Power Lunch - Major Stock Averages Rip 11/10/25

Episode Date: November 10, 2025

Brian Sullivan does the show live from a utility conference in Hollywood, Florida as energy becomes increasingly important to the AI story. It's all here on Power Lunch.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

All right, happy Monday, everybody. Welcome to Power Lunch. I'm Brian Sullivan Live from Edison Electric Institute's Financials Conference here in Hollywood, Florida. Utilities, power, it's on a tear. Utilities, by the way, the third best sector performer year to date. AI's power demand just keeps growing exponentially. Companies overall announcing $1.1 trillion worth of upgrades. A lot of questions remain.

For example, will all this power be enough to achieve all of America's AI dreams? We'll ask about that all-hour long. Got an all-star lineup, a guest to discuss it, including the CEO of Duke Energy, Harry Sedaris, the CEO of PG&E, Patty Poppy, and the CEO of Red Hot Crypto Mining and Data Center Company, Hutt 8, all hour long. Plus, of course, that's not all the markets. They are beginning the weak, strong Congress closing in, thankfully on a deal to end the longest government shutdown in history. Emily Wilkins is on Capitol

Hill following all of those latest developments. And speaking of the shutdown, another 2,000 flights canceled today because of air traffic staffing problems. The shutdown hitting business travel, the FAA restricting private jet flights at a dozen major airports. We're going to talk more about it, including, by the way, my own experience in just getting down to South Florida. Yesterday, We have an action-packed hour ahead, but let's start where it's all happening in D.C. senators finally doing their jobs, taking a critical step toward a deal to reopen the government, hopefully by the end of the week. Emily Wilkins on Capitol Hill, Emily, where are we now and what needs to happen? Well, Brian, fingers are still crossed that this can be done by the end of the week. We're looking at the shutdown, potentially ending there. But look, we had a group of Democrats last night. They finally broke the stalemate. they joined with Republicans to take the first steps to reopen the government. Now we're just waiting on details for when the next vote will be.

There needs to be consensus from senators. They're hoping this can speed up the process. Speaker Mike Johnson actually told Republicans on a call this morning that they could be voting as soon as Wednesday. That, of course, depends on the Senate. And while eight Senate Democrats voted to advance that bill last night to reopen the government, many other Democrats, they're livid right now because the final agreement does not include anything on those affordable CARAC tax credits that have helped millions of Americans keep their insurance premium costs low and that Democrats really made their main ask to reopen the government. Instead, what they got

is a promise from Senate Majority Leader John Thune that Democrats could have a vote on their choice of bill to extend those tax credits by mid-December. Now, Tim Kane, he's one of the eight who voted yes with Republicans last night, and he said he truly believes that there is a bipartisan path forward on these tax credits. Enough Republicans have said to me, look, we really have to fix this. We know this is a problem. We've got to fix this for our own politics. We've got a fighting chance of winning it.

And I'm planning on making sure we do. A lot of optimism there from Kane, but it will be an uphill battle because even if senators get together and pass a bipartisan extension of those health care tax credits, there is absolutely no guarantee in the House. I mean, Speaker Mike Johnson has been asked about this. avoided committing to a potential vote on those health care tax credits. And many of the members in his caucus, they just do not want to vote for anything that could be seen as supporting Obamacare really means that there is an uphill battle to see if those tax credits can be extended before the end of the year. Brian? Emily, I guess I'll speak for the country just as a voter and a citizen, not as a TV journalist.

Why don't we have a deal yet on the next votes? Like, what's going on? That's a great question, Brian. I mean, right now the process, if it were just to play out in the Senate, it would take days and days and days for the Senate to actually pass this bill. The good news is that usually senators can find a way to agree to shorten that time limit. However, any one senator can hold that up. And it's actually Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Republican. He's the one Republican who did not vote for the bill last night. And Kentucky is pretty big when it comes to hemp production.

And it's benefited in the last couple of years because unregulated. to THC is able to be sold around the country regardless of what the laws are in relation to marijuana. However, the bill that was put forward last night would actually close that loophole. And so Rand Paul is now asking for an amendment vote, and that is before he can give consent for this process to go faster. Well, I'm sure they're going to take a lot of heat, but a shout out maybe to the Democrats that did cross the aisle, looking out for the country, not for their own interests. We'll see what happens. Emily Wilkins in D.C. Emily, thank you very much. All right. So as we mentioned, earlier. We are here live at the EEI conference in South Florida. Two letters are dominating

most of the conversations. You know what those are? A and I, artificial intelligence. The AI boom driving huge energy demand. Companies like Duke Energy stepping up working with companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, all the power of the next wave of AI innovation. Harry Sedaris is the president and CEO of Duke Energy and he is joining us on set. And I believe this is your first interview as the CEO, at least with CNBC, correct? That is correct. Well, I'll try to take it easy on. Great to have you on.

