Data Centers and Stranded Energy: A Model for Alaska

Play, we're watching you like a hawk, man.

Built supervision, never heard of it. Watching you like a hawk, buddy.

Play, have you met Andrew? Andrew is the Chief Revenue Officer of SAP. Okay, great. Blake Hoffman, very nice to meet you. He's the godfather of energy in Alaska.

All right. And at times the whipping boy of energy. Yes. Yes. Both are true.

I am from North Carolina. Okay, great. Yeah. Some hot coffee they make over there. Yeah, I joined Sparrow about a year ago.

—Actually one of the first to join Sparrow in her mission, so awesome to do what she's done here in Alaska. Yeah, this whole thing is actually really interesting. Oh, great. That's part of our thing, that we love diversity more and more. I love it here.

This is great. Yeah, Rob's like, make sure you jump in front of every camera.

Yeah, we'll let you do—. We'll let you prep your, your thing.

One more. One is red.

Ah, to the side.

That would be awesome. So we're going to need everyone at this point. Right, right.

You know, I've never seen their logo on the boat. No. I just wonder what—.

Sam, what we doing?

Sam, we met over the video screen. Oh yeah. So it's nice to see your face in IRL. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very cool. I forgot my cell phone, so we're here.

Good to meet you, Sam. Yes. He is, uh, Sam Harris. I don't know what he is. Comms.

Kind of the comms department of One. Storytelling. Yeah, yeah. And one of those. Yeah.

It's like, it's Swiss Army knife right now. It's cool though.

It's me and Andrew working together up at like 2 in the morning and getting stuff out.

I'm in the perfect spot for having lunch. This is Andrew. Hey, very nice to meet you. So he works for Tulip City. He's the chief revenue officer for staff.

Hey, Ben. This is Albert. Good to meet you, Albert. Ben also works for Sanyo Japan. Sounds like we've got a lot to talk about.

Couple of things, yeah. Great.

Photos. That's cool, man. Oh, you don't dare say that in front of her. I will get murdered. I'm putting a picture together.

Yeah, thought I recognized you. How you doing? A lot, a lot.

You'd like to turn it on screen? We'll see.

Yeah, we've got it. I'm putting everything across. Gotcha.

I should put an AirTag on her. Yeah.

Oh yeah, yeah, right, right.

Test, test.

Director of Connectivity.

Oh, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay.

Uh, for the Italian corn and bears? Okay.

Sure. I'll say hi to him. You rascals. You rascals. Answer question.

Okay. Do you know I was just there in Roma for the, uh, we had the, okay, we had the, we had the Art of Cockfighting event.

Well, we've got a great panel today, so I am going to get started right on time as people are filing in and really want to maximize maximize the speakers' time. We have some really great diverse presentations and we want to maximize the time for you as well in the Q&A. We want to leave plenty of time for questions at the end. Good morning.

Good. We have a full house this morning.

So welcome to this presentation. This is Data Centers and Stranded Energy: A Model for Alaska. And we have 3 panelists this morning. I'll just introduce each one before their presentation. And we're going to hold questions for the end after all 3 presentations.

So If you have a question you'd like to ask, jot it on your cell phone notes or jot it on a pad and hold it because we want to have— leave a lot of time at the end for questions and answers. So our first speaker this morning is Sam Enoka. He's a founder and CEO of Greenspark. And he will start us off. Join me in welcoming Sam.

Thanks, Clay. Thanks for asking me, inviting me to join the panel today, and excited to tell you a little bit about GreenSpark and kind of what we're doing here in Alaska. But just by way of background, born and raised here in Alaska, grew up in North Pole, you know, went to undergrad University of Alaska Fairbanks. I was a, you know, key catalyst to getting the Alaska Center for Energy and Power started up. You know, I begged the university to start that because That's what Alaska has.

Alaska has microgrids. And so I was really pleased many years ago to see ACEP get started up, and I've been on the board of advisors there since inception. So I, I remain engaged at the university, but really happy that my career has sort of led me back here to Alaska. GreenSpark is developing micro data centers wherever we can find stranded energy, and Alaska is sort of the motherlode of stranded energy in North America. So I'm super excited to have made my career in Silicon Valley for the past 30 years, but, you know, now having the opportunity to bring home to Alaska the best technologies and best practices that we've seen, you know, across the Lower 48 and around the world, but really scaling that down and applying it to Alaska's microgrids.

So, um, you know, there's been a lot of talk. Obviously, you can read— you know, you can't pick up the newspaper anymore without seeing a headline about something going on in the data center world and what it means for prospective growth, you know, on Alaska's grids and the strain it's causing on the grids in the lower 48. But, you know, our motto at Greenspark is to go, you know, faster, cheaper, and cleaner. And it starts with the existing capacity. So, you know, as I look out across the room, Just by a show of hands, are there anyone— are there any folks here from village utilities or rural utilities across Alaska?

Great, great, because I'll want to talk with you after the panel. So you hear about the gigawatts and the hundreds of megawatts needed. Greenspark's developing microdata centers at as low as 100 kilowatts. So we have a pilot project that we've already demonstrated here in downtown Anchorage, and then we moved it out to Cordova. About 2 years ago, and it's 170 kilowatts, and we're getting ready to scale that up.

But we're excited about what we've got going on around Alaska and what we're, you know, what we, what we have to share about that. But first of all, again, we're focused on stranded energy. So let's go to the communities. Every time Greenspark enters into a new conversation about another community, whether it's here in Alaska or the rural United States, our first, you know, our first question to the utility is how much energy do you have available for this strategy? You know, I've sat in on the IEEE task force meetings that are talking about large loads in the 5-gigawatt, 10-gigawatt, 15-gigawatt scale.

