Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. My name is Abby and I'll be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to CleanSpark's Fiscal Third Quarter Financial Results Conference Call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speakers' remarks, there will be a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] Thank you. And at this time, I would like to turn the floor over to Isaac Holyoak, Chief Communications Officer. You may begin.

Thanks, Abby, and thank you for joining us today for our fiscal third quarter financial results call, covering the period April 1, 2023, through June 30, 2023. Our press release was issued about 30 minutes ago and is available on our website at www.cleanspark.com/investors. Today's call is also being webcast and a replay and transcript will be available on our website. I'm here with Zach Bradford, our Chief Executive Officer; and Gary Vecchiarelli, our Chief Financial Officer. Keep in mind that some of the statements we make today are forward-looking and based on our best view of the world and our businesses as we see them today. As described in our SEC filings and on our website, those elements may change as the world changes. We will also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures concerning our performance during today's call. You can find the reconciliation of GAAP financial measures in our press release which is available on our website. And with that, it is my pleasure to turn the call over to Zach.

Thank you, Isaac. Good afternoon and thank you for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. Since last speaking with you, we have strengthened our position as one of the largest most efficient publicly traded Bitcoin mining operators in the world. The dedication of our teams has resulted in extraordinary rapid growth. We now outperformed almost every single one of our competitors in monthly production even compared to competitors that on paper may seem bigger than us. As a CEO and Founder, I hope you excuse a little cheerleading, but I don't think it is at all an exaggeration to say that we are the best bet in this space. We have a proven track record of doing what we say we'll do. And to that point, we have hit or exceeded every milestone we've set for ourselves. This company and the people who work here are best-in-class in every way. Now, before I get into the details on the quarter, I want to take a moment and announce that we have fully funded our growth to 16 exahash per second. This includes machines, materials, and everything else nuts to bolts that goes into building a world-class Bitcoin mining facility and bridging the gap to 16 exahash per second. This creates certainty for our shareholders around our future and puts any questions to bed about our path to 16 exahash per second. We are building transformational infrastructure with almost 90,000 machines deployed and another 60,000 on hand or pending delivery for a total fleet of approximately 150,000 state-of-the-art miners, all fully funded. We are operating over 9 exahash per second and over the next half of the year, we expect to add an additional 7 exahash per second after energizing the expansion of our data center in Sandersville Georgia.…

Thank you, Zach. As Zach mentioned, we have a proven track record as the last 2.5 years of execution speaks for itself. I'm very humbled to be part of this management team and proud of the efforts of our operations team who have made us a top-tier miner. Let's dive into the numbers for the third quarter now. For the third quarter of 2023, we recognized $45.5 million of revenue which was an increase of approximately $14.5 million or a 47% increase. This increase was due to our growth in hash rate and thus greater bitcoin mined during the most recent quarter. When compared to the preceding second quarter, our revenues increased approximately $3 million or 7%. Our hash rate remained relatively steady in the most recent quarter, the revenues increased due to bitcoin price remaining elevated. This increase in revenues led to increases in gross profit for both the prior year and preceding quarter comparisons. I want to point your attention to the preceding quarter comparison for our gross profit increased $4.4 million to $24.8 million. We also saw our gross margins increased 7% from 48% to 55%. The increase in gross profit between the quarters is greater than the increase in revenues due to declines in our third quarter power costs. I want to call that out now, as I will discuss this in greater detail here in a few slides. Looking at our GAAP net loss, we decreased our net loss in both comparable periods to $14.2 million. The largest contributor to our net loss is our depreciation amortization, which is a little less than $22 million for the third quarter. As you are aware, our business model requires significant capital investment and our efforts in acquiring the newest and most efficient ASIC miners on the market…

Thanks, Gary. Abby, this concludes our prepared remarks. We would now like to open the line for questions from analysts.

Thank you. And ladies and gentlemen, at this point, we will begin the question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] we will take our first question from Mike Colonnese with H.C. Wainwright. Your line is open.