Thank you very much for joining us. Listen, North Carolina, where you're headquartered. I know you're in a lot of states. You're headquartered North Carolina. It's always one of the top two or three CNBC top states for business from Scott Cohn. You're sitting next to a giant gas pipeline, Transco. You got one of the fastest growing economies in America in that region. That's a pretty good hand to be dealt.

So how do you then help the AI boom? develop next? Oh, it's a great state to do business and just like all our states are and we really appreciate CNBC recognizing us as the top state this year for the third out of the four years, last four years. So it's great, great place to do business. I just think Scott Cohn likes North Carolina. Yeah, he does. It's a beautiful place. Beautiful country, you know, so. But how do you grow the AI boom then? We're focused on how we can bring speed to power. That's what these AI companies are wanting. How can you build transmission lines faster? How can you get energy to them faster? And we've been very successful in how we put together a team that's focused on how you can build things faster.

And that's what got the Amazon deal done in Richmond County. They were looking at 40 sites across the country, and they picked Richmond County, North Carolina. Why? What questions are Amazon, what questions did Amazon ask you? How fast can you get us power? They happen to be right across the street from one of our big power plants. So it made it easy to drop a line there. And they're going to add a $10 billion. investment there, the biggest investment ever in the history of North Carolina. It's going to bring 500 jobs to that community. This is a rural community. It's going to be a game changer, the jobs and the tax revenue that they're going to get, and I think they're going to expand from

there. So we're really honored and privileged to be able to get that to happen in North Carolina. Okay, and this is a critical question about deals like that, which are happening all across America, which is people want AI, they want their chat, GPT, they want their clawed from Anthropic, They want all these things, but they don't want to pay a lot more on their electric bills, Harry, because electric bills in large part across America have already gone up. Is Amazon paying for that power, and how do you prevent AI from trickling its way through other rate payers, electric bill? Yeah, that's near and near to us to make sure that our broader customer base is protected from these large loads. And we work with Amazon on special contract terms that protect the broader base,

customers so they're paying their way there none of our customers are going to pay or subsidize the amazon deal that we just signed so that's important as we move forward because it does help the communities it does bring jobs there but we want to make sure that we protect our customers because they're worried about rates their grocery bills are going up their health care bills are going up their rentals are going up so we're doing everything we can to keep cost low as possible utilizing tax credits where we can to return money to our customers making sure that the AI firms are paying their fair share. Yeah, and it's maybe not even the Amazon deal or other deals.

Are these companies going to not only just pay their own way, but will they be net ads to the cost structure or payment structure? Because they're going to affect their taxes that you reference, they will pay in. Could they actually reduce bills? I think over time you will see reductions because they will be taking on a portion of the fixed costs that are in everybody's bill. So as more data centers come to North Carolina in our states, you'll see a reduction in those fixed costs.

Well, you know, you referenced right across the street from one of your power plants. This is critical because everybody here, we talk about the L word latency, right, meaning the speed of the compute versus sort of where you are. How long does it take to get the power or the information over there? Being where you are near these massive gas pipelines, how critical is that for future growth? When data center providers, hyperscalies look around, will that pipeline play a role? Oh, absolutely. That's what power is what we're building to serve these right now. We're building seven and a half gigawatts of new gas-fired power plants in North Carolina, powered by that pipeline that you're talking about.

And that's what gives us the reliability and affordability to serve these customers as they come in and they grow. We'll continue to look at expansions to that pipeline to be able to continue to serve into the next decade. but we're covered on gas through the beginning of the turn of the century. Well, you said gigawatts. I know that whenever I say that, we all think of the scene from back to the future where they hit the thing. Oh, yeah. 1.21 gigaw, I think he mispronounced it. But either way, it's a lot of power.

It's a lot of power. Roughly seven gigawatts, what, 5 million-ish homes? It's closer to 10 million. Closer to 10 million. It depends on the size of how much power. By the way, if you're in Phoenix, Craig and the AC, it's going to be a different story. So when we hear Open AI say 10 million here, you know, gigawatts, five gigawatts here, 10 gigawatts over there, Morgan Stanley says we're 49 gigawatts short on power right now.