And I just have to laugh. I'm like, okay, well, you know, the rural electric co-op that I'm talking to in Oregon or Eastern Washington or Nevada doesn't have gigawatts, much less, you know, more than 20 megawatts. So we're really focused on finding that stranded megawatt, that stranded 5 megawatts, that stranded 10 megawatts, and plugging into the capacity that these rural and microgrid systems already have. And once we enter into that conversation, you know, you start to see the eyes light up on the other side of the table about, wow, if, if Greenspark can arrive in their community and, and represent, you know, that 1 to 5 to 10 megawatt load, that base load, it becomes new and very stable revenue for that utility. And we have the opposite— we have the opposite problem that, you know, our hyperscale counterparts, the Amazons and the Googles of the world have, which is when we, when we come in and we don't require major new network upgrades for the utility, we start, you know, we eat up a fair share of the fixed overhead for that utility, and we put downward pressure on the rates for everyone on that system.

So, you know, that's a real win for the community, that's a win for the utility, it's a win for us, and, and that's our stance. Every time we start the discussion with a new utility. At the hyperscale, you heard it, you know, in the last talk on the main stage, NIMBY is killing billions. Last week, I heard, you know, I heard about an amazing project in Utah, 9 gigawatts, that just got shelved for a little while because it's big, and rightfully so, the community's concerned. 9 Gigawatts, that's more than all of Utah currently consumes.

It's mind-boggling that they would even propose, you know, a data center in a community— in a state where they're proposing to consume more energy than the state currently consumes. Like, good luck with that project. So it's no surprise that the community, you know, over 200 community protests have already been filed. Community support for these kinds of projects is as material as technical feasibility at this point. So, you know, we've— you know, just in the last few years, we've seen close to $100 billion of data center projects be delayed or canceled.

And just in the first quarter of this year, 20 projects have already been killed. So it's really important for our stance when we engage in Alaska and beyond in these smaller grids and smaller systems and rural communities that we really get buy-in from the utility and the community itself first.

So as I mentioned, start with energy. Let's go there and let's build in that community. Let's identify with the help and the partnership of that local utility what are the stranded assets, not just generation, But once we understand that they have capacity, it's easy to kind of, you know, request a little extra help. Hey, where's the transformer where I can get that 1-megawatt service? You know what's been decommissioned or what's been— what's gone offline in your community, whether it's a cannery or a refinery or some other industrial process that's been turned off in the last 10 years.

Great. That's where I want to start looking, because that's where the T&D infrastructure is. So it's not just generation capacity. But it's also having a real granular understanding of where are the assets that I can get that service from. And so the Greenspark team, you know, not just myself, but many of my co-founder and others on our team come from the energy world.

So, you know, we heard on stage that, you know, data center operators and developers are not grid experts. We're the exception. We are grid experts. So we came to the data center world with a very detailed operational understanding of how the grid works. And specifically, you know, I spent the last 20 years doing grid operations in the California ISO market, arguably one of the most litigious and policy-laden markets to be involved in, but that's where I cut my teeth in energy markets, and I'm really gratified to be able to bring that experience back home here to Alaska.

But once we identify those stranded assets, we partner very closely with the utility. We model our system. We right-size our system to fit the local utility system. And then we get in there and we start generating revenue within 90 days from being handed the keys to the site. So that's another— that's another key differentiator for us is that, you know, we want to be in market fast.

The demand for these AI assets is global and they can't wait for the next stack of chips to be lit up. Size matters. If you're talking about hundreds of megawatts and gigawatts, that's a problem. That's a problem everywhere. Water consumption is a big deal, let alone the interconnection queue which is going to take 3 to 5 years.

Again, when we look at stranded energy and stranded assets, It's a focus on generation, transmission, distribution. How fast can we get this stuff into market? And the smaller the better. The supply chain for the transformers at services over 5 to 10 megawatts could be years. And oftentimes, a lot of these smaller rural systems have assets already in the ground where they're not being used because they've been abandoned by some earlier industrial process.

So, you know, the one word missing from this slide is additionality. And I had to wear a neck brace for years from hearing the word additionality so many times at the California ISO. But, you know, this is key to a lot of these smaller systems is when we bring our 1 to 5 megawatts of load and we bring that base load demand, that's what really unlocks the ability for these rural systems and these microgrids to make the investments in the next energy efficiency project or the generation expansion project that they want to develop next. That's really important and that's something that we've learned from our discussions with all the utilities around Alaska that we speak with is that they're really looking at GreenSpark and our ability to bring just a small piece of base load as being the stepping stone for their utility to grow and improve.

So, I'll just leave you with that final message which is, you know, we start with— we what you have. That's key. We don't, you know, we don't need to start with gigawatts. We don't need to start with hundreds of megawatts. It's an examination of your existing system and then figuring out with you what works.

We're going to right-size— we want to right-size our infrastructure deployment for you. And believe me, the world's demand, you know, the The customers that are demanding AI assets globally cannot wait for the next stack of NVIDIA chips to get lit up. So we want to bring those to, you know, rural Alaska, lower 48, and emerging markets globally to get those plugged in. So we're excited to talk about it and I'll answer questions at the end of the session. Thanks.

Thank you, Sam. Let's get queued up here. All right, so our next speaker is Erlingur Gudliefsson, Eli, and he is a research fellow at the Alaska Center for Energy and Power, but also is an Icelandic colleague, roughly same latitude on the other side, and brings some experience and past history to us. Join me in welcoming Erling.

Thank you all. Good morning, and thank you for having me. Thank you for the invitation. I'm really honored to be speaking here today.

My name is Erling Gurgudlevsson. I'm a researcher with University of Alaska Fairbanks. I've been with the university since 2023. I'm with Alaska Center for Energy and Power. And I'm also an interdisciplinary PhD student at UAF.

