RUM Group Stock

Greetings and welcome to RUM Group Incorporated's third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Shannon Devine. Thank you. You may begin.

Thank you, Rob. I'm here today with Chris Pawlowski, founder, chairman, and CEO of RUM Group, and Mike Masci, CFO. A press release detailing our third quarter 2026 results was released today and available on our investor relations website.

Before we begin the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made on this call may include predictions, estimates, or other information that may be considered forward-looking. All forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this call and should be considered in conjunction with the company's cautionary statements in our earnings release and the factors included in our filings with the SEC.

Future company updates will be available via press release and the company's identified social media channels. I will now turn the call over to RUM Group's founder, chairman, and CEO, Chris Pawlowski.

Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Before we begin on this Veterans Day, we want to thank every man and woman who has served and their families, because the freedoms we build on every day, including the freedom to speak openly, were earned by their sacrifice.

This was a very strong quarter for RUM Group. We posted record revenue, we beat guidance, and we were profitable on an adjusted EBITDA basis for the first time as a publicly traded company. Our company is ideally positioned for today's market. We have real assets running real AI workloads for real customers, generating real cash. We believe we have one of the least levered balance sheets among the larger public neoclouds, and we have a Quake AI team that is as experienced as anyone in our industry.

I also want to be direct with you today about what's changed in the market, what it means for our projects, and how our management team is navigating it. Let me tell you how I view the Q3 results. Let's start with record revenue of $96.6 million, nearly four times what it was a year ago, but the story isn't just the size, it's the mix. In its very first full quarter as part of RUM Group, Quake AI contributed more than 70% of our revenue. That is a brand new profile for this company. A year ago, our revenue came almost entirely from video. Today, AI infrastructure is the core of our business, the engine of our growth.

On guidance, Mike will walk you through the details. What matters more to me is that every quarter we operate as a combined company, we get a clear view of how this business runs, and we'll keep sharing that view with you as it sharpens. Profitability is the part I'm most proud of, and I want to put it in context. In the early years, I bootstrapped this company. Every dollar mattered because there wasn't another one coming. Then, as an early public company, we made a deliberate choice to invest in the platform, in our team, and in the assets that got us here. Those were the investment years, and we were open with you about that.

Now, RUM Group is maturing into a profitable business, one that generates returns for you, our shareholders. That's the turn this quarter represents, and we're just getting started. The turn is being driven by Quake AI. We run approximately 22,000 GPUs today, one of the largest GPU estates in Europe. As of the third quarter, we are running at 85% utilization, which means we are nearly sold out. This is the cash engine of our business. And the market is moving in our favor.

Supply is low, demand is high, and we don't see that changing for the foreseeable future. That manifests as increased pricing, which has been observed across the GPU market. With the majority of our contracts coming up for renewal by early 2027, management's plan is to optimize our contracts for the market we are in. To be clear, we and our customers expect prepayments and higher pricing. Now, as I promised at the top, let me turn to the market and our projects. I view AI infrastructure and in particular AI compute as similar to the oil industry. And as markets realize the value and returns, I believe capital will keep flowing into it.

But over the past several weeks, as you've all seen in the news, the financing markets have become quite difficult for data center and AI buildouts. Execution challenges at some neocloud and data center builders on large-scale projects have put a spotlight on permitting, power, and team experience. Lenders and investors are doing more rigorous diligence on every customer and every operator. So let me be direct about what that means for us. First, the message from our customers has been very clear. The need for us to deliver on AI compute has never been greater, and we believe our customers want to find a way for us to deliver that compute. Second, regarding our Maysville site, we are in active discussions with our customer on an alternative path forward to deliver that AI compute.

While this path is still in the early stages, we're optimistic it could represent a more financeable project despite current market conditions while still delivering attractive economics. Notwithstanding the recent market challenges, we remain optimistic about the assets we have, including our GPU estate, which I mentioned earlier. As the political dynamic changes and as AI compute supply continues to become more scarce, I believe our GPU estate assets will increase in value, and I believe we'll see this continue in '27. The only debt we hold today is a favorable note from Tether, and our existing estate of 22,000 GPUs generates meaningful cash flow.

Now, let's turn to the Rumble video business, where we are applying that same discipline. In the third quarter, we began a cost reset in video, tied to a refocus strategy. We expect to start seeing those savings through 2027. That strategy comes down to two core elements. First, product-led automation, driving monetization centrally through Rumble Studio. Second, creator-led economics. In October, we announced the new Rumble partner program, which gives eligible creators up to a 90% rev share on video ads, including host-read sponsorships. Together, these make the video business leaner, sharper, and well-positioned for growth.

And while we implement the new model, engagement on the platform remains strong. During the U.S. midterm elections this month, Rumble hosted three of the top five largest U.S. independent streams, according to StreamCharts, at around 9:00 p.m. on election night. We also launched a long-term distribution and content partnership with the WWE, which makes Rumble the new home of the weekly premium program WWE Main Event. As we grow, diversify, and lean into a more automated model, I am excited about the path ahead for our video business.

I'll leave you with this. We know the market feels uncertain right now, but as a leadership team, we could not feel more confident about the AI compute market, and we are excited about our future. Our revenue is nearly four times what it was a year ago. We're profitable. Our GPUs are running, and our customers are asking for more. You'll keep seeing us focus, execute, and deliver. With that, I'll turn it over to Mike.

Thanks, Chris, and good morning, everyone. This is our first quarter reporting in two segments, Rumble Video and Quake AI, as we committed to you in our last call. I'll walk through the consolidated results, then the segments, and then our outlook for the fourth quarter.

Revenue for the third quarter was $96.6 million, an increase of $71.8 million, or 290%, compared to $24.8 million in the third quarter of 2025. Above that increase, $68.2 million came from Quake AI and $3.7 million from higher Rumble revenue. Cost of services was $43.6 million, up from $25.2 million a year ago. The increase was driven by $16.4 million of incremental data center expenses from Northern Data and $3 million of higher programming and content costs, partially offset by a $1.1 million decrease in other costs of services.