You're obviously adding. Are you confident we're going to get the power to meet these AI dreams? Oh, absolutely. Our industry and our company are good at getting things done when we need them for our customers. When you think about hurricane responses, we all. rally together with innovation and dedication and that spirit of getting it done for the customers helps me to meet that moment in storms, it's going to help us meet this moment that we have to power these AI centers and power our future. Because you know what I mean, Harry, some of these

numbers, like I feel like with Open AI, and I'm not picking on them, but they're the biggest player and they're like, oh, five gigs here, 10 gigs there. And I'm looking at my friends of the power industry going, where's this power going to come from? I know you said you're adding seven. So then you add five over here. You think we can get, what, 10 years? How long is it going to take? Yeah, absolutely. So we're actually adding 13 gigawatts between now and 2030, seven and a half of them being gas in North Carolina.

We have also solar and batteries. We're looking at all resources. We're looking at extending the lives of some of our current plants. We're also upgrading our current facilities to get more power out of them with the same amount of fuel which saves money for the customers as well. Any plans for nuclear? Because there's one south of you, you know, in Georgia. and it took a while to build and was over budget.

It's not your facility, but it scared a lot of people on nuclear. Where are we on nuclear? Yeah, we have 11 reactors in North and South Carolina. It's a big part of our business. We think it's a big part of the future. We think it's a big part of the future, but we have to make sure that we can do this on time, on budget. We have backstops to protect our customers and our investors.

So what role the federal government can play in backstopping overruns is going to be key for us to move forward with that. forward with that, but I think it's needed for the future of this country. All right. Well, Harry Sedera, CEO of Duke Energy, by the way, got a lot of friends in the Ashfield Black Mountain North Carolina area. So I want to say thanks for the good work. And all the line workers, by the way, that are humping out for not a lot of attention, putting the lines back up. Shout out to them as well. They're amazing. Harry, thank you very much. Thank you, Ryan. All right, folks, do you love the energy trade or maybe the stocks involved?

Well, guess what? I wrote a piece. It's on CNBC.com. You can scan the QR code that's going to pop up on your screen. See which five utilities analysts say have the most upside right now, including one that they say has got 30 percent potentially more to run. I wrote the piece over the weekend. It's up on CBC.com right now. Scan that QR code. Check it out. Read it today. All right. After the break, flight cancellations. They continue coast to coast. And at least right now, no solution to the historic shutdown. How long and how bad might it get? We'll talk about air travel next as markets go up. We're back right after this. All right. Welcome back. More here on the real impact of the government shutdown. President

Trump posting to true social earlier today that air traffic controllers, quote, must get back to work now. Navas all capitalized with three exclamation points. Then Trump goes on to say that he'll be recommending, get this, a $10,000 bonus for those air. air traffic controllers that did not take time off during the shutdown. Maybe he's reading my tweets because yesterday at Newark Airport at 6.50 in the morning, I kind of suggested the same. Oh, and by the way, what you're seeing right now, folks, that's a screenshot I took of flight radar 24. It's an app not promoting it. It's an app that I use because I fly all the time. And that is the real world look at stacked up airplanes. I'm a little blue dot somewhere in the front of that.

It was about two and a half hours as about 30 to 40 planes every couple of minutes slowly took off. Obviously, we did take off because I'm here in Florida now, but let's take off and talk to CBC Auto and Airline Industry reporter, Phil LaBeau. Phil, you can see that tweet post I had there with all that screenshot. I'm sure that is not unique to me. This is happening at major airports all over the country. How bad is it getting out there? It's not a good day today, and it won't be a good day until this is officially. ended. Now, I get this question from a lot of people. Okay, well, the government shutdown. It looks

like it's going to be ending soon. Does that mean that we're going to see flights and schedules return to normal before the end of the week, which is theoretically when we're hearing people say it'll be officially over? No, this depends on air traffic controller staffing, and they're not going to go back to work until they are certain. The ones who are not coming in right now, The staffing is not going to improve until you say 100%, whether it's tomorrow, whether it's Thursday or Friday. This is going to happen. You should report to your schedule. And then after that, you've got airlines.

They're only scheduling out two or three days. They're not going to lock in their schedules until they have certainty when this will be over. They've also got to position their aircraft and their crews. So this means this week will probably be a rough one at airports because you've got 4% of the cancellations today. It moves up to 6% tomorrow, 8% on Thursday, and 10% on Friday. And remember, the DOT mandated these cancellations because they wanted to slow down the level of traffic going into the 40 largest airports around the country. There's no indication that the DOT is going to say, well, we're close to a deal. Let's go ahead and get rid of this.