Why are we looking at Iceland? That's a pretty, pretty good question. Iceland is an Arctic nation and therefore faces similar challenges Alaska faces every day.

As pointed out in previous ASAP publications, both Alaska and Iceland are isolated energy markets. And therefore, some decisions might lead to similar economic results. Our research focus has mostly been within the power transmission sector. And most recently, we have been looking at transferability of specific local energy innovation. Iceland has been practicing load growth policy since late 1960s.

Since the '60s, a policy that is in some terms driven by the fact that Icelandic energy is stranded out there in the North Atlantic. Similarly, Alaska is seeking to understand what opportunities might lie, be involved with Alaska's stranded energy. We see such efforts, for example, in the case of Greenspark in Cordova, and recently I see discussions about stranded gas energy and how that could provide growth for the state of Alaska.

I want to give you a little bit insights into the industrial power-consuming sector in Iceland, the C&I sector. It annually consumes 15.7 terawatt-hours of energy with a total generation of 19.6. You see that the C&I sector is a very dominant figure in the Icelandic power market. And obviously on the pie chart, the orange one, you see how dominant the aluminium industry is there. Putting— talking about putting too many eggs in the same cradle, the data center industry consumes there 1.1 terawatt hours.

The aluminium smelters, I said, were brought online in late 1960s. Alloys, 10 years later, and the Fiskmål district heating in 2006. And the first data center was established in 2010 with a 2-megawatt installation. So it's not that big. I want to draw you— we're talking about incentives and what can we do to actually get the needle moving, get the ball rolling.

And I want to draw your attention to this year here, 2006. This 19.6 terawatt hours of energy that Iceland produces is predominantly generated by hydro— hydropower. But in 2006, the state energy company started to make curtailable load agreements, and that changes the game. I don't want to draw your attention so much to the unit prices of energy here, but the blue line represents the average prices of the heavy industry sector in Iceland. But the orange one represents the curtailable load agreements that the state energy company started to offer in 2006.

Of course, it's easy to innovate when you have cheap energy. But if we look a little bit of what is happening here, the curtailable load agreements or the curtailable load available in the system has been disappearing. Of course, it's subject of rain and so on and so forth. But it also ignited significant innovation within the Icelandic power sector. Strategic location, proximity.

Data centers in Iceland are all located in the proximity of a substation. I want to show you here an example. The three The red dots there mark where the data centers are located in Iceland. It's in the— okay, I have a pointer here, sorry. It's the capital area and where the international airport is.

Of course, we have a huge aluminum smelter here, so there are big power lines coming here. And there is two in the north region. But if you look a little bit closer here to this one, This red, solid red line here represents the 32-kV transmission power line, and there we have the data center. So it's less than 3 miles distance from the substation and from the, you know, large power transmission system. Same story applies here and in the north region.

I want also to emphasize on that the data center sector in Iceland that in 2022 numbers was connected to 140 megawatts of power. It was not a singular investment. It has been growing incrementally and is, in a matter of fact, the fastest growing industrial consuming power sector in Iceland. We see this blue pretty flat line which represents the heavy industry sector in Iceland over the, over the past years. But the data center industry has been growing more than 50% annually over the period that we are looking.

So the main reasons why— for this data center growth in Iceland is that Iceland has stable, reliable, and predictable energy market. Iceland has a pretty stable economy, especially if you choose to forget about when Iceland tried to be financial capital of the north. That was a little bit of blob. Anyhow, we have a— there is a high level of education in Iceland, and there is a cold weather. All of those attributes, I think, could apply here to Alaska.

So why shouldn't Alaska have a growth within the data center sector? I would like to thank you with a nice picture of me and my family. We took a trip from Valdis, sailing, my supervisors and friends. So we want to— I want to leave some time for questions. So with those words, I think— thank you very much.

Thank you, Eli.

And Sparrow Mahoney is going to bring this home for us as our last presenter. And she is the founder and chief of Stac and Amazing Graphics.

Join me in welcoming her.

I'll use this. Yeah, sorry. Hard time, hard time standing still here. We've got a lot to talk about. So yes, I'm Sparrow Mahoney, and I am the fortunate founder and chief executive officer of a company called Stack Energy.

Stack Energy is a company that most people have never heard of. We've been quietly gathering our strength for, for this moment and for the times ahead. So what is Stack? We love the fact that we've got colleagues and peers in the industry like Sam and others and Ali who are really showing us how to use existing capacity and, and turn that into value in our state. We see a different opportunity.

We see the gigawatts of opportunity that Sam was talking about. So when you look at American innovation, the last 50 years we made a pivot from industrial innovation to services, software, technology. And now what we're finding in the industry and nationally is that all of that innovation has to have power or it can't run. So the gating issue to trillions of dollars of value has become hundreds of gigawatts of shortfall in demand. Stack is here to meet that moment and unlock Alaska for that.

So everything that Sam and the others have said is true, and you'll see it all over the news. America's problems are that grids are congested and households are impacted and prices are rising and transmission is failing. And so what is the solution? The solution isn't to try to shrink our needs, right? Our— it's our opportunity to step up and grow into it, but to reframe how we go about meeting that gap.

What is the delta? According to Department of Energy, Oh my goodness, we need 100 gigawatts in America by 2030. And that's last year's estimates. We can't keep up because the demand is so prolific that we're having a very difficult time as an industry figuring out exactly what the demand is. But you can take this to the bank.

It is real. It is sustainable. It's not a bubble. So what Stack is doing is saying exactly what our administration, starting day one of President Trump's Obama's second administration, he passed an executive— he issued an executive order that said unleash, unlock Alaska. This is where America's energy solution sits.