General and administrative expenses were $39.5 million, up from $10.5 million. Northern Data contributed $24.6 million of that, mainly lease costs, payroll, and other administrative costs. Excluding Northern Data, the increase primarily reflects $3 million of higher professional fees. Research and development expenses were $7.7 million, up from $4.5 million, and sales and marketing expenses were $7.7 million, up from $5.1 million, with Northern Data accounting for part of the increase in both.

Adjusted EBITDA was a positive $4.4 million, our first positive quarter as a public company, as compared to a loss of $15.1 million in the third quarter of 2025, and a loss of $16.6 million in the second quarter of 2026. The net loss for the quarter was $91.7 million, or $81.5 million attributable to RUM Group, compared to a net loss of $16.3 million a year ago. The increase is primarily non-cash. Amortization and depreciation rose to $85.8 million, including $39 million related to the fair value step-up of the Northern Data assets in purchase accounting.

Quake AI generated revenue of $68.2 million and adjusted EBITDA of $23.5 million, and an adjusted EBITDA margin of roughly 34%. Revenue was primarily from GPU cloud computing services with a smaller contribution from hosting and co-location. Rumble generated revenue of $28.4 million, up 15% year-over-year, driven by $5.6 million of higher advertising revenue. That was partially offset by a $1.2 million decline in subscription revenue and a $700,000 decline in licensing, platform hosting, and other revenue.

Rumble's adjusted EBITDA loss was $12.1 million compared to a loss of $10.9 million a year ago. Corporate and other costs not allocated to the segments represented an adjusted EBITDA loss of $6.9 million. We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $142.3 million, consisting of $134.4 million of cash and cash equivalents, and 94.68 Bitcoin, valued at $7.9 million. Now let me turn to guidance.

When we gave our first formal outlook in August, I told you building a credible track record was a priority for me. Part of that is being clear about what's in our numbers. We reported $96.6 million against a range of $87 million to $93 million. But Q3 included items that we don't expect to repeat. So it is not the right baseline for modeling. Q3 included certain items that we don't expect to repeat in the fourth quarter, including our work with one customer as a part of a barter agreement, which had more accelerated revenue than expected with a little over $3 million in the quarter, but with a larger drop-off in Q4 than expected. Excluding those items, Q3 revenue would have been roughly at the top end of our range.

That's the run rate where we're really working from. For the fourth quarter of 2026, we expect revenue between $88 million and $94 million. This will be the last quarter where our existing fixed H100 contracts signed back in 2025 are in place, and we will see some small impacts on revenue as we begin to transition certain clusters for their renewal at hopefully significantly higher rates starting in the first half of '27. This is accounted for in our guidance.

As Chris mentioned in his remarks, we continue to work with our customers on key projects. And as a seasoned operator with one of the least levered balance sheets among the large public neoclouds, and an estate of 22,000 GPUs generating significant positive cash flow, I believe our Quake AI team is well-positioned to take advantage of the extremely favorable supply-demand dynamics in the AI compute market. With the changes in the financing markets over the past few weeks, that gives us an even greater need to have a disciplined operating and financial model.

First, with increased cost of capital, it is critical that our GPU per hour rates increase. Chris mentioned the pricing dynamics across the GPU market, and with a majority of our H100s coming up for renewal by the end of Q1 '27, I am excited for the tailwind this dynamic is expected to have to our bottom line. Second, many public neoclouds have used dilutive financial instruments to raise project equity in support of key deals. With the increased demand and scarcity of compute, we believe our potential customers will be more willing to fund substantial project equity needs via prepayments.

The bottom line is, in our Quake AI business, we are taking a disciplined capital approach. Our GPU rates are increasing, our margins are improving, and we believe we have the opportunity to leverage customer prepayments for project equity. We are taking the same disciplined approach in our Rumble video business with significant CAPEX reductions taken in Q3, including a reduction in force and other recurring expenditures. Rumble Video has significant growth prospects ahead, and with a refocused strategy and reset cost basis, we will actively manage towards a more profitable trajectory.

In summary, Q3 was our first full quarter with Quake AI, which is now more than 70% of our revenue, and our first quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. We will continue to focus first on execution, renewing our existing 22,000 GPU estate at better economics, executing on our new operating model to deliver project financing and execution, and grow this business in the disciplined way we've committed to you. That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we are now ready to open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Jacob Stephan with Lake Street Capital Markets. Your line is now live.

Hey guys, appreciate you taking the questions. Congrats on a nice quarter here. I guess just first I want to touch on the 250 megawatts that you said may slip beyond 2027. I guess your prepared remarks kind of implied that it would be on the Maysville side, but I wondered if you could just clear that up for me.

Yeah, hey, Jacob, and first just welcome, so glad to have you on the call. So we've been very disciplined about not publishing specific timelines on projects until we got to places of firm certainty, because we're a company, frankly, that executes what we say we're going to deliver to. So we mentioned in our disclosure, and you mentioned it before, we're not going to do project-specific guidance. But overall, we do expect a portion of the 250 megawatts to move beyond 2027. But we are still targeting a portion of that to land in 2027. As Chris mentioned in his remarks, we're working closely with our key customer on a new potential construct that we're very excited about.

And so we'll provide you further details as we go along. But just going back to our philosophy, we are very much a we don't put out information until we know that we can hit it, and we are a high execution firm.

Okay, helpful. Maybe just on the H100 repricing, I think your numbers imply that it was like $1.40 or so this quarter. But maybe if you could kind of help us think through where you expect those rates can be repriced at and maybe how certain clusters kind of roll off into higher-price contracts over the next quarter or so.