Hi, good afternoon, guys, and thank you for taking my questions. First one from me, great to see the power costs come down in the quarter if you could just speak to what you're seeing in the market since the quarter and the trajectory going forward, especially in light of some of the recent heat waves we're seen across the US and now that Vogtle 3 is online in the state?

Hey, Mike. Thanks. This is Zach. I'll fill that one first. Power prices have continued to remain very advantageous. This is a great thing about Georgia is we are not in Texas and we're not contending with the power prices in a way that they are. Also we're not seeing the heat in the same way. Yes, it's hot. Yes, we have to manage around that. But our curtailment has been incredibly limited. I don't have the exact number, but we are able to maintain still upper 98% uptime, even after the quarter end. So really what you should expect to see, you know, in our next update is continued extremely high realization. July has been great. We do expect probably the last two weeks of August are usually the hottest of the year in Georgia. What we're seeing on the power prices though is that's been able to maintain fairly flat. So, will we see a slight increase in August? Yes, I think so. But we are seeing the wholesale power rates to continue to maintain in the $0.02 range, just like we did last quarter where we had $0.024 on average. So all in all, we're feeling really good,. We're able to keep our machines online more than I think most of our peers and Georgia is again proving to be one of the best bets. To your last question, let me address Vogtle 3, you know, really its impact is -- it's probably a little too early to tell, but it's part of the reason that we made the bet. If you understand the power costs or really just applying demand, what Vogtle 3 is providing is additional supply base load 24/7, 365 and that should lead to increased abundance, which again on a supply and demand curve should lead to lower cost, simple economics.

Great. Thanks for taking my questions, Zach.

All right. Thank you.

And we'll take our next question from Josh Siegler with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.

Hey guys, thanks for taking my questions today, and congrats on getting the 16 exahash fully funded. I think that's quite an achievement. So, congratulations on that. It actually ties into my first question which is with the 16 exahash fully funded now, what do you view as the major risks to actually achieving that 16 exahash year-end target? How do you plan on best managing for things such as transportation of rigs and actually installing the rigs to make sure you can still hit the 16 exahash by year-end? Thanks.

Hey, Josh. Thanks for joining the call. Appreciate the thoughtful question on this. What we focus on is what we can control and we've been planning on this for many months. So let me address the rigs first and the miners I should say. The miners are going to arrive months in advance is our intention. So we expect the -- if you look at that 45,000 new order, which will be the majority of what goes into that site, it's in August and September batch which means they should be shipped late September -- sorry, late August, early September. And so at that point, it's just a matter of how quickly the planes can get on the ground. So I really would expect that we should have all the -- all 45,000 of those machines stateside realistically by the end of October, on an outside case, it should be the first week or two in November. Now from there, it comes to infrastructure. So our infrastructure is well on track to be ready ahead of time with -- the minute that we have shelves available, optimally we're storing miners for a very short period of time and then we're putting them right onto shelves and ready to go. So everything we control between the rigs and the infrastructure, all the lead -- long lead-time items have already been ordered under contract. We have all the contracts are secured. So all of that is taken care of. The risk to us, certain things we don't control that can of course be utility timing or anything that relates to their side. As of right now, we feel good about the trajectory things are going. Now, of course, we can help in some ways along the process and we're going to continue to do so to make sure that we get there as quickly as possible. But when the power is there, it still does take time to turn the machines on. If you've paid attention to what happened with our recent 50-megawatt expansion, you know, it took us about 10 days to get -- 10 days, 12 days to get all those machines turned on hashing and that just comes down to the fact that we're working with a whole lot of power. It's not like flipping a light switch when it comes to 50-megawatt or 150-megawatt of power. So, for us, to kind of sum that up, it's -- we're going to try and have everything we can control ready early and that way we have plenty of buffer room on our side of the equation.

Got it, Zach. That was a very helpful color. Thank you. And then, I was curious if we could take a look forward, right, once the 16 exahash targeted is achieved, it should set the company up to establish a larger hollow balance over time. If we're thinking about growth beyond the 16 exahash, would you view this larger hollow balance as the potential funding source for growth?

