00:00 Speaker A
KR and I co-founded this company. So, it’s a startup. We’re trying to do something new and different with Helix, coordinating all the infrastructure that needs to be integrated to form the foundation of AI. And yet we have all the backing of KKR’s infrastructure platform, um, all the resources that are already there. So I think it’s a pretty powerful combination.
00:39 Speaker A
And I’m looking to hire a senior team of operators to run this as a company. So this is unusual. In other words, Helix is trying to coordinate power, data centers, and connectivity all together in a way that hyperscalers aren’t used to. Um, this is run as a company with experienced senior operators, so, um, I’m in the middle of assembling. And then there’s KKR and all the big, reliable capital behind it. We believe that the combination of all these is unique and differentiated.
01:21 Speaker B
Will you build it yourself, contract with a builder, or will you own the land and Helix will own the building itself?
01:34 Speaker A
So Helix will launch with over $10 billion of capital invested from KKR itself, the Kuwait Investment Authority, or Nvidia. Nvidia will be a very important strategic operating partner and Vistra will be our preferred power partner. So it’s a very powerful set of relationships. And we’re not only going to build things, but we’re also going to invest, and we might even buy the platform ourselves. Therefore, you can expect our company to have strong capabilities in the data center field. And then that company or set of companies that you end up investing in, uh, bringing in Vistra and other power partners as needed to develop the data center and feed the power side.
02:44 Speaker B
Well, there’s a lot of companies that are involved in different parts of all of this, right? Well, Blackstone has QTS, Neo Cloud, Core Weave and all that. Why do we need another one of these?
03:02 Speaker A
But if you and I had sat down and talked about the Internet in, say, 1999, we’d have said, “How can we justify all this construction and all the investment that’s going on in the Internet?” Ten or 15 years later, we’d have looked back and laughed and said, “What we thought we overbuilt turned out to be dramatically underdeveloped.” More investment was needed. And I think what’s happening now with AI and the cloud and building digital in general is going to at least enhance that, maybe enhance that.
03:36 Speaker A
And we’ll look back and say, “Wow, I can’t believe we were having this over-the-top conversation.” But I think more importantly, um, a lot of things are being announced and it’s just not happening. It’s not reliable. It’s tough. Oh, no permits, no financing. We see Fortune 100 companies struggling to get bank loans. And that’s something we haven’t seen very often in history.
04:12 Speaker A
I think what’s unique here and what sets us apart is that we’re able to coordinate and integrate all the different pieces of data center, power, connectivity, etc., so we’re bringing it together. The second is the fact that this is not just a financial investment. We run this as a company with people like myself and other experienced senior operators. And three, we have the capital and the backing of KKR and the partnership with Vistra and Nvidia behind it, and we have the scale and the reliability. So I think it’s a little different from what other people are doing.
