Wes Cummins
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
Thanks for having me.
I appreciate it.
Sure.
So we started the company in 2021.
What I would say about Applied Digital is we've never been a Bitcoin miner.
We were always a data center company.
So when we started in 2021,
What we did was when China cracked down on crypto, we saw the opportunity to build data center capacity for Bitcoin miners in the United States.
So we built over a two year period, we built 500 megawatts of data center capacity, but we didn't mine the Bitcoin.
We actually leased it out just like a data center model would.
We leased it out to Bitcoin miners, Marathon being our largest customer there.
So we signed a big contract with Marathon, built out, helped them become the largest miner in the world through that lease of our data center capacity where we ran their equipment for them.
And then a year into that, so we're still building it out in 2022.
we decided to build high-performance computing on the same campuses.
That was the idea, to build high-performance computing.
So during 2022, we hired some guys.
They were previously building data centers for Meta, and we designed a high-performance computing data center that we started building in Jamestown, North Dakota.
And at the time, the market was very different than it is today.
So we designed a 10 megawatt build in Jamestown, North Dakota.
It was purpose built for high performance computing.