At SAC, we believe that's true. So why do we believe that America is such a paradigm shifting— or that Alaska is such a paradigm shifting transformational solution for America? You cannot find this solution to gigawatts and gigawatts and gigawatts of shortfall if you continue to look in the same places. The grids are tapped. They're breaking.

Americans are absolutely done paying for industry to grow. So what we need to do is bring industry to the place that it naturally belongs. How many Alaskans do we have in the room? All right. All right.

I love it. I love it. I'm an Alaskan too, by the way. Born and raised here on a homestead. And people in the back, if you want to come up, come on up.

Let's do it. We're having a visit today. If you're an Alaskan, certainly of my vintage, you got to hear about what we did with TAPS. And I have spent the last 50 years hearing about what we used to do and how great we used to be. And I'm here to tell you our best days are ahead.

What we used to do was just practice for what we're about to do. Pay attention. It's coming. It's not coming small. It's coming big.

All of that stranded resource on Alaska's North Slope is getting unlocked, and SAC is the first key in the door. We're doing it because it makes sense. We're doing it because it is the solution that is demanded regardless of which company was going to put their sale in the air. America must have power. We use it.

We don't just use it so that companies can have better margins. Many people don't realize there's a war going on. Right now. There are tokens, right, that are fighting to break their way into American infrastructure to own us, to shut us down, to freeze us, to lock us up, right? That's the war that's going on.

It's equivalent to a nuclear arms race. And it is power and power alone that will make America independent and safe and prosperous. And it must happen at scale or America will lose. So Alaska, here we are once again, just like we were back in the '70s when America demanded an at-scale solution, unheard of. TAPS.

We brought TAPS. We're at that moment again. America, Alaska is the only solution for tens of gigawatts of power that must come online just as fast as we can build it together. So This is not our first rodeo, is it? Right?

We've done this. What I love about being from Alaska and what I love when I get the privilege of meeting our partners in New York or Houston or Tokyo or Korea, what we love is that we get to tell them with pride, "Oh, you picked the right team. Oh my gosh, look around this room. Hold your palms up if you've got calloused hands. If you were part of the generation that The people that built our beautiful state, you know what's coming.

Please teach us, teach the next generation how to be tough, how to stop being afraid and think in those kilowatt-size thinking. Oh no, no, no, no. Kilowatts are not the solution. It's gigawatts. Get ready for it.

Train this generation to step up and meet the moment. Only Alaskans can do that. We are the toughest, scrappiest, most creative people I've ever met. Anywhere in the world in my career. And I've been privileged to be in some of the most hallowed halls with some of the biggest leaders, the biggest investment firms, the biggest global leaders, and everywhere I go I am so damn proud to say I'm from Alaska.

We know how to get it done. Watch us. So what is Stack actually doing? We're this company that everybody keeps going, "What is Stack?" We're starting to hear a little buzz, but what actually is Stack? And Stack is the first in.

We're a company that believes it will take all of us. We're not here to compete with your project. We're here to ask you to join together. It is an and moment. We need every bit of innovation.

We need all your workforce. Please hire more. Get ready. Invest in equipment. We need it.

It's coming. Stack is building the most vertically integrated set of solutions for for the data center industry in America. Why? Because we had to. Instead of trying to bring the gas all the way down, we know about another project that is taking on that challenge, and good for them.

It is a big challenge. What we felt was that we should take the market up. And so STACK is building a foundation for gigawatts of power just south of Prudhoe Bay. Why are we doing it there, right? We're doing it there because building it in Prudhoe would mean asking all of you and Alaska to give up its existing industrial base.

Those air sheds are tapped, right? But that's where the resources are. So what we're doing is building just right next to it, bring it down just enough so that we can build unlimited scale thoughtfully, sustainably, viably.

Our first version of that is Project AKA, and I'm so proud to tell you that we You know, internally, these, these multi-gigawatt campuses that are popping up in other states, this is our first one. It won't be the last one. We went around our community and we've engaged with our neighbors to the north and our neighbors all over to say, what do we get the privilege of calling this beautiful campus? It has the chance to be the biggest power campus in America. Wait, or the world.

But let's start with America, okay? We don't have a ceiling Other projects have artif— they have natural stops. They can only go so high. We haven't found ours yet, and we're looking. We're hiring the best engineering firms, the best design firms.

We are working with the absolute best energy firms in the world to ask the question, how big can we grow? Really, how can we do that? ACCA is the first answer, and the answer is a multi-gigawatt campus right below Prudhoe that is going to be multi-gigawatts. What does that mean? Like, can you translate that, Sparrow?

On a funny note, if you've looked at this year's sponsorships, you'll see a difference from last year. Last year, the sponsorship tiers were all different, right? Maybe it was minerals. I think it was gold and silver and all that. This year, we have gigawatt sponsors.

We have megawatt sponsors. You know why? Power. It's all about power. And Alaska is sitting on the most incredible opportunity to be the most powerful state state in America.

And Akka is taken from our neighbors. We wanted to pick a name for our campus that says we commit to you to build sustainably, responsibly, collaboratively. So Project Akka, it stands for grandmother. We look at the wisdom of the thousands of years of cultural heritage that know how to do things sustainably, responsibly, continuously. We're not here to look back at what we did for the last 50 years.

At Stack, we're looking forward to the next 50, and we're saying it's all about power. We're all in, no hedges. So what we want to do today is invite you— if you're an Alaskan company, put your balance sheet to work. Come and use ours too. We've got some of the most incredible partners that the world can deliver truly.

We're, we're a net importer of financial support. We're not asking you to dig in your pockets and go out We're asking you to get ready for the massive investment we need and the workforce and equipment that we must have to put gigawatts online. And if you see some partners around the room, I want to say thank you for those of us— we're very privileged that we have a broad system of support that reaches all around the globe. We have our friends from Kirkland Ellis in the room. They flew out from New York.