Yes, sure, great question. So I'm not going to go into the specifics on pricing, but I can speak to the market and some of the dynamics of: you have a choice between often the duration or the length of the contract, and you have a choice between how much you choose to do in terms of prepayment and also then the rates. But what I can tell you is the prevailing rates of H100s today by any market metric that you see are firmly with a two-handle on them, and we definitely are seeing market rates that are similar in our discussions with our customers.

So we'll provide more specific guidance later as we get commitments toward it, but we're definitely in a really good spot and we're liking where the market is today. We're going to make optimized portfolio decisions based on duration, prepayment, et cetera. And then to your second question, the vast majority of our H100s will have their contracts roll off by the end of Q1 '27.

Okay, got it. And maybe just last one for me, touching on the video business, you guys talked about the cost reset there. Wondering if you have some sort of annualized savings target or maybe any update on the video data licensing that we've talked about.

Yeah, let me do the first one and then I'll hand it off to Chris for the second one, because I know he's excited about that and that's a great opportunity. So to answer your question, we haven't released the exact numbers on what some of those actions will ultimately manifest, but let's just call them significant. Think of them in excess on a run-rate basis of 20% plus run rate on operations, and we felt like we can do that in a way that was still going to drive growth for the business through the automation and some of the constructs that Chris mentioned before. So a significant reduction getting us into an OpEx space where we can be positioned for growth.

Hey, this is Chris. I'll also add on the things we've introduced to the platform like Boosted and Premium, we see that we can push a lot of growth there with the 90% that we're giving on the other items. But the most important part, which will come in the second half of 2027 that we're gearing up for, is the potential for the creators to tap into data licensing on their IRL content and their video content. So we're in the process of designing and moving forward a marketplace that will allow AI robotic companies or AI companies in general to tap into that and grab content that creators may want to license to them on the spatial-temporal data front.

So we're super excited about that. That's something that we haven't seen in the market. And we obviously have an enormous community that can generate an enormous amount of IRL content and video content across the spectrum. So our target for that is late 2027 to roll that out, and hopefully we'll see some more meaningful updates in the first half of 2027 as well.

Got it. I appreciate all the color. Thanks, guys.

Our next question comes from Param Singh with Oppenheimer. Your line is now live.

Yes, hi. Thank you so much for taking my questions. Firstly, if I could kind of dive into the cost of the 250-megawatt build-out and the financing on it. I wanted to understand how are you thinking about it? Because by my math, it should cost about $11 to $12 billion for, say, a Vera Rubin to build out that capacity. And how much are you thinking is going to come from customer payments versus, say, secure financing or equipment financing and other ways you're thinking about funding that growth? Thank you. And I have a follow-up.

Yeah, no problem. And hey, welcome, Param. So we haven't given specific CapEx guidance, and we don't plan to today. But to your question and to our overall operating model and how we're thinking of it moving forward, I think that customer prepayments are really going to be a large portion of the financing for projects that is necessary for the project equity. And then I do think that the debt markets, in spite of the fact that there is a potentially higher cost of capital, I think that as they become more discerning about the operational execution of the companies to whom they are issuing the debt, I think that's going to be really beneficial to folks like us who are experienced and have a trust and belief in terms of folks within the market.

The other thing I would mention to you is that the 250 megawatts and some of the opportunities we're looking at, there are different flavors and styles of customers that we have. So not every deal we would paint with the exact same brush in terms of the operating model. I think the discipline will hold regardless, but I think that the circumstances may be different in terms of the mix between how much is needed to be prepayment, how much is financeable via debt, et cetera. So we'll continue to monitor and we'll release to the shareholders and investors more information as it becomes available.

Understood. And then let me take the other side of the equation then. Look, obviously you'll get a chance to reprice higher on the H100s, H200s, I think it's 30% to 50% higher, and you said it's a two-handle, so that makes sense. But as you think about the new capacity, that's predominantly going to be Vera Rubin or Grace Blackwell, if I'm not mistaken. So whether it's a short-duration contract or a long-duration contract, those are going for significantly higher than the Hoppers. So is this a $6 billion revenue run rate versus the $3 billion before because of the pricing in the market? Or how are you thinking about the longer-term opportunity of a consistent 250-megawatt build-up?

Yeah, Parm, to your point, and I think you know obviously we're not going to give the long-term run rate or guidance at this point, but to your point, if you look at revenue per megawatt at this point on next-generation NVIDIA GPUs—I know that space has given indications, but we have seen nothing but increases. I think that depending on how we work between the short-term duration versus the long-term duration mix that we have within our portfolio, we'll have a fairly material impact on what we think the run rates will look like.

But we are certainly seeing significantly higher revenue per megawatt on Vera Rubin and next-generation GPUs compared to even the increased rates that we're seeing in our existing Hoppers from a revenue per megawatt perspective. Thank you so much, I'll get back in line.

Our next question comes from Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now live.

Hey everybody, so two questions on the ad business. Given that the change around the content acquisition, I think particularly around content payment, do you think that segment can kind of go gross margin positive next year or potentially even in the fourth quarter? Just any help there. And then Chris, I mean, would you consider selling the content business if the price was right? Like how important is this asset to your long-term strategy versus just the financials if somebody came to you and offered you what you thought was a fair number for that business?

Chris is going to want to answer the second question immediately. But on the first question, and I know we haven't released the Q yet—that'll be released tomorrow—but to answer Jason, the video business was gross margin positive this quarter, and we expect that to be moving forward. But that's not all that we're satisfied with, just having positive gross margins. We really want to get to the bottom line. So that's where we made some of the tough calls on OpEx in reducing the run rate moving forward.

We've made some really smart tradeoffs on existing creator contracts and optimizing more of the economics, as Chris mentioned before, on the 90-10 split, that we think is going to continue to accrue towards gross margin. Really happy on our path there towards profitability with the video business.

Hey Jason, I'll jump in on the second part. The way we look at the video business, it's almost like a moat for the Quake AI business going into the future. And with what we're planning to launch in the second half of the year on the AI side for Rumble, we see that as a really, really good opportunity for the entire business. So what we did just recently by announcing these better economics for creators, we're doing our best to basically stimulate growth as much as possible on the platform to get as much content onto the platform going into 2027.

