Galaxy Digital and TeraWulf post Q2 losses as data center revenue climbs

Both firms’ relatively nascent AI data center businesses did a lot of the heavy lifting in the Q2 results, which were released before markets opened Wednesday. TeraWulf’s profits set it up for a pre-market run while Galaxy’s loss set off a slide that has grown to almost 7%.

How did markets react to Galaxy’s Q2 earnings report? 

Investors were not impressed as Galaxy Digital (NASDAQ: GLXY) closed the quarter ending June 30, $85 million in the red, disregarding the fact that it made big strides in cutting down on the $216 million loss it reported in Q1. Diluted and adjusted earnings came in at negative $0.09 per share.

Galaxy shares traded at $20.99 pre-market, down about 6.55% around the time of this report.

Galaxy pointed to the underperformance of the digital assets in its portfolio as the reason its second-quarter results were not so hot.

Galaxy’s Data Centers segment made up for the lag, though. Adjusted gross profit came in at $20 million, a $3 million improvement on the first quarter. Adjusted EBITDA was $11 million.

Earlier in the quarter, Galaxy confirmed that it had delivered all 133 megawatts of critical IT load under the first phase of the CoreWeave lease at its Helios campus in West Texas. That arrangement is supposed to open an $80 million quarterly lease revenue stream, starting with its next Q3 report.

TeraWulf rides HPC leasing, crossing 70% of revenue

The other half of the data center duo reporting around the same time, TeraWulf (NASDAQ: WULF), saw shares rise 1.64% to $19.19 in pre-market trading.

High-performance computing leases made up for $31.9 million of the $44.8 million revenue that Terawulf reported for the quarter. That roughly 71% contribution from the HPC segment represents a doubling down on the AI compute rush that earned it about $34 million in the first quarter.

TeraWulf reported another $3 billion in cash and restricted cash.

Executives are projecting a better third quarter too, pointing to 102 MW of revenue-generating critical IT capacity at its Lake Mariner site in New York, which came online in early July. Another 336 MW is expected to be delivered at some point. Chief Financial Officer Patrick Fleury also said the CB-3 delivery unlocked $600 million of credit support from Google backing tenant Fluidstack’s lease obligations.

Power, not chips, is the growth story

Both companies used the quarter to stretch their pipelines well beyond current capacity. TeraWulf disclosed a 20-year lease with Anthropic for about 401 MW at its Justified campus in Hawesville, Kentucky, a deal it values at roughly $19 billion in contracted revenue, or as much as $33 billion if Anthropic exercises two five-year extensions. It also agreed to sell its 50.1% stake in the Abernathy joint venture for about $530 million and won FERC authorization to acquire the Morgantown generating station in Maryland.

Galaxy, for its part, said it expanded its power pipeline past 5.7 GW after buying three Texas development sites following quarter-end, and it closed a $3.5 billion senior secured notes offering on July 28 to fund the next phase of Helios. The company also struck a multi-year agreement with BNY, the custody bank that oversees more than $60 trillion in assets, to support staking on BNY’s digital asset platform.

The common thread is electricity. When TeraWulf secured its Muskie site in May, access to power, transmission, and utility approvals had become the binding constraint on AI buildouts, with the International Energy Agency projecting data center electricity use will nearly double to about 945 terawatt-hours by 2030.