They're the largest law firm in the world, folks. Why are they on a plane? Flying to Anchorage because they believe in what we just said, and they're putting their own skin in the game, and they are backing us in every way that matters. And they're not just backing us, you know, from one project. They're here to support this ecosystem.

So they're backing us and spreading the message: America needs power. Alaska is power. And STACK is the key to power.

Okay, so I'll take some questions, and I have a couple of roving mics here.

And if you could just state your name and affiliation with the rest of us, I'd appreciate it.

The next hand.

Hi, my name is Fred Brown. I'm with the City of Akatan today, which is one of those stranded locations. And so my question is if there are any comments that could be made with regard to the communications we did see on the last presentation talk about fiber optics to the North Slope, but I'm wondering if you could talk about two other stranded locations.

Sure, I'll take a stab at that. In our strategy, you know, we look for— it was the case a year ago that fiber connectivity to the community was prerequisite, but even in the last 12 months' time, we've seen bandwidth increases from the low Earth orbiting services go from, you know, bonded, you know, bonded terminals to, you know, kind of patchwork your way together to get to 1 gigawatt to now today, you know, you can get 10 gig, 20 gig symmetrical service, which is pretty amazing. And the fact that there's more LEOs entering the market, you know, we expect to see a race to the bottom, a race to zero in bandwidth again. So We're at the point where fiber is no longer a prerequisite and, you know, another year I think it'll be very affordable to get extremely high levels of bandwidth even to support AI operations. Okay.

Next question.

Ethan Berkowitz from Far North Fiber. Sam, I disagree with you about fiber being passé. But my question is more of an Alaska interest, as we're hearing a lot of talk about a gas line and what the benefits it can bring to the state. I'm curious what the benefits would be to doing large-scale data centers on the slope in terms of revenue to Alaska, including things like carbon sequestration and all the other benefits.

First of all, thank you, Ethan, for the question, and thank you for your work at Far North Fiber. For those who don't know, Far North Fiber is working on a subsea line between Tokyo and London to make sure that we have a landing site up in Alaska's north. No disrespect to our friends up there, but we really, really want massive communication lines to onshore in America. And there are only a certain number of places that can happen. So thank you for your work at Warner Fiber.

The reality is, when you look at TAPS, we built TAPS in 3.5 years, give or take. I know we have different numbers floating around. But that's an incredible thing. We had to activate close to 70,000 workers at its peak to deliver that set of energy infrastructure. Stack intends to hire, give or take, 10,000 workers during our construction phases.

We have hundreds of permanent jobs for our operations phases. We will be— we're not one of those companies that makes a lot of big announcements. But I can tell you with kind of a wink, I guess, a wink and a nudge, plan on your royalties increasing from gas sales. We are ready to do this. This is— we're not a theory.

So what Stack has done has laid the foundation to actually build this. And so what it means is royalties to the state, tens of thousands of construction jobs. We're going to be investing and sponsoring workforce training programs in partnerships with some of the largest companies in Alaska, the ANCs, and the university system to develop the workforce so that when our long-lead items land, we're ready. But we need workforce. I mean, America has this problem, don't get me wrong, but Alaska, we need it here.

And so we're going to be looking for your companies to step up and meet the moment. Get ready for massive hiring. We are right now, we've got our procurement team has RFPs out for camps of a size unprecedented. If you've seen the announcement about our Phase 1, you'll see that by a factor of 2 plus, 2x, you know, 2x, we are going to be the largest pad on the North Slope, and we're just getting started. 7 Million cubic tons of gravel will move just for us to get our feet on the ground to start loading things up.

So if you're in the industry, invest because exactly what Ethan just asked, it means massive economic impact. And if AKLNG goes, which, which, you know, all of us, we're all Alaskans, we're in this together. This is an era of and. If they go, great. STACK is actually building in a way that we can work collaboratively with the massive ecosystem.

But what we love about STACK is we're going to do it anyway. We're here to build. This is not a maybe. This is not an if. This is not a when.

We're going, and we're going as fast as we absolutely can to hire those things right here in Alaska. Tom Dans with the U.S. Arctic Research Commission. Thank you for the presentation. It's fascinating to hear the story, and both at the small scale and at the very large scale. Question for you both: the opportunity here you identify properly is about stranded energy, and that's a jumping-off point for everything that you do.

I also note that the process that you then use to plug in generates its own kind of outputs. One, one of them may be thermal heat, and I'm wondering about opportunities. I've read about hydroponics or other things where you can generate. So how far down the chain are you actually working? I know you could keep going, but can you give us some color on that?

Absolutely. You know, we— one of the first things we looked at is what do we do with our heat. One, we need to be responsible with it. In Alaska, we need to be very careful that we don't— that we don't direct our heat in a way that has— so first, no harm, right? And so we're working with one of the national labs under DOE.

They're the only lab that does heat simulation for data centers. So we're working with them on our architecture. We are deeply committed to doing this right so that we— you know, so we're here for the the next 50 years and then some. But the interesting thing is a group like ours— so our first phase is multi-gigawatt. We can't get into the details for, for all kinds of reasons, but a multi-gigawatt build puts off so much heat that we could produce enough food in Alaska to feed all of Alaska.

We could become a net exporter if we design these things properly. So we— our teams are working on this, and I'm very proud of One of our team members jokingly, but not so jokingly, calls himself our Chief Agricultural Officer. Former Commissioner John Boyle, who was in the Governor's cabinet for 3 years, is already at work on how can we use this byproduct, which in other states is a real problem. In Alaska, what a tremendous opportunity. Let's raise the ships together.