No, it is all contingent upon staffing, Brian. So the answer is when you see this deal is going to be. locked in. I mean, for sure, locked in. Then I think you start to see air traffic controller attendance improved dramatically. Okay, two points. Number one, before the shutdown, because I listen to, you know, Phil LeBoe, staffing wasn't great to begin with. I would imagine that that kind of layers on top of where we are now and then talk to this point. And I don't want to scare anybody, certainly because I'm planning to fly tomorrow to go back home to Newark Airport. That tweet that I showed with all the stacked up planes at Newark waiting to take off. That's because they don't

have a lot of women and men in the air traffic controllers in the tower, correct? So they've got to limit the airspace. So I've got to imagine that the people that are working are also really working a lot. Think of it this way. Right. And think of it this way. There is a funnel into every airport. And they're trying to slow down the amount of aircrafts that are going into the funnel. And I know that's a very crude and very basic explanation. You have fewer flights to monitor. It should be, in theory, a little easier for the staff. But remember, you have fewer staffers in these air traffic control towers.

Look, the Secretary of Transportation was out yesterday saying that if this does not change, you're going to see airline traffic slowed to a trickle by Thanksgiving. And I've heard a couple of people say, oh, that's ridiculous. It's already slowing down, Brian. You can see that it's slowing down. Go to the airport and you'll see the number of flights. it's dramatically lower than where it was a week ago. And that is just, that's just prudent.

You have fewer people in air traffic control towers. You shouldn't have the same level of traffic. And that's at the end of the day what this is all about. Yeah, and that, that ex post that I put up yesterday, that screenshot, there we go, thank you guys. You know, what we're hearing, what I'm hearing from you, Phil, is that that could get worse tomorrow, that that kind of scene, whether it's at LAX, that was at Newark, whether you're in Logan, you're in O'Hare, Hartsfield, in Dallas, or Atlanta. You don't know where it's going to pop up, Brian.

You just don't know where it's going to pop up. It could. And you don't know that it's going to get worse at Newark or Atlanta or Dallas or Chicago or L.A. It's not like there's a coordinated effort by the air traffic controllers where they're all calling each other and saying, hey, I'm calling out sick tomorrow. Are you calling out sick tomorrow? By the way, that's illegal. you can't do that. But let's be clear here. You've asked people who go to work without a paycheck for

38 days. There are people who, A, they may be furious with the federal government. B, they might be saying, I need to do something else. I got to, you know, I'm going to go work at Home Depot. I'm going to go, you know, drive an Uber. I'll do something. I need to get some money coming in. And you do have people who are genuinely sick. I mean, that does happen. So all of that creates a situation where you're never quite sure what's going to be at. certain air traffic control centers. And just wait to the people who are going to travel, Phil, we'll say goodbye, but people are going to travel to a non-refundable hotel. The flight gets canceled. Hotels says, sorry, you booked a

non-refundable room. We're going to charge your credit card anyway, even though you couldn't make it to your vacation. I guarantee you that's happening, but we'll save that for another day. Phila, thank you very much. All right, time now, guys, for a quick bond report, Treasury yields. They are up a little bit on hopes that the government shutdown end is somewhat You heard Phil talk about it. Emily Wilkins at the top of the show. Tenure yield holding steady right around 4.1%. Several treasury auctions scheduled for this week, $42 billion with the tenure notes on Wednesday, $25 billion of 30-year bonds on Thursday. Really a test for investor appetite for longer-dated bonds. The reopening will end the blackout of official economic data, maybe hopefully give investors a better clue about the economy, what the Federal Reserve may do with rates ahead. All right, coming up. The CEO of the largest utility in California will speak with us exclusively about their plans to meet AI's insatiable power demand, how they are balancing cost, how they are balancing fire safety as well. Patty Poppy, a PG&E coming up next. All right, welcome back to Power Lunch, everybody.