And we had a really successful last few weeks on the platform as we've launched this into beta, and we'll be rolling it out in early 2027 to the majority of our users. And by late next year, where we see the real opportunity here and how Quake and Rumble are really going to work together in the best way possible is that we're going to be introducing a marketplace. And that marketplace is going to allow AI robotic companies, AI companies, any company that requires spatial-temporal data to tap into and teach their models.

And we think as we move into this robotic era, this is going to be an extremely important data set for a lot of robotic companies that are going to need to do trainings. And at the same time, it's going to create a new revenue stream for creators on the Rumble side that is really going to propel it into a category of its own versus the competition. So not only are we situating Rumble to be the number one place for a creator to generate revenue off their content, but by introducing this AI angle in 2027, we think that we can really exceed our competition in being the absolute number one place to generate revenue off of content. So we're really looking forward to that. That's something we want to see through and it's something we're going to introduce in late 2027.

Okay, appreciate the call, guys. Thanks.

Our next question comes from Derek Whitfield with Texas Capital. Your line is now live.

Good morning and thanks for taking my questions. Also congrats on the quarter as well. Wanted to follow up on the H100 estate. While not pressing for price, could you perhaps speak to what you'd like to accomplish from a term perspective?

Yes, hey Derek and welcome. So, as I mentioned before, I think we want to take a pretty balanced portfolio approach to the H100s. We really love where the spot market is right now and we really love where the short term is right now. I don't think we're going to do a ton of pure spot. We do have some partners that we work with that both allow us to have potentially fixed-term contracts with a baseline with revenue upside potentially for spot increases that they are able to manifest to their customers.

So we love those kinds of deals because they get us exposure to upside without the downside. I do think we'll do some longer-duration contracts, but I don't think we're going to do five years on the H100s, though maybe we could if we wanted to. So think of it as a mix of durations wanting to do fixed plus some upside as one of our key opportunities for margin, targeting a relatively short-duration style contract. Like Chris mentioned in his remarks, just our view on the market right now is that with all of the dynamics that are happening with the political environment, energy, et cetera, supply is going to be very challenged to come on the market at least for the foreseeable future, and demand is not slowing at all. So we love the idea of having an estate, and we want to make sure we continue to be exposed to the upside in that supply-demand dynamic.

Terrific. And as my follow-up, maybe we'll shift over to the regulatory environment. Have your views on the viability of the targeted 1 gigawatt of capacity changed at any level post the midterms?

I'll tell you the short answer is yes. Just to be transparent, I think right now with where supply-demand is, we are very much focused on how do we deliver to the 250 megawatts that we have and how do we deliver the AI compute as soon as we can, because the ability to be able to deliver compute in the short to medium term with this supply-demand environment is extremely lucrative and it's a differentiator within the market. So while we're always going to look at future capacity and we're always going to look at opportunities, we have a lot of different geographies that we've been looking at, a lot of different countries that we've been working with. But our management leadership team's focus right now is really going to be on the 250 and getting that monetized because the payoff is potentially huge.

Perfect. Appreciate that and certainly a great quarter.

Our next question comes from Thomas Forte with Maxim Group. Your line is now live.

First off, Chris and Mike, congratulations on the quarter. I have one question and one follow-up. So, Mike, you sort of touched on this in the last answer, but I would appreciate it, at least at a high level, what are the implications for RUM Group from either a faster or slower pace of data center expansion? I would think that there's pluses and minuses for you in both instances.

Yeah, I think the first big plus is supply has gotten more difficult to bring online. And if you're an operator that has an existing estate of GPUs that are currently operating today, that's a huge tailwind because the demand is just not shaping. So that's the first positive one. The other positive is demand, and when we talked about our 250 megawatts of unmonetized capacity and opportunity, one of the ways in which we really talked about that or why we talked about it is we had the ability to have key power in place and we had the ability in many cases to have permits already in place.

So as you look at how far along a project is in its lifetime and on its milestones, I would rather be as far along as we are, as opposed to starting with dirt and nothing today. And so I think there is probably going to be a differentiation within the market of the maturity of your given projects, and I feel really good about having an existing estate as well as properties which are further along in the processes which are going to become more challenged moving forward, which is permitting, power, and operational execution to prove to the debt markets that you are somebody that they should bet on.

Yes, I'll just add that our 250 megawatts in general is at a much further matured state than many others, and that's what keeps us super excited about that estate that we have right now. We don't believe and see any kind of impediment on that on the political side or regulatory at this moment.

Excellent. And then for my follow-up, you have an exceptional track record on strategic M&A. I'd appreciate just high-level thoughts on what your current views are and maybe areas you'd consider additions.

Yeah, I'll take that. Strategic M&A has obviously been a big part of our company history, and it's certainly something we continue to look at right now. Obviously, as an opportunity presents itself, it's something that we're not going to be shy about doing. And I will say from the perspective that we're seeing and the way that the market is treating certain companies, there may be opportunities that come and present themselves in the near term or long term, and it's something that is definitely on our desk that we evaluate on a constant basis.

And just to kind of step back like a 10,000-foot view, I do think the market is not really appreciating how strong the demand in this market for AI compute really is. And with that being said, that does leave opportunities for us and other companies to take advantage of, and it's certainly something I like doing.

Excellent. Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Mike.

This concludes today's conference. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.

This live transcript is auto-generated without human intervention or review.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to RUM Group Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call.

[Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded on Monday, August 10, 2026.

I would now like to turn the conference over to Shannon Devine, Investor Relations for RUM Group. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Chris Pavlovski, Founder, Chairman and CEO of RUM Group; and Mike Masci, CFO. A press release detailing our second quarter 2026 results was released today and available on our Investor Relations website.