Let's all rise. Thank you for that very thoughtful question. We can't wait to invite you all to our biodome, and also we'll have some very good I think. I think we have a lot of Alaskans in the room, and I think it gets lost on visitors that our energy costs— heating energy costs are often 3 times the electricity cost in our market. So the heat gets overlooked, whether it's nuclear industry and the excess heat.

But just curious, Sam, at small scale, at your scale, thoughts about heat in smaller environments? And then maybe Ellie, I know there's district heating in Iceland. Is there any connection on the thermal side between your data centers? And then if I could have a couple more hands, I'll get these mics up. Yeah, at the small scale, I mean, we're looking to just recycle the heat into the space that we have or the industrial space that we've, you know, co-located into.

If there's an industrial process in proximity to our operation, you know, we're happy to throw heat off that direction. I've, you know, I've ridden around at a couple of villages with the folks that are farming kelp, and they'd say, please tell us where you're gonna, you know, where are you gonna set up shop? We want to be next door. We'll take that heat. I'm like, absolutely.

I, I'm not sure how that's going to work, but you can use the heat to dry kelp for your operation. You know, this is now symbiotic. So, you know, at a very small scale, um, it, it's limited because of proximity to what are we near that could use the heat. So we're looking at like just, hey, recycle it into the building next door if it needs a little, a few more BTUs.

Yeah, as you said, like Iceland is of course predominantly heated by geothermal energy and therefore the cost to do that is nothing compared to what Alaska faces with residential heating. There hasn't been very much focus on waste heat in terms of the data centers in Iceland. But we all know that most of the energy that goes into the data center turns out to heat. So it's just simple physics. Though it will— we will get there soon because we have been seeing that the reservoirs of boreholes of geothermal energy are at peak case, the coldest days in Iceland, not performing enough.

So even it's Iceland, and it's geothermal heaven and all that, but people eventually have to utilize or be at least more respectful to the energy that we put out to the atmosphere. And there I think it could be a great opportunity to learn from states as Alaska.

Thank you. Next question and then— Steve McClure. I should say I'm representing myself since I actually work for Jet Propulsion Lab, Caltech, on the nuclear stuff, the reactor, moon reactor, Freedom One. That kind of stuff. But I'm not here today for that.

I'm actually running for an Alaska Native corporation. The question I have for you is, are you involving Alaska Native corporations? What is the benefit to Alaska Natives in general in working— that you're working with? Sure, that's a great question. Coming home to Alaska and having grown up you know, North Pole and run the rivers with my dad from Fairbanks all the way out to Galena and back.

You know, I've gotten to, you know, participate in many of those communities, so it's near and dear to my heart. The door is always open. We always have the conversation and invite participation, and at a minimum, there's awareness. They need to understand what's coming to their region or their community, and Everywhere we've gone, I've always led with, hey, at a minimum, we'd love to make sure that we're plugged into your workforce development function, your economic diversity function, just so you know that what we're doing, and if there's a way for us to work together in your region, absolutely we'll want to do it. Not required, but we always lead with that.

And if there's an interest beyond that, to participate in the project somehow, we welcome that. As I've told many of our stakeholders, and we do have some investors from the Alaska Native community that we really value, I'll never ever ever tell an Alaskan investor no. So there's always a— I've always made sure that for Greenspark, within Greenspark, that we've had— I keep a seat open everywhere we go for participation in our projects. I'll just echo that and say that at Stack we're engaging with ANCs everywhere from the cap table to the design and implementation. We're doing a workforce-first ANC, work-first force, and that includes— you know, we say ANCs, we are working actively to engage with village corporations, the ANCs, so that we have a higher Alaska First and higher First Alaskans First.

And so everything from how do we thoughtfully get together— before you see anything come out about stack, you can count on the fact that we will have sat down with elders from the communities that we're working in, or with leadership from those Native corporations or village corporations, if it impacts them, to sit down and say, we're in your backyard? How can we thoughtfully, respectfully, not only be here, but invite you to the table? How do you want to be involved? We've been hiring, working very closely with some of the large energy services divisions and participating, like I said, everywhere from the cap table to the dinner table. Come on, come on.

It's Alaska first. As far as we're concerned, we'll take all the T's, talent, time, and treasure from our first Alaskans before we'll take anything from anybody else. So—. And I'd just like to add back that actually my argument is with the ANCs themselves and their lack of getting involved up front and together. But thank you.

Yes, that's true. But, you know, you can't compel them, right? You can just create awareness and let them make their own decisions. But what's, I think what's interesting about our model at Greenspark is that, you know, obviously I wanted to start this in Alaska, you know, to prove that we could execute in arguably the world's most punishing, harsh energy environment. And the message about what we do is reverberating around the world.

So, you know, I'm looking at invitations to go to other continents at this point because the sovereigns in those regions understand how far back behind the rest of the world they're falling in terms of the AI race. So if, you know, if the folks in Africa or South America or any, you know, emerging market globally want to have any aspiration to keep up, they're going to be looking for a partner that has some kind of track record of being able to execute in difficult environments. And I can't think of any place more difficult than Alaska to attempt this. So we're being received well and exactly for the same values, is that they want and need the technology and they also want to participate in the project from somewhere from the cap table down to workforce development and eventually dinner table. So— I'm Bob Kaufman.

There's a lot of reasons why this could work up here. I'm curious, what constraints have you discovered would be the reasons it wouldn't work? And also, how does scale relate to adding risk or de-risking this?

Boy, what a great question. Thank you for asking that. I have a biased answer. So, so I'll disclaim that right from the beginning. But when we first started, we had our first lease on along the Dalton for 50 megawatts.