We are live in Hollywood, Florida at a big utility conference. And we've been bringing you key interviews all day long. and we've got another one right now. We had the chance to sit down exclusively with PG&E CEO Patty Poppy earlier today. PG&E, the largest utility in California. And we began by really talking about the complicated juggling act that they've got to do to not only keep up with AI and energy demand,

also without spiking the cost of energy and risking fire safety. We asked Patty Poppy how they navigate a really, really narrow road. We have a perfect solution and it's called the simple affordable model. It allows for infrastructure investments that then is offset by operating maintenance cost reductions which we've delivered significant cost savings over the last several years. We have load growth that helps more fully utilize our assets and then improving credit metrics results in lower cost financing that has allowed us to actually lower rates for customers. In the face of the national trends, our rates are down. We've lowered our

rates three times in the last 15 months, and they're going down again in 2026 while we are growing our earnings at over 9% a year. Because many in California overall as a state still pays some of, if not the highest electric rates of the country, but you also have some of the most complex conditions in the country. So you can talk to your customers right now. How do you say to them, listen, we're bringing costs down, but we also want to make it safer, because I've been to a beautiful state. I was just there. There's these amazing old growth trees everywhere. There's a lot of them, and a lot of power lines. How do you mitigate the fire risk? Well, first and foremost, we have layers of protection that starts with hardening the system.

We, this year, buried our 1,000th mile of power lines, and we did that at a million dollars a mile less than when we started just a couple years ago, so we're lowering the cost because we're getting better at it, we're doing it at scale. That lower cost infrastructure investment, then combined with technology, we're in the technology hub of the world. We have amazing technology that underpins our situational awareness and our responsiveness when there is an ignition.

This year, in fact, our ignitions were down 35% over last year, even though the fire conditions were very much the same. Our layers of protection are working that makes customers safer. That's the most important thing. You referenced also technology. You are literally in the San Francisco Bay Area where almost every AI company is based. The headquarters are there.

Are you able to also then grow production capacity to make actual data centers while still doing all the projects you just laid out? Yeah, that's what's so exciting. This load growth, we call it rate-reducing load growth. Because for all the hand-wringing about AI raising rates, It's quite simple. You just have to price it right. So in our service area, our residential customers do not subsidize large load.

That large load pays its full freight. And because they are based there, they're growing there, the compute demand is up in our service area. That more fully utilizes our grid. There's new revenue that's coming. We haven't had load growth in decades. We've got load growth. But they'll pay for it. And of course they'll pay for it.

Because you're in Michigan, and you gave me an example before we came on air where you know, if you want to open a new car plant in Michigan, they're going to give you a lower utility rate because you're going to hire a bunch of people. Data centers don't take a lot of people. So how do we make sure that they cover their own, pay their own way without a lot of added jobs? It's all about pricing, rate design, and we've got the right rate designs in California so that residential customers only benefit from this new and growing load. And yes, our customers, all of my large tech customers, they're using more compute. It's not just building a hyperscaler data center that's enormous out in some cornfield somewhere.

We're talking about compute data centers all over our service area for companies, say, PayPal or Zoom or Netflix, they're using AI, DoorDash, using AI in their daily business. That takes more compute. Does that compute coming from your area or is it out in Iowa or Indiana, right? Latency matters in those inference models. So having the compute near those headquarters and near where the technical talent is, where you have, the people who can unleash the power of AI, that matters. So if I wanted to build a one gigawatt data center, an hour from Silicon Valley, could I do it?

Yeah, in fact, we have a site up in Woodland just outside of Sacramento that's prepared and equipped for up to a gigawatt, but most of our applications are for 100 megawatts because, again, it's distributed data centers. We call that Goldilocks load. Okay, 10 mid-sized ones, not some gigantic. Exactly. So it's big enough to matter to provide that benefit to all of my customers, but not so big that it's causing a problem. Okay, I'm going to wrap it up with this because speaking of big, you have a giant nuclear plant, the only one left in California, Diablo Canyon. It's about one-ninth of the daily power production, give or take, one-eighth, one-tenth, whatever it might be. There was talk about shutting it down a few years ago.

Now, thankfully, they're going to extend it. But there is a weird, so it sounds like the federal government has. extended it but the state hasn't what's the status of Diablo Canyon yeah so we're on a five-year extension from the state the state will need to take further action to extend the plant further however we applied for a nuclear regulatory commission license and they've given us a 20-year permission to operate conditional upon a few final permits in the state of California but the state will have to take legislative action in the coming years to extend that plant further the one thing I can tell you about that plant is we are so

