Applied Digital Corporation (NASDAQ:APLD) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Lucas Pipes: Very helpful. Thank you. Thank you, Wes. I’ll do one last one, before turning it over. On the HPC side, you mentioned you’re in discussions for additional commercial relationships. Can you give us a sense of the order of magnitude? In terms of the discussions you have in currently? Thank you very much for your color on this.

Wes Cummins: Sure. That’s a great question, Lucas. So I think you should think about HPC – the way I think about it is we’re putting this facility up. We already have some GPUs running and we have some customers working and trialing on those GPUs in a couple of locations. The site that has been built in Jamestown, it’s going to happen in phases. So really happens in 3 phases. The first phase goes up and there’ll be 300 GPUs that run, we have two customers for those GPUs. And that’s really kind of proving out how this works. And then we’ll expand it from there by a little over 2 megawatts. And then there’s a third expansion by another little over 2 megawatts that would happen later in the year. So it’s kind of staged a couple of months apart on each one.

But the way I look at this is, we’re seeing a significant amount of demand. And if we get these customers up and running successfully over the next few months, we’ll sign additional customers, I have no doubt that we’ll do that. But my view is signing a few there’s a potential to sign a few very large customers once this is proven out. But we’re, we’ve had some initial discussions with those customers, but we’re not going down the track with them initially, we’d rather make sure that the that we kind of have these facilities tuned to where I think they should be and where the team thinks they should be before we do that. But the strategy is to add a few small customers and then maybe add, kind of what I would call an anchor tenant, similar to what we did with the Bitcoin mining later this year.

Lucas Pipes: Thank you very much, Wes to you and your team. Continued best of luck.

Wes Cummins: Thanks.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of John Todaro with Needham and Company. Please proceed with your question.

John Todaro: Great, thanks for taking my question. Congrats on another quarter down here. First question, just as we do think about gross margin, so 25% of revenue for Jamestown, with the Texas and Ellendale sites when they’re up and running, should we expect kind of a similar gross margin profile there as well?

Wes Cummins: I think we expect those sites to be a little bit more profitable than Jamestown. I mean, the target we’re shooting for John is is around 30% gross margin, once we have everything up and optimized. It will need the site to be running for a couple of quarters to get there. Now that can be a moving target a little bit, because generally our business focuses on a spread between electricity and what we charge our customers. But where that’s dialed in right now, I think I think looking towards 30% optimized gross margin is where we’re trying to get to where I think we can get to.

John Todaro: Okay. Got it. Great. And just one other question for me on HPC. So just remind us and sorry if I missed this, kind of a timeline for the pilot program? And what is being determined in that? Is there some optimization you guys would look to do? Or is this really just kind of testing the waters before building more demand?

Wes Cummins: Yes, it’s, it’s both of those actually. So it’s, putting the facility up, we’ve designed the facility putting it up and then making sure it works correctly for the application. So we have a software partner on this that is that we’re working with as well and working through how that software works on site, specifically for machine learning. And so we’re putting that up making sure it works on this location in Jamestown, making sure design looks good. And then we can expand from there, but it’s yes it’s truly both of those and so you should expect the 300 GPUs to be running in March. And then we’ll expand from there. But, right now, I fully expect the full 5 megawatts to be running by the end of the year of 2023. But, if things were running well, there, we should already be, on to the next facility and expanding that.

John Todaro: Got it. Great. Thank you. Appreciate it.