And we found it incredibly difficult. We were, we were relying on tapping into taps, we were actually going to use existing capacity on the fuel gas line and make, make use of existing infrastructure. It was like sprinting into a brick wall. And so what we found is that In order to make this viable, to underwrite a proprietary midstream, our own dark fiber line, a campus that can support the at-scale demands of energy, the bigger we've gone, the more viable it's been. And we've got the commercial partners now.

Late— our foundation includes the partnerships that are needed to do it at our scale. I think for us, size does matter. And right now, America just, we cannot continue to think small. And I think in Alaska, we've run— the biggest challenge, I'll speak for myself, that I've run into, that our team has run into, is a whole bunch of people that talk about what we used to build. We run into things like, well, can we just scale it down and do a pilot?

We're like, what are you testing? All we're testing is just how many things can we get down the haul road? How many spots can we build? Let's invest in more slots up at, you know, up at Westok. We need more infrastructure.

The rest of it, I don't think there's any better place in the world to build what we're building. But we'll be doing refinements. You know, we'll be looking for fiscal refinement and we're working very actively on that. We, Stack, are a C corporation. You know, if you— if you're dialed in on how taxes work in Alaska, you know that we could have been an S corporation and not paid any tax.

Our commitment was build this for Alaska, meaning build it in a way that is commercially viable when you contribute to the place where you're taking the resource from. So we are committed to going right up to the edge of viability and leaving every dollar we can in the jobs and pockets of our partners. But scale helped us. The bigger we got, the faster we could move. Velocity is real.

The hurdles that we faced, the constraints that we faced at the small scale is showing up to the town hall meeting and facing the pitchforks. Seriously. You know, everyone hears about, oh, you know, there might be a data center coming to town. So everyone does their internet research and they see what, you know, big, what the problems are that are being caused by the large hyperscalers in the lower 48. And, you know, they come with the hard and direct questions.

They're like, Sam, what are we— what's going to happen with water? Why are our rates going to go up? And it has to be sort of a campaign of awareness to work through that. And, you know, as in my travels anyway, as I've been able to sort of break the logjam there and kind of educate folks about what it means for a right-sized system to be added to their utility and to their community, it thaws the ice pretty quickly. And so we get from NIMBY to YIMBY really quick.

How about now? All right. I'm Ray Latcham, and I've traded gas in North Slope and Cook Inlet over the years. And I've been watching the gas prices up there a lot. And what I'm not hearing from any of the projects— and there are now, like, give or take, 4 to 6 significant offtake projects for Prudhoe Bay gas.

And I'm just wondering how sensitive They are to price because nobody's talking about the price. And I've seen gas trade for 25 cents in Alaska and I've seen it trade for $12. Somewhere in between there, you know, there's some numbers and some of your projects work and some don't. I'm just wondering how sensitive is— and I'm not— I'll pick on Sparrow just because you're here, right? So between say $1 gas at the wellhead in Bruto versus say $3 gas.

And we've seen $5 gas, and we've seen, you know, 50-cent gas up there over the years. So, is the data center business real sensitive to gas costs? Because I kind of get the feeling sometimes it is when they've called me before for, you know, years ago when the Bitcoin thing was just taking off. And they'd say, okay, well, then they find out it's not free or that the producers aren't willing to pay them to take it because they've heard it had a negative value, constrained oil production, et cetera. So how sensitive are these projects to a $3 gas cost versus $1.50 or something?

And then, Sparrow, if I could just add another layer to that— the price but also the availability. What's the status of actually access to that gas? Yeah, absolutely. Great question. And no surprise, Ray, that you would ask that thoughtful question.

I think gas price matters tremendously. You know, in Alaska, it costs more to do things. You know, we're looking at hundreds of millions of dollars. There was an article recently about our project, and I think the number was thrown out that it's going to cost us half a billion dollars to do this. That's what we're planning to spend on just one component.

So this is— for our project to hit the first phase of demand, just to deliver the power, that's not including the data centers, we're looking at approximately $20 billion worth of investment. So gas price price advantage is one of the things that matters tremendously. It doesn't have to be free. That's unrealistic. It has to be worth it to the producers.

We have a royalty audit board here in Alaska that needs to get paid. Alaskans need to get paid when we take resources out. But I think it's a fine line between offering, you know, reasonably priced gas, you know, commercially viably priced gas. But the other thing we think we solve uniquely here in Alaska is predictability. What you're talking about with volatility, and we're seeing this play out, the Iranian war is showing people that when you are exposed to hub pricing, your model might be in jeopardy.

And I'll just give you one economic set of numbers to take away, because if we— if America is missing 100 or more gigawatts of power, then, um, and, and the— these companies that are trillion-dollar companies are putting their balance sheets to work. I mean, how in the world did software companies become the biggest infrastructure builders in America? Because they have to secure their supply chain, and power is the most important component. So interestingly enough, the one thing they can't do is invest all of the money it takes. And the numbers I want to give you are this— it's publicly available information, so I don't have to, I don't have to violate or caveat anything.

Look up a deal that was recent recently done in Ohio. SoftBank Energy did a deal for 10 gigawatts. That project is going to cost half a trillion dollars to put all 10 gigawatts online. About $33 billion of that is power. About $66 billion of that is shells.

Everything else are the chips inside, and those chips get refreshed every 3 to 4 years. It's incredible. But according to, you know, if you, if you talk to the head of Google's on global infrastructure, what they tell you is, yeah, that sounds like a lot of money. What it means to us is $4 trillion worth of enterprise value in a matter of a small number of years. We cannot afford to not build power.

So I think our, our challenge at Stack— and I'll just speak for us because we're not using existing power, we're making it— is to find that right line. What is, what is the plumb line where we can pay Alaska and producers a reasonable rate, deliver the price predictability that's needed to offset the other penalties of building on the slope and the other costs that we have to incur. Our goal is not to bring a little bit of the market home. I want us to be just one of many where we create a giant sucking sound and you hear, "Fwack! Alaska, we are where the electron economy lives.