Yeah, absolutely. We view it also an ROI source because it's an asset on the balance sheet that has the ability to grow in value and going back to the market events that we're seeing ETFs, for example, halving aim is another. Bitcoin is built with scarcity in mind that should push the value up on a long-term basis. We also believe that the other market effects such as ETFs, but also the continued adoption rates of bitcoin everything is trending in the right direction to show that that will increase in value. Now as that goes up in value, we can, of course, use that to fund growth from operations like we have for the last 18 months, we've always seen it as one of the levers to pull to grow. And so again, from a market conditions point of view, we got it right, when we started selling our bitcoin even though it was unpopular, almost what's that 18 months. Almost two years ago when bitcoin hit 69,000 although on popular, we chose to sell it, because the market indicated it was time to sell. We believe the market is indicating it's time to hold to more than other times and we'll measure it day by day week by week, but absolutely. We still see it as a way to fund growth and again on a long-term basis, we also hope that debt markets come back into play, which they're really knocks good opportunities there. But the more non-dilutive capital whether it's operating or debt, the better, and on a long-term basis, we think that having a really strong balance sheet, sets us up -- sets us up to do that and we'll look to those levers in a higher degree as for future growth.

Great, thanks, Zach. Very helpful again. I'll hop back in the queue. Thanks.

Thank you, Josh.

We will take our next question from Tyler DiMatteo from BTIG. Your line is open.

Yes, thank you. Really appreciate the time here. So, Zach, I was wondering if you could provide a little more color on Dalton specifically. And really, what would that expansion look like, you know, realizing that Georgia is the real strong whole footprint of the company, but any color on timing there? How you would think about going about realizing that with Vogtle 3 online obviously nuclear in Georgia is becoming even more important. Just any other color on that sites specifically?

You know, at this time, I'm not able to provide a lot of additional information. We don't want to give away the secrets of everything we're working on right now. So there's this opportunity. There is opportunity all over Georgia from the abundance of power point of view. To reiterate Georgia again is continuing to prove out just like we made the bet 2.5 years ago it would, that power prices would be low and continue to stay low. And so that is one of many opportunities for expansion. When we have more information in hand, we will look forward to sharing it with everybody.

Okay, great. And then my follow-up here. I wanted to circle back on the fleet efficiency at the 29 Joules per terahash going to 25 Joules per terahash. I mean, I guess how do you think about moving beyond the 25 Joules per terahash, potentially, and really the rig replacement cycle and just growth in general? I'm just curious how you're thinking about efficiency and anything you can do to kind of improve that, and I know, obviously, emerge is a big topic in the market today, but just any other color there on kind of how you're thinking about efficiency and what that could shake up today?

Yeah. So that's obviously going to be an optimization strategy that -- it's going to be required by all miners in the future. What we are actively in the process for and if anybody has added up the exahash of total miners that we have, they're going to see it's over 16. And we're actively in the process of doing some upgrades that will lead to I'm going to call it a mid-term fleet efficiency improvement between now and the end of the year and we think that that's going to get us halfway to 25. And then, once we get everything installed and online, really there won't be -- we don't expect at halving that there'll be anything on our fleet that will have an efficiency over 30.5 watts per terahash. All the machines will have been upgraded and shifted from there. Now, what does that mean for the machines that we pull out of cycle? There's obviously a couple of things to do with them. We can keep them and look to deploy them in maybe more remote situations where power is extremely cheap, but maybe where there is uncertainty of timing. This can be anything from flare gas to small sites in Africa, or we can just sell them and turn them into capital and keep buying and building more efficient facilities. So we see that as a point of optionality. So we are going to have a stack of lower efficient miners. But what the bull market has always proven, when you look back and how many F-19s we're suddenly flying off the shelf for prices for what you can actually nearly buy an F-17 or an F-19 for today. That's another opportunity, it should stack the least -- the less efficient machines in a warehouse and the next bull run there, work their weight and gold again. So we see that as a point of optionality, but we don't expect to have anything plugged at halving that would have an efficiency under 30 -- or above 30.5 watts per terahash.