proud to serve California with baseload, greenhouse gas-free energy. We're one of the top performing nuclear plants in the world, and my team is equipped and ready to serve, when called. But it's insane to me that they were talking about shutting it down. Well, and the state hasn't, so the federal government said longer is fine. The state has not. That seems weird to me. Well, the state did take one action, and, you know, I applaud Gavin Newsom for actually pushing the state to extend Diablo Canyon for five years. I think it'll be important that there's action. It will be necessary to have legislative action to extend it even further. That was Patty Poppy of PG&E. That stocked down, by the way, 18% year-to-date,

dealing with a lot of regulatory and legislative issues in California. And coming up actually in closing bell overtime in the 4 p.m. hour, we're going to be speaking more with the CEO of Edison International. That interview will be up on cnbc.com. All right, still ahead. Shares of Hutt 8, they are the number one stock. In our Power City Index for Miami, the street, betting. The company will follow in the footsteps of other miners turned energy infrastructure firms. Their CEO will join us live and exclusive next. All right, welcome back to Power Lunch. We're here in South Florida, and we know we've got these Power City indexes that we've built.

Well, Miami's doing pretty well this year. But the number one company in all of our Miami Power City Index is a company called Hut 8. That stock has been red hot. They were a crypto miner, kind of spun that business. off about a month ago, now known as energy infrastructure data centers and they own power plants. Pretty good spot to be in. Stocks up about 140% this year. Joining us at a power lunch exclusive, Asher Gnuch, he is the CEO of a eight. Asher. Great to chat with you. Thank you very much for joining us. Let's talk about this business pivot. Okay, you were on Squawk Box recently.

What does energy infrastructure mean and how in demand is your power right now? Very in We have a ton of demand from AI infrastructure primarily today. But the idea when we built the company at first wasn't for Bitcoin. It was we believe that as technology evolves, its consumption on power will increase. And right now we're very much at that intersection. Everyone in the world is looking for more power, power at scale, power faster, and we're lucky that we've built a company that has done exactly that over the years since we've founded the company.

And so today we have gigawatts of assets in our pipeline. We run about 1,000 megawatts online today, and we have 1,500 megawatts for commercial. 1,600 megawatts were commercialized it. So earlier, about an hour ago, we had the CEO of Nextera Hall, okay, based right here in South Florida, and I tried to pin him down on how much Google is paying for their power at this going to be reopened nuclear power plant in Iowa. He wouldn't bite on it, I get it, it's a trade deal. How much is power worth right now, Asher?

Access to power and power quickly at scale is worth a lot. And that's why we're seeing this unprecedented demand for our business and for the assets that we own today. And so the question is, as these data centers get larger and larger, they're going to want to create campuses that cluster all the GPUs together. And you're seeing that. A year ago, we were talking about 100 megawatts for campus. Then we went to hundreds of megawatts, and today we're talking about gigawatts for single campuses. Does it have to be co-located really next to the power production? In other words, is the future of data centers going to be in far west, Texas, where they have a lot of natural gas, or is the future data center is going to be just

directly next door to any nuclear or gnat gas or whatever power facility, wherever it might be? At scale, you want to have generation as close to the load as possible. Actually, speaking of next year, we have a site with them that we own 50-50 in a joint venture, and in that project, we co-located their wind farm with the data center capacity that we own. And that was for when we had the Bitcoin mining infrastructure. It's about 280 megawatt facility called King Mountain. And so you'll see more and more of that where people bring power generation with them because the grids won't be able to just support that initial demand that they have and they have to bring generation with them. Here's what I have to ask this. And we've had,

we had a few other players with cipher mining on the show last week. We've interviewed Terrell Wolf, Paul Prager, they're all doing great. You guys kind of co-opetition, compete a little bit on the margins. But all of you saw something, right? Some of along the line you and Tyler Page and Paul Prager and these other saw believed in crypto enough to build out the power mostly for crypto you would admit that right back in the day and now like oh data centers makes crypto power demand look small right by comparison. Asher what did you and your team see like because now you're sitting on a gold mine sure when we started the company it was actually not the deep belief in

crypto. The belief was if we're one of the lowest cost operators, we can find the cheapest power at scale, as long as Bitcoin doesn't go to zero, will always make money. So it was a hedged way to actually be able to get exposure to crypto. Today, the company that we spun off is called American Bitcoin. This last quarter, they mined Bitcoin at over 50% discount to the market. So it's essentially you're being able to buy at a discount. And so that was kind of the business model at the time. But the demand from AI has made those megawatts so much more valuable. The revenue and the profits we're able to generate from those megawatts. Can you replicate this model, though?

