliver on their backlog when a site like Missouri doesn't even have an interconnect agreement there. Pretty sure this site will have to use BTM to bridge the gap as well. Someone tell me whether paying Data One for colocation and then paying Bloom Energy on top of Data One is a good or bad look.

I'll also be candid here about $IREN:
- they have had some growing pains
- horizon 1 is by far the hardest part of their portfolio because they're improvising as they go
- getting GPU's has been a bitch
- they still have to prove they can scale AI revenue from a meager 33 million last quarter to billions over the course of the next few quarters
- they still have to prove they can deliver and operate liquid cooled datacenters at scale

It's not like $IREN is perfect, but because I have an edge in knowing how the Horizon development is going + company roots + ability to source long-lead items + the genuine differentiation it has with its huge portfolio, I see it as more de-risked from an infrastructure standpoint than Nebius.

For all of these companies - Nebius, Coreweave, Iren, my view is that they should not be evaluated as software companies, but as infrastructure first companies.

It follows that if you don't have an infrastructure first background, then you might win the early game, but you won't win the late game.

Good luck.

[Nate Endicott @EndicottInvests]

$NBIS CBO, Roman Chernin:

Is the growth sustainable longer term? Is there a differentiation between the hyperscalers and $CRWV?

Roman broke it down in to three tiers:

1. Hyperscalers just want broad compute. Just a few

2. AI Labs/Researchers who want to focus on research and training but need some infrastructure. Hundreds to thousands of companies

3. Costumers that don't want to talk clusters. They think in terms of the models they consume and for many reasons they move towards open source specialized models. Thousands to tens of thousands.

4. Solo builders, who need every service & product under the sun.

"We could just have bare metal compute but then it would only be limited to a few customers. We could stay on cloud but could only service hundreds of customers. We could stay on inference but then we can only be limited to tens of thousands. We believe there will be hundreds of thousands of builders and customers and our goal is to meet them there and provide them the services they need."

[Marbles @marblesats]

@cvel317 Thanks!

[Marbles @marblesats]

@LandoInvests Onlyfrans

[Marbles @marblesats]

@FransBakker9812 Thanks and your right to call that out. Nate is pretty fair and level headed.

perhaps I should’ve started with the PhD doctor.