Let's bring them home, shall we? They're yucking it up down there in the lower 48. Alaska's the solution." But it's a— it's an important line to walk. We also want it to generate royalties. So do I think they'll pay $3 an M for gas?

I don't. Do I think they'll pay more than zero? I do. And I know that because— because a certain company is, you know, Stack has a great partner, set of partnerships, multiple partnerships on the supply front. So we've worked together to find the answer to the second question.

How do you actually get gas off— off the or slope? That's such a thoughtful question. You— Ray might be one of— I mean, if I could count the number of people who might actually know the answer to this, Ray's one of them. Not many people have done the work to say, how do you actually move gas off the slope? Meaning that it's all wonderful to say, we've got it, it's stranded, and it's a stump speech.

It's wonderful to say. The devil's in the details. And what we've been doing quietly for the last couple of years is incredible investment deep investments into engineering, permitting, looking at how do we actually interface with Central Gas facility or other systems. What is our own midstream? Okay, it's not going to be a pipeline to nowhere.

How does our system need to engage with the broader ecosystem from the various producers so that we can deliver not only the cost but the reliability? You know, the data center world, they'll pay for power, but they— we need to give them 5, 4, or at a minimum 3 nines of reliability. We can't buy that right now off CGF, right? CGF has, you know, depending on who you ask, you know, uptime rates that will not meet that. So what we're looking at is how to stack build redundant spokes into our hub so that our campus is what the commercial solution has to be end to end.

Thank you for that question, Anna. We have time for one more, but before we get there, Sam, maybe you could convert or asparel to kind of a kilowatt-hour rate that some of us in my industry are more familiar with? Is there bookends or a tipping point where that price just becomes infeasible? You're putting me in a dangerous spot here. But let's just say, you know, our model in a Southeast utility, maybe a 30-minute flight southeast from here, we're facing something on the order of $0.25 to $0.30.

Our model works fine.

If I was worried about— I'll just leave you with this. If I was sensitive to energy cost, I wouldn't have started this in Alaska. So the real factor is energy availability. That is it. That's what's happening in AI today.

It's about energy availability. Okay, thank you. Thank you. And then, Eli, you've kind of had this large industrial— I mean, 80% C&I is your entire electrical use is very different. And in Alaska, I think Iceland, 4 times their per capita use of electricity, which has a dramatic reducing rates effect.

And our legislators went to Iceland to see how your transmission and large anchor tenants have affected you. You've had the aluminum industry, now you're starting to see the data industry. What's your main takeaway for Alaska as we look at engaging the data industry?

One of the reasons for this successful growth of the data center industry in Iceland is because Iceland has been keen to seek diversity. You know, the aluminum sector consumes 80% of the of the power that's generated in Iceland. And there are very— you know, back in the days there was only one pillar to support the Icelandic economy. That was fisheries. Okay?

Then in late '69 we moved into— or late '60s we moved into the heavy industry sector. And then we had— then there were two pillars supporting Icelandic economy. And lately tourism has been growing. Tremendously. So it's approximately today 1/3, 1/3, and 1/3.

So the aluminium industry is less dominant if you look at the economy of the whole nation, but Iceland has been really keen to seek all options to diversify the off-takers of the C&I— off-takers of power in the C&I sectors. I did a brief calculation on jobs, for example, And we see that there are more jobs. If you just look at the annual statements of those companies, there are more jobs with the aluminium sector than with the data sector. But that actually doesn't matter because it will, it will give, it will, it will give pressure to the university. It will give pressure on the infrastructure and the status that we have within each of our states to actually produce and diversify the workforce of the nation.

And therefore, I think you'll have a— you'll have a— what do you say— more pleasant life. So we'll squeeze one more in if we could keep it brief and maybe point it to one of our panelists. Good afternoon. Arnav, Department of— could you turn the switch on there? Sorry, the lower switch.

It'll turn green. Perfect. Good afternoon. Arnav, Department of Revenue. I have a quick two-part question.

Right now there are projects being proposed in case the gas line doesn't happen of potentially building a power plant on the North Slope to power the rail belt. I was wondering if your team has some ideas in that sphere, in power generation for the rest of the state. And second part, I imagine the Quintillion cable might not be reliable enough for your network infrastructure. So I'd love to learn more on what your plan is for network connectivity up there. And I'll be really quick here because I know we're running out of time, but just to say that, which is we're going to produce power, and it's our commitment that we're not competing with other projects.

However, if those other projects don't go and power is needed, we're here for Alaska. So I think we've been preparing ourselves to be supportive within a set of solutions that could be statewide. And then the last thing is really connectivity. We're going to build our own fiber line to support the existing infrastructure. And I know we're out of time, so I just want to do one thing, if you'll indulge me.

Everybody in this room has heard about AKLNG. Very few people in this room have been privileged to be inside the quiet halls of Stack where we do all the fun work in private. We have a phrase, and we invite you to join us. Say it loud, say it proud. We say LFG.

So at STAC, we say AKLFG. It's time. It's our moment. We're ready to be the best version of our state that we have ever been. Full stop.

Let's go. Okay, a round of applause for our panelists.

And then just a couple of quick, quick announcements. Third floor ballroom is our lunch. Presentations begin begin at 12:45. On your way, be sure to check out the exhibit hall located in the third floor foyer. And for more information about the conference, download the conference app by scanning the QR code on the back of your badges.

And we look forward to seeing you at the next session. Thank you.

No, because I'm seeing right now that the estimate is sitting around $700,000. Last time, that's what I'm hearing.