I mean, is the model, the HUD-8 model, is it replicable? I think so, because the unique thing about us relative to kind of the overall peer set is all the sites that are in our pipeline today are actually new projects we developed over the last 12 to 24 months. There are not sites that we had for Bitcoin that we're converting over to AI. We're actually not converting a single one of our campuses. We're keeping those and we've developed an additional 1,500 megawatts of new sites and capacity in addition to our larger pipeline. saw something with electricity demand because the weird reality, and this is, it's like mind-blowing, I think, to me anyway, being here, and talking about this for years when nobody else wanted to talk about it, people were giving away power plants 10 years ago. That's right. That's old.

Please take it off our hands. Nuclear power plants are being sold to be decommissioned. Now if you have an orphaned power plant, you're the richest king of Europe. I mean, it's unbelievable. are you even surprised by how much power we need in the United States? It's a ramp in demand. So you have a couple factors here. You have AI demand, which is growing at an insane rate, right? If you look two years ago, you would have never thought that the rate would keep up. And any megawatt you have, people want, and they want to build a data center.

And they'll pay for it. And they'll pay for it. A lot. Definitely. And then secondly, you also have reshoring of manufacturing. And so Louisiana, we have a large campus there. And you have a couple hundred megawatt Hyundai manufacturing. facility that's coming in there. So now the demand is not just coming from data centers and

AI, but you're having the reshoring of manufacturing, advanced technologies, robotic facilities, more gigafactories, et cetera, and you're seeing all of this demand for power at the same time, which is creating the supply and demand imbalance. You don't have to comment on this, but Europe really screwed it up. Yeah. Look, there's this chart that I always referenced. That's not a question. It's not. I'm sorry. Europe, I love you. But you screwed it. You missed, they missed it. They should not have, I mean, Germany getting rid of nuke. clear. There's a chart that I follow, which is the World Bank came out with it. And it shows GDP per capita and energy consumption per capita. And it's a linear correlation. The more power

you consume per capita, the higher your GDP is. And you plot every single country on that chart. It'll tell the same exact story. That's it. Well, next interview, we'll have that chart ready. Let's do it. Yes. As you're going to eat, hottest stock in our Miami Power City Index. Really appreciate your time. Not even at the conference. I guess you snuck in the hotel. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. All right, let's get down with Bertha Coombsbury, CNBC News Update. Brian, United Nations Climate Talks began today at the COP 30 summit in Brazil, but U.S. negotiators are not present. The unprecedented absence comes after President Trump denied the existence of climate change

and pulled the U.S. out of the 10-year-old Paris Agreement. It is unclear if the participating countries will aim to negotiate a new deal. Organizers and analysts have said the focus will likely be. beyond following through with pledges to fight climate change. Nancy Pelosi's daughter dismissed rumors today that she would run for her mother's vacant house seat representing San Francisco. Christine Pelosi instead launched a bid for a state Senate seat in California. There had been speculation she might try to succeed her mother, who announced last

week that she would not seek re-election in 2026. And the hat worn by Margaret Hamilton as the Wicked Witch of the West in the original 1939 Wizard of Oz movie is going up for auction. It comes just in time for theatrical release of Wicked for Good from our sister company NBC Universal. The auction will be held from December 9th to the 10th. And Brian, last year it went for about $3 million. The Ruby Red slippers 10 times that. It's almost as valuable as electricity these days. For the Coombs, great stuff.

Thank you very much. All right. Another betting scandal, rocking a different professional sports league. This time, it's baseball, and we'll have the details for you right after this. All right, welcome back another day, another sports gambling scandal this time in Major League Baseball. Two pitchers from the Cleveland Guardians were charged over the weekend. Federal prosecutors say they took bribes as part of a scheme to rig the number of bets or the type of bets on pitches thrown during games. This comes a month after Portland Trailblazers coach Chauncey Billups and Miami Heat Player Terry Rozier are arrested in connection with two major federal gambling investigations.