Okay, great. Really appreciate the color there, Zach, and thanks for taking the time.

No, thank you.

We'll take our next question from Brian Dobson with Chardan. Your line is open.

Hey, Thanks very much for taking my question. So interesting thoughts that you shared on the potential approval spot ETF, I suppose, what are your thoughts on the timeline for that approval? And do you have any estimate for how much capital we could see directed toward bitcoin if one of those is approved?

Anything I would say is going to be maybe a guess, but I expect that will be a matter of months, not years. If Mike Novogratz yesterday got pretty public during their earnings call and some follow on comments that his belief from insiders of BlackRock was that it would be four months to six months out. He probably has better information than I do on this. So that's probably a good indication. But we have had conversations with market participants over the past few months and I do see it as something that is likely, it's something that has to happen in the very near term. So really looking forward to that. From a capital point of view, I think it's going to just come down to percentages. There's a lot of money being managed out there. And once ETFs from these big firms come into play, there is nothing to stop somebody from putting 1% or 0.5% or even a 10th of a percent into these ETFs, and when you think about the trillions under management that could potentially be a very large dollar amount that flows into bitcoin. But what that is and how much funds would our family office would consider to allocate into any of these ETFs, it's just a guess. I do think that the regulatory certainty is a really big part of this, which again we mentioned, we think is coming. So even if when the ETF come into play, there is not all the potential capital that comes in, maybe we need another 12 months after that of additional regulatory certainty and when that happens, we could see a second wave, I think. So, I think this is a two-step process potentially, unless, you know, from a commodity's point of view that certainty speeds up just a little bit more.

Very helpful. Thank you.

Thank you. I appreciate the question, Brian.

We'll take a follow-up question from Josh Siegler with Cantor Fitzgerald. Your line is open.

Yeah. Hi, guys. Thanks for taking my follow-up. I just wanted to touch on immersion cooling. Now that you've been hashing in immersion for quite some time. I'm curious if you can comment on the efficiency gains you're seeing from immersion and any color you have on its operations as well would be helpful. Thanks.

Yeah, absolutely. So we really like the results we're seeing from immersion. And I also think in future generation of miners as the chips get more efficient and the nanometers gets smaller, and therefore produces more heat potentially. Immersion is going to become more and more important. And so, as part of that, I really do think that in 2024 and later, we'll look to build more Immersion cooled facilities. We specifically said that when we built Norcross that we knew it wasn't going to be the biggest sites that we owned. It's actually amongst our smallest currently but it allowed us to learn everything we needed to learn. Currently, it is running perfectly flat, all the time, 24/7, repair, and downtime is substantially better than air cool. And so again, we're extremely happy from the results we've seen, we've also learned a couple of things that we would change in the future. So I do think in 2024 and later we'll be ready to move into more large-scale immersion facilities. Now when it comes to performance, we do gain some flexibility in immersion. And so there's a lot of headlines and a lot of talk about the ability to over-clock 100% and that's not something we're interested in doing because the efficiency goes out the window. But instead what we're seeing is we can hash at 8% to 15% better, and maintain or improve the baseplate or nameplate efficiency of many of these machines. So, it allows us to make gains on efficiency while maintaining those miners very healthy temperatures, very long life, happy environment for them to be in. So we're happy with smaller gains, higher efficiency, which again drives more to the bottom line. So that's where we're going to focus on our immersion in the future. We're not going to try and do these massive over-clocks because efficiency does go out the window and that's I guess the point of risk, I would say, for -- to when investors do hear about that is, you just need to know that comes at a cost. So again, you can over-clock when bitcoin goes to $69,000, it sounds great. But when bitcoin comes down to current levels or even lower like we saw in the winter under clocking is actually more valuable. So flexibility is the real value in immersion cooling.

Great. Thanks, Zach, and thanks for taking the follow-up.

Thank you.

And ladies and gentlemen, with that, we will conclude today's conference. We thank you for your participation and you may now disconnect your lines.