Before we begin the formal presentation, I'd like to remind everyone that statements made on this call may include predictions, estimates or other information that may be considered forward-looking. All forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this call and should be considered in conjunction with the company's cautionary statements in our earnings release and the factors included in our filings with the SEC. Future company updates will be available via press release and the company's identified social media channels.

I will now turn the call over to RUM Group's Founder, Chairman and CEO, Chris Pavlovski.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. Last quarter, I told you this would be the last call before Rumble meaningfully entered the cloud and agentic AI era. Today, I'm glad to say that transformation is complete. On June 17, we closed our acquisition of Northern Data, securing approximately 85.2% of its outstanding shares. And with the deal closed, we renamed our parent company, RUM Group, Inc. We now operate 2 distinct, synergistic business units: Rumble, our Video platform; and Quake AI, our new cloud and AI infrastructure business, combining Rumble Cloud with Northern Data's estate of roughly 22,000 NVIDIA H100 and H200 GPUs.

To kick off our first earnings call as a combined company, I'm thrilled to announce that our revenue for the second quarter was $40.4 million, up 61% from $25.1 million in the second quarter of 2025. I'm proud to say it's been nearly 5 years since we announced being public, and we're still posting all-time records for our company, and we anticipate that we will post another all-time record in the next upcoming quarter.

I want to spend a minute on the strategic logic here because I think it's important for everyone on this call to understand where we are headed. Rumble spent years building its own rails as a speech platform, our own bare metal compute, our own CDN and the network to deliver low latency streaming at scale. Combine that now with an AI compute-as-a-service business like Northern Data, and you get a compelling end-to-end AI infrastructure company. That's Quake AI, and it's going to be the financial engine of RUM Group going forward.

On execution, Quake AI's existing GPU estate is running at more than 85% utilization today, up sharply from where it stood not long ago. That improvement reflects a deliberate focus on customer support, software, and Infrastructure as-a-Service execution, and it's what gave us the credibility to win the next stage of growth. In June, we signed a multiyear agreement with Together AI to deploy NVIDIA HGX B300 GPU capacity, establishing RUM Group as a credible independent provider of large-scale AI infrastructure outside the traditional hyperscaler ecosystem. It validates that our customers trust our execution enough to partner with us and that NVIDIA is willing to support us with the supply allocation to keep growing.

The next stage for this team is monetizing our 250 megawatts of power targeted for 2027, the grid connections and agreements that put us in position for real deployment next year. That capacity spans our marquee 180-megawatt powered site near Atlanta, Georgia, one of the most important Internet points of presence in the country. We continue to see strong customer momentum as well as meaningful progress on the site development, where the substation is already built and the transformers are on site.

In addition, we also have a smaller site in Pittsburgh and 2 European sites; roughly 50 megawatts in Sweden and roughly 20 megawatts in Norway. We continue to see encouraging and unprecedented growth in demand for AI compute as a service, and our customer and demand pipeline remains strong. Simply monetizing 250 megawatts of currently unmonetized capacity represents what we believe is a $3 billion-plus annual run rate opportunity for RUM Group.

Turning to our video business. Average global monthly active users were 57 million in the second quarter, and ARPU was $0.48, up 20% quarter-over-quarter. Our management team's focus is to continue to increase revenue by bringing in brand advertising. Additionally, with the recent formation of Quake AI, we are quickly learning from our AI clientele that Rumble may have a much more compelling monetization opportunity. As the AI industry moves into the robotic era in the coming years, Rumble's spatiotemporal data, otherwise known as video data, becomes increasingly valuable and very important to robotic learning.

For example, contextual data, like what Reddit has is a prime example of the value in today's world of AI, but we believe in 1 to 2 years, this will shift heavily towards video data. And only a week ago, it was reported in the news that Amazon was exploring ways to tap into Twitch's video data. In fact, Quake AI clientele have already expressed interest in our video data. Our team is looking at various ways to capitalize on this opportunity and add another bucket of potential revenue for the creator community.

With significant spatiotemporal data on Rumble, combined with the AI compute rails we are building and deploying at Quake, RUM Group sits in a very unique position compared to today's neoclouds. Like them, we can offer scaled AI compute, but unlike them, we have a trove of video data and a creator community that can help power the robotics era. In short, we have data, we have the rails, and we have the community to power the future of AI, which we believe is the robotic and agentic AI era.

With that, let me turn the call over to our CFO, Mike Masci, who will walk you through the quarter in more detail, along with some important updates on our guidance process and reporting on our businesses going forward.

Thanks, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. This was a landmark quarter, both operationally and financially. And let me start by walking you through the high-level financials. First, revenue for the second quarter was $40.4 million, an increase of $15.3 million or 61% compared to $25.1 million in the second quarter of 2025.

Taking a turn to our expenses. We continue to make strategic investments to best position ourselves for high growth in AI. Cost of services were $30.6 million, up from $26.5 million a year ago, driven by higher programming and content costs as well as the incremental data center expenses from the Northern Data acquisition.

General and administrative expenses were $16.3 million, up from $11.7 million, again, primarily driven by Northern Data, which contributed $5 million of payroll and other administrative costs. Excluding Northern Data, the remaining increase reflects higher payroll and other administrative costs, partially offset by lower professional fees.

Research and development expenses were $6.8 million, up from $4.8 million. Sales and marketing expenses were $10.4 million, up from $7.9 million, attributable to higher marketing and public relations spend, increased payroll and other sales and marketing-related expenditures. Adjusted EBITDA loss for the quarter was $16.6 million, an improvement from a loss of $20.5 million in the second quarter of 2025. Net loss for the quarter was $80.3 million, or $79.1 million attributable to RUM Group, Inc. compared to a net loss of $30.2 million in the second quarter of 2025.

The year-over-year increase in net loss was primarily driven by $28.3 million of acquisition-related transaction costs associated with Northern Data close, along with higher noncash depreciation and amortization following the acquisition. We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $220.5 million, consisting of $203.3 million in cash and cash equivalents and 293.14 Bitcoin valued at roughly $17.2 million.

