Money Bullziel

$NUAI recently appointed Ted Warner as CFO. (newerainfra.ai/news/new-era-e…) Warner was previously Managing Director and Head of Energy & Power Infrastructure at Northland Capital Markets — the investment bank behind many of the largest financings in the digital infrastructure space. This is a significant hire worth understanding in detail. Warner's track record in data center financing is unusually deep. According to Northland’s own materials, his group originated and executed nearly $7 billion in lead managed financings since he rejoined the firm in 2020, with a heavy focus on digital infrastructure and HPC data center development across the capital stack. The best way to understand what Warner does is to look at his work with Applied Digital ($APLD) — arguably the clearest case study of a single banker helping transform a small-cap power and mining company into a legitimate institutional-grade AI data center platform. When Applied Digital needed $50M in April 2024 to advance its HPC data center in Ellendale, North Dakota, Northland served as sole placement agent on a convertible debenture. (globenewswire.com/news-release/2…) Four months later in August 2024, Northland placed another $53.2M in convertible preferred stock to keep the Ellendale buildout on track. (globenewswire.com/news-release/2…) Then came the deal that changed the company’s trajectory entirely. In January 2025, Northland served as sole placement agent on a $5 billion perpetual preferred equity financing facility with Macquarie Asset Management — one of the world’s largest infrastructure investors managing approximately $634 billion in assets. The deal provided up to $900M for the Ellendale HPC campus and gave Macquarie a right to invest up to an additional $4.1 billion across Applied Digital's future HPC pipeline, supporting over 2 GW of data center development. Goldman Sachs served as senior financial advisor. Citizens JMP, TD Securities, and Needham also provided advisory services. But Northland — Warner's team — was the sole placement agent. (globenewswire.com/news-release/2…) That deal essentially took Applied Digital from a company scrambling to fund a single campus to one with multi-billion-dollar institutional backing to build a national HPC data center platform. The structure — perpetual preferred equity with a 12.75% dividend, 15% common equity interest, and a 1.80x liquidation preference — allowed APLD to retain 85% ownership of its HPC business while recovering over $300M of its existing equity investment. (macquarie.com/us/en/about/ne…) Warner's group didn't stop there. In April 2025, Northland placed a $150M convertible preferred equity facility for continued Ellendale campus development. (globenewswire.com/news-release/2…) By late 2025, they were drawing an additional $787.5M from the Macquarie facility to fund both Polaris Forge 1 in Ellendale and the new Polaris Forge 2 campus in Harwood, North Dakota. (constructionreviewonline.com/applied-digita…) In December 2025, Northland placed yet another facility — a development loan from Macquarie to fund pre-lease development costs for new AI factory campuses, with an initial $100M in draws while Applied Digital negotiated with another investment-grade hyperscaler for multiple additional sites. (ir.applieddigital.com/news-events/pr…) From a $50M convertible to a $5B institutional partnership to a multi-campus national buildout — all with the same placement agent quarterbacking the capital formation. That's the Applied Digital story, and Warner was at the center of it. His group’s reach extended well beyond APLD: Riot Platforms ($RIOT) — In February 2025, Riot announced it had engaged Evercore as financial advisor and Northland Capital Markets to support the evaluation of AI/HPC uses for its Corsicana Facility power assets in Texas. (sec.gov/Archives/edgar…) Bitfarms ($BITF) — Northland acted as sole placement agent on Bitfarms’ conversion of its Macquarie debt facility to $300M in project-specific financing for the Panther Creek 350 MW HPC/AI campus in Pennsylvania. (globenewswire.com/news-release/2…) Bitdeer ($BTDR) — In its March 2025 production update, Bitdeer disclosed it had formalized an engagement with Northland Capital Markets as financial advisor for its HPC/AI data center development strategy. (sec.gov/Archives/edgar…) TeraWulf ($WULF) — Warner personally signed the amendment adding Northland as an agent under TeraWulf’s sales agreement in August 2023, positioning the firm on TeraWulf’s capital markets platform. (sec.gov/Archives/edgar…) Super Micro Computer ($SMCI) — Northland served as co-manager on Supermicro’s follow-on offering of common stock in late 2023, alongside J.P. Morgan, BofA Securities, and Goldman Sachs. (northlandsecurities.com/ncm-co-manager…) Prior to this run, Warner spent 8 years as a founding member of Northland’s energy banking practice, participating in 150+ transactions totaling over $10 billion. He also served as CFO of Fountain Quail Energy Services, a PE-backed oilfield services company. (northlandsecurities.com/team_member/te…) For context on where $NUAI stands today: the company, formerly New Era Helium, pivoted to AI and digital infrastructure in August 2025. Its flagship project is the Texas Critical Data Centers (TCDC), a campus in Ector County, Texas, planned to scale to over 1 gigawatt of capacity on a 490+ acre site. The parallel to Applied Digital’s starting position is hard to ignore. As recently as 2024, APLD was a small-cap company with power assets, a data center thesis, and a need for institutional capital to scale. Warner’s group provided the financing pathway that took them from that starting point to a $5B Macquarie partnership and a multi-gigawatt development pipeline. NUAI today has power assets from its legacy as an energy company, a massive data center project, and a similar need to access institutional-scale capital to fund the next phase. Thus, it’s meaningful that Ted Warner, the banker who had a seat at nearly every significant transaction in the power-to-compute pipeline, is now the CFO of NUAI. Warner had broad visibility into deal flow across the digital infrastructure landscape — he saw the pitches, the power positions, the hyperscaler LOIs. He had a strong sense of which projects were real and which weren't. With all of that context, he chose NUAI. That decision is informative for a few reasons. First, it suggests he sees a valuation disconnect. Warner knows what these assets trade for. If NUAI were fairly priced, there would be less incentive to leave banking for an operating role. His move implies he sees a gap between where NUAI trades and where its assets sit — and he's willing to stake his career on that gap closing. That carries more weight than a price target. Second, it raises the probability of a hyperscaler partnership. Warner has seen these deals from the inside. He understands what a company needs to look like before a hyperscaler signs. If he didn't believe NUAI was credibly on that path, the move would carry significant career risk. The timing and NUAI's current trajectory are consistent with the kind of catalyst convergence that has driven other companies in the space — like APLD's Macquarie partnership — from relative obscurity to institutional relevance. Third, it reflects confidence in the team. Warner has worked with dozens of management teams in this sector. Joining one full-time, with your compensation and reputation attached, is a stronger endorsement than any external rating. From a credibility standpoint, Warner brings roughly two decades of experience structuring the exact type of financings NUAI will need to execute — along with institutional lender relationships, infrastructure fund access, and sell-side credibility that would be difficult to replicate. Finally, we should consider the compensation structure. NUAI compensates its C-suite through stock options and RSUs with multi-year vesting, and Warner is under the same framework. That makes him not just an executive but a co-investor — dilution hurts him, poor execution hurts him, and every capital structure decision he makes is informed by his own exposure to the outcome. None of this guarantees a specific result, but when someone who financed many of the sector's winners decides to join an operating company, the signal is worth weighing seriously.

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