Contessa Brewer joining us now. Contessa, it's a black eye on baseball. What do we know? And again, what is the industry saying about this? OK, well, so here are the facts in the indictment. Two Cleveland Guardians pitchers, there are Emmanuel Clazze and Luis Ortiz accused of, as you said, rigging pitches, allowing betters to profit. And this was a scheme that was worth nearly half a million dollars. Now, Clause is a star closer. I mean, he was working on a five-year contract of $20 million. Ortiz's a starting pitcher, both from the Dominican Republic, both facing a slew of federal

charges. Prosecutors say over the last two years, those players telegraphed the pitches to conspirators. The conspirators bet and profited and then shared the winnings with Clause A and Ortiz. For example, there's a game that prosecutors cite against the Red Sox, June 2023, and prosecutors say clause they arranged to throw a ball with a pitch that was slower than 95 miles an hour. Here's the image that they included in the indictment. You can see that red square. The ball hit the dirt. bettors won $58,000. Similar accusations against Ortiz. He was arrested in Boston yesterday, scheduled for federal court there today. His lawyer, Clause's lawyer, both say that the players are innocent of the charges. I mean, here's the lawyer for Ortiz saying he would never improperly

influence a game, not for anyone, not for anything. MLB and the Guardian say not only are they cooperating with investigators, but they're also doing their own investigation. And the Players Association got back to us. They wouldn't comment on this specifically. But during the World Series, the executive director had said, look, anything that takes these basically temptations for the guys on the field out of the equation, he would support. He would support removing the prop bets if it would remove the temptation. So I think, as you say, when you're looking at all of sports, not just baseball or not just

basketball, when you look at the sports books, they get defrauded when players go in and arrange cheating. So the sports books don't want that. They want the gamblers to go in and have full confidence that they're gambling on their knowledge, insight, gut, whatever, not against ranked games, Brian, and that's really the problem.

Yeah, for an audience that doesn't sports game, prop bet is you're betting on a player, the number of points they score, pitches they throw, whatever it might be. You're not betting on the outcome of the game as much as an individual. What's weird about these stories, Contessa, is that, you know, you talked about $58,000, that's chump change for, like, some of these people, again, innocent until proven guilty, but if they are proven guilty, some of these people are being, are doing things that don't seem like the math adds up. It's really weird.

You have to wonder if that's, I mean, the people who engage in that, and again, I'm not casting any accusations here myself, but a highly compensated player who does that, is that also a gambling behavior, a risk-taking behavior where the payoff, is the thrill of pulling it off. And I think, you know, that goes back to human behavior, and that's been around, not since gambling expanded, but for millennia. Yeah, that's a great point. I like to sneak into electricity conferences. That's how I get my kicks.

Whatever works. Contessa Brewer, thank you very much. All right, we've got some news on Apple. Apple News with the markets up right after this. All right. Welcome back. We've got a news alert around Apple's new iPhone. Steve Kovac has more. Steve, what's going on? Hey there, Brian. Yeah, this is specifically about the iPhone air. The information just put out a report a few minutes ago saying the next version of the iPhone air, which was originally scheduled to launch in September of 2026. That is being delayed. now. Information citing sources familiar with the matter on that. And it's all because this model in particular is not selling well. We've seen so many headlines and reports about that since

this new lineup of iPhones went on sale a couple months ago in late September. And there's just been other evidence that they're cutting back production. And now it sounds like they're going to delay potentially even just cancel the entire lineup. Look, it doesn't really matter. The reason why you're seeing shares still positive here, Brian, is because App already told us, This iPhone cycle is a hit. It's the other models, the baseline model and the pro models people seem to be gravitating towards. And Apple told us just two weeks ago, we're going to see double-digit revenue growth for the iPhone because of the strength of this lineup already, Brian. Yeah, because I want to be clear because it's a little bit confusing.

Because you've told us that sales have been good, but they are good, but this air, which is the thinner phone, that apparently is the one that is having some issues. Yeah, and what's going on here, Brian, is if you're in the store and you're looking at these phones, the iPhone Air doesn't have as good battery life. The cameras aren't as good as the pros and so forth, you spend $100 and you get the latest and greatest. And as people hang on to their phones for three to five years, that makes more sense as a buying decision potentially than buying something thinner and lighter just for the design. So not really surprising here. We've seen Apple cancel the big versions of their phones, the mini versions of their phones. They really struggled to figure out. this so-called fourth model of the iPhone. It seems like the base and the pro are what people really gravitate towards. That's it. Maybe it's like the new Coke. We'll wait and see not affecting the stock. Steve Kovac really appreciate that. Thank you very much. Folks, before we say goodbye, just another friendly reminder. Got a piece up that I wrote over the weekend on CNBC.com on the five utility stocks with the most upside vis-a-vis analysts average price targets. Not only can I read, apparently I can write.

Anyway, you can scan the QR code, check it out. There you go. CnBC.com. And before we go to the final hour trading, stock soaring, NASDA up 2.3%. Invidia, up 5%. It is going to be a rocket. Final hour trading, and it starts now.