But before I get into guidance, I want to talk you through an important change in how we will report going forward. This will be the last quarter we present MAU and ARPU as headline metrics for the company. Those numbers described a single video audience business. And following the Northern Data acquisition, that's no longer the full picture of what RUM Group is.

Beginning with our third quarter report, we plan to move to segment reporting: Rumble Video and Quake AI, each with its own revenue and profitability metrics. I think that's a far more useful way for all of you to understand where we're allocating capital and how each part of our business is actually performing. And it's the reporting structure I'll be building around as I get further into the seat. So that brings me to guidance. For the first time, we are issuing formal revenue guidance.

For the third quarter of 2026, our first full quarter reflecting Quake AI, we expect revenue between $87 million and $93 million. We've heard directly from many of you that formal guidance would help you better understand this business, and now that Northern Data is closed with strong contracted revenue, high utilization, we felt this was the right moment to give you that visibility. Over time, as our forecasting visibility continues to improve, we plan to build this out further, including longer-term views. Building a disciplined, credible guidance process is something I'm personally focused on as we establish our track record with all of you.

So in summary, this was a transformational quarter, record revenue, both including and excluding Northern Data. We closed Northern Data and established Quake AI as a leader in AI compute as a service. We signed a marquee agreement with Together AI, and we are now focused as a team on converting our 250 megawatts of unmonetized power targeted for 2027 into what we believe is a $3 billion-plus annual revenue run rate opportunity. I was excited when I came on board at the end of March. And today, I'm more excited about where Rum Group is headed, and I look forward to updating you on our progress.

That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we are now ready to open the line for questions.

And your first question comes from the line of Tom Forte with Maxim Group.

This is Henry Dare filling in for Tom Forte. So I got 2 questions. Firstly, Chris, there's some debate amongst investors as to what happens for the pricing for AI when capacity catches up with demand. I would appreciate your thoughts on that matter.

Henry, this is Chris. So yes, there's been a lot of debate about that. The way I look at it right now and the way -- what we see right now in our window is that we're still in the early stages of AI. In particular, I think that with inferencing and agentic AI coming on exploding in the coming years, the demand for AI compute is going to continue to increase. I don't see at this point, any time in the near future, any point where capacity is going to catch up to the demand on the AI compute side. I think it's scarce. It's very scarce. And I believe at this point in time, I don't see any point in which we're going to have capacity meet that demand in the next 1 to 2 years.

Okay. And this may be too early as you just finished the Northern Data transaction. But I would appreciate your current thoughts on your strategic M&A strategy and types of companies you consider adding moving forward.

Yes. Like you said, it's pretty early in our process in terms of how we're thinking about moving forward in terms of growth. I think right now, as a management and leadership team, we're really focused on that 250 megawatts of unmonetized capacity. I think we're always going to look at opportunities in terms of value creation for customers and for shareholders. But like you said, I think right now, we're focused on that 250 megawatts of unmonetized.

And your next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer.

Congrats on giving guidance, and I never say congratulations on the call. So glad we hit this milestone. So just first to dig in some of the questions I think folks have is, so when you think about kind of getting what you need to get the compute going, obviously, you've gotten the cash now. Just help us understand the challenges around getting the chips, rack cooling, all of the parts you need for the data center. How much has already been contracted, like, it's signed? And just help us understand timing of when that comes online.

And then just if you want to weave into that because I think most people know, like, is challenging to get all of the equipment to get the data centers open. Have you thought about potentially doing the TeraWulf's playbook where basically you run the infrastructure and then the customers bring the chips and the racks. And then I've got a follow-up on advertising.

Jason, this is a record-setting quarter. We hit record revenue and record number of congratulations from you. So it's wonderful. So to your question on CapEx, I think when we look at agreements like something what we did with Together AI, we don't sign the contract and the agreement until we have strong line of sight to be able to secure the right amount of equipment and capacity to be able to put that one online. So to answer your question, you can see from our cash flow statements that this past quarter, we had a large uptick in our investing activities, upwards of almost $47 million in investing activities, which is unusual for us. That really went towards a lot of the purchases of that IT CapEx that's going to be necessary to execute that AI compute as a service deal. So think of that as the start of that process, but we feel really good about where we are in terms of our ability to get supply to be able to ultimately fulfill our obligation for key deals, including the one with Together AI.

In terms of your question about the TeraWulf model, which I'll -- not to be specific about them as a name, but we sometimes in the industry call this the powered shell model. So the idea if you have capacity for power in the way that we do, you build the data center and then you lease it out to somebody on a long-term lease for them to be able to do AI compute as a service. So we actually addressed some of this in our investor deck. It's a worthy business model, but what we found is the unique ability to deliver AI compute as a service is something that's been differentiated in the industry. It's one of the things that's really interested us and we think is a huge value add from Northern Data. They've been doing AI compute as a service for a number of years.

And so just to make that real, we put this in our investor deck, but you can think of doing power and shell monetized at roughly anywhere from $1.5 million to $2 million per megawatt per year. Delivering AI compute as a service just on the Blackwell generation, we show that, that delivers at almost $11 million per megawatt per year. So you're talking about orders of magnitude of almost 5x in terms of the value creation when you deliver that AI compute as a service.

Now it's not without cost, to your point, of the ability to be able to secure effectively, the AI compute hardware, the capability to be able to actually operate some of the most complex machinery in the world, et cetera. But to me, as a company, Northern Data and RUM Group have really earned that right over a number of years in partnership with NVIDIA. And so we're really happy to be able to take advantage of that 5x monetization opportunity. We feel like that's our business model moving forward is really AI compute as a service.

Jason, I'll add into that, that I think that with the Rubin chipset coming in the next year or 2, that even moves up even further on the monetization front. And I think we heard from SpaceX call with Elon, he was quoting numbers much, much higher than that for the Rubin.

Okay. So -- but I mean the main point you're saying is that whenever you make a public announcement, you've already secured, basically, hardware to do that. So like that's how investors should think about modeling this, kind of, building as you go with these announcements. So I mean, is that going to be the policy though? Like I guess, like -- it's almost like a guidance philosophy. So should we assume like every major customer win like that, you're going to announce and then that's how we can think about like the timing of the scaling of the model?

So first of all, what I described is really how we're going to seek from an operating model perspective. So don't take this as a commitment or a policy. I would struggle with those words a bit. But to your point and as a leadership and management team, our first job is prudent risk management. So we would not enter into contracts that we didn't feel like we had the ability to or be able to fulfill. So ultimately, having things like supply allocation and certain execution is part of the way we do our diligence before we would sign up for deal.

And then remind me the second part of your question?

No, no, that's fine. That covers that. And then just on the ad business, I mean, kind of a nice acceleration on a year-over-year basis. Just can you, give us, like how much was tether -- I guess, the Tether ad comm impact the quarter, if you're willing to break that out?

Yes, we do have this -- I know it's been -- it's a pretty quick turnaround from when the Q came out, but we actually do have this broken out in the Q to show you how much was related to Tether during the quarter. We had roughly $6 million related to Tether -- sorry, $4.8 million related to Tether in Q2.

And I'm showing no further questions at this time. Ladies and gentlemen, this now concludes today's conference call. Thank you all for joining. You may now disconnect.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Rumble Inc. First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] This call is being recorded today, May 14, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Shannon Devine, Investor Relations for Rumble. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Chris Pavlovski, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Rumble; Mike Masci, CFO; and Brandon Alexandroff, former CFO and current Strategic Adviser to the CEO.

A press release detailing our first quarter 2026 results was released today and available on our Investor Relations website.

Before we begin the formal presentation, I would like to remind everyone that statements made on this call may include predictions, estimates or other information that may be considered forward-looking. All forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this call and should be considered in conjunction with the company's cautionary statements in our earnings release and the factors included in our filings with the SEC. Future company updates will be available via press release and the company's identified social media channels.

I will now turn the call over to Rumble's Founder, Chairman and CEO, Chris Pavlovski.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. This is a special moment in Rumble's history. This should be the last call before Rumble meaningfully enters into the Cloud and Agentic AI era. As the transaction with Northern Data is set to close in June, Rumble will undergo a major transformation. Cloud will become a pillar alongside video. And from early indications, Cloud should be the largest generator of revenue. This vision dates back to when we announced to go public in 2021. And today, we are fully executing on that vision.

The acquisition of Northern Data continues to be on track to close this quarter. Rumble has secured approximately 81% of Northern Data's outstanding shares, and we've received all required regulatory approvals for the business combination. That's an enormous milestone, and it clears one of the last meaningful hurdles to closing. The strategic logic of this acquisition has only strengthened in the months since we announced it. Northern Data reported their Q1 results yesterday, which included record revenue of roughly EUR 43 million, driven by increased utilization of its GPU estate from 62% in December 2025 to approximately 85% in March 2026.

In addition, Northern Data confirmed its full year 2026 revenue outlook of between EUR 130 million and EUR 150 million, supported by a current pipeline of opportunities and recently executed customer contracts.

In addition to Northern Data's pipeline, the Rumble team has been working on its own pipeline. We are currently in negotiations with multiple customers for GPU-as-a-Service. Additionally, we also have several non-dilutive GPU financing offers in hand that we are currently evaluating. In parallel to our quickly emerging GPU-as-a-Service business, we have been investing into our CPU-as-a-Service business, which we believe will continue to play an important role for the Cloud business into the future as AI moves to the edge in an Agentic era.

As an example, we recently launched one-click OpenClaw deployment on Rumble Cloud, making it dramatically easier for developers and enterprises to spin up high-performance AI agents in minutes. We see this as an early but important step in positioning Rumble Cloud as the preferred platform for scalable production-grade AI deployment.

In addition to playing a role in Agentic AI through the GPU infrastructure and application layer, Rumble Cloud is also in a unique position to play a significant role in crypto infrastructure and Agentic payments given the low latency, high-reliability infrastructure we built for video and our strong strategic partnership with Tether. Throughout Q1 and into Q2, we have seen strong validation of this product market fit from leading players in the digital asset space, including Anchorage Digital, which has selected Rumble Cloud as an infrastructure partner. This win highlights our ability to meet the performance, security and reliability requirements of regulated institutional-grade platforms. It's a clear signal that Rumble Cloud is gaining traction with high-value, mission-critical workloads.

As for the video platform, we are starting to see some encouraging results. Our MAUs hit 56 million monthly active users, which was driven by our marketing efforts with international expansion and Rumble Shorts. This marks another quarter of sequential growth. Since we last spoke, Rumble Shorts has continued to grow and set records. In May, we set a new record of roughly 2 million unique video views in a single day. Rumble Shorts is now driving meaningful growth to our MAUs, and we see it complementing and eventually helping grow the long-form side of the platform. Additionally, since Shorts is not yet monetized, its growth had a negative impact on our ARPU. We are planning to roll out monetization of Shorts in the second half of this year and hope to see it lift ARPU accordingly.

Second, we launched Rumble Wallet in partnership with Tether. The growth of this product will be heavily fueled by the $100 million advertising commitment from Tether, which has begun to slowly scale in our current quarter. We plan to materially scale in the second half of the year, bringing a new cohort of creators to the platform.

Stepping back, we have had many exciting moments over nearly 4 years as a public company, but I can honestly say this feels different. We are working on Cloud-based revenue deals, which are far larger than we've historically seen. We are on track to close Northern Data this quarter. And if we were a combined company, our top line revenue would have been roughly $75 million in Q1.

Before I turn over to our financials, I want to thank Brandon Alexandroff, who has been with us from the very beginning, taking us from single-digit million revenue to where we are today.

Now let me formally introduce and welcome our new Chief Financial Officer, Mike Masci. This is Mike's first earnings call with Rumble, and I could not be more excited to have him in the seat. Mike was previously at Intel, coming with deep technology expertise across Cloud and AI, having spent his career at the intersection of finance and some of the most important compute and infrastructure businesses in the world. That background, financial discipline paired with the real operating understanding of Cloud and AI economics is exactly the profile we wanted as Rumble steps into its next chapter as a Cloud and AI infrastructure company, prepares to close the Northern Data transaction and operates at a meaningfully larger scale. Mike has already hit the ground running, and I know investors, analysts and our team are going to value the rigor, perspective and partnership he brings.

Mike, welcome to Rumble. I hand the call over to you to walk through the quarter.

Thank you for the introduction, Chris, and good afternoon, everyone. It's an absolute privilege to join Rumble at such a pivotal moment for the company. After spending much of my career at Intel, leading Cloud and AI infrastructure, I'm psyched about the opportunity to join a company with Rumble's capabilities, which will combine an international data center portfolio with a leading video platform that delivers some of the lowest latencies in the live streaming industry.

Finally, the incoming AI data centers and fleet of GPUs from Northern Data will build a Rumble portfolio, that's the foundation of what's needed for a significant Cloud infrastructure business poised to lead in the Agentic AI era. We will be a high-growth company, but with a disciplined capital and financial approach for our shareholders. I look forward to meeting and working with many of you over the coming quarters.

So with that, I'll take you through our first quarter 2026 financials at a high level before turning the call over to the operator for Q&A.

For the first quarter of 2026, we reported revenue of $25.5 million, an increase of approximately 7% compared to $23.7 million in the first quarter of 2025. The $1.8 million year-over-year increase was driven by a $2.6 million increase in audience monetization revenues, partially offset by an $800,000 decrease in other initiatives revenues. Cost of services in the first quarter was $27 million, a 10% decline year-over-year. The decrease was driven by a $2.3 million reduction in programming and content costs and a $700,000 decrease in other cost of services.

General and administrative expenses decreased by $6.2 million or 37% to $10.4 million in the first quarter of 2026. The reduction was primarily driven by a $6.7 million decrease in payroll and related expenses and a $400,000 reduction in professional fees, partially offset by a $700,000 increase in other administrative expenses.

Research and development expenses increased by $1 million or 20% to $5.7 million, reflecting a $600,000 increase in payroll and related expenses and a $400,000 increase in costs associated with computer software, hardware and other expenditures used in research and development activities.

Sales and marketing expenses increased by $4.9 million or 134% to $8.5 million. The increase reflected higher marketing and public relations spends of $3.8 million, increased payroll and related expenses of $800,000 and a higher consulting cost of $300,000. This step-up reflects the deliberate investment we are making beyond our brand, our products and our sales operations as we move into a midterm election year and ramp the Rumble Cloud commercial motions.

Adjusted EBITDA loss for the first quarter was $21 million, an improvement compared to a loss of $22.7 million in the first quarter of 2025. Net loss for the first quarter was $30.3 million compared to a net loss of $2.7 million in the first quarter of 2025. The year-over-year change in net loss was primarily driven by movements in noncash items, including a $14.9 million lower benefit from change in fair value of warrant liability, a $9.7 million lower benefit from change in fair value of derivatives, $4.8 million in acquisition-related transaction costs from the pending Northern Data acquisition, and a $2.4 million higher charge in change in fair value of digital assets, partially offset by operating improvements.

We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $233.4 million, consisting of $219 million in cash and cash equivalents and 210.82 Bitcoin valued at $14.4 million as of March 31. Our Bitcoin holdings are carried at fair value and remeasured each quarter. Net cash used in operating activities for the first quarter was $16.6 million.

So in summary, we are seeing strong user growth on our video platform. Our Rumble Cloud continues to grow with strong customer momentum. With the addition of the Northern Data GPU and AI data center assets, our cloud business will expand meaningfully. I could not be more excited for where Rumble is headed.

That concludes our prepared remarks. Operator, we are now ready to open the line for questions.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer.

So 3 questions. So first, so I think most of us have seen the kind of forecast, I guess, whatever we call them in the S1. I guess, specifically, I'm just going to call out a few numbers, and I don't know if there's like any commentary you can put around them, but I think there was something like a $204 million revenue target for stand-alone Rumble for next year and then $878 million for Northern Data. I guess how should investors think about that? Like it's definitely not guidance, but it's a guardrail or just any kind of color how people should think about those numbers? Maybe I'll just do them one at a time, probably easier that way. So let's start with that.

Yes, sure. Jason, I'll take that one. So first, just to start out, no, those forecasts are not guidance. Specifically, those forecasts were internal in nature in connection with the transaction. And so overall, those are not guidance. That said, in the future, we are going to evaluate the transaction and the combined entity with Northern Data. And at that time, we may choose to provide guidance. So the way to think about that was the forecast and it's not guidance.

Okay. So second question, so should we assume that Tether ad revenue commitments begin after the Northern Data close? And then are there any thresholds that need to be triggered? Or does the commitment kind of like come in ratably over the length of the commitment? And then I've got one more.

Jason, this is Chris. So the Tether ad commitment has already begun this quarter. We're scaling it slowly right now to make sure that everything is working properly with the Rumble Wallet, and we want to embed some good promotions with it that we are looking to launch in the coming weeks. So we anticipate this to scale more so in the second half of the year, but it has begun slowly here in this quarter. There's no specific -- it doesn't have to happen after the transaction closes. It's not tied to that at all. It's just based on the product and where we see the product and when we want to step on the gas with the product, and that's up to us here at Rumble.

Okay. And then lastly, our understanding is that Northern Data has about 25 racks right now comprised of H100s and 200s. I mean any commentary that's like close to accurate? And then how should we think about like future contracts for more compute and power?

So this is Chris again. Northern Data has 22,000 -- we've released that they've had -- and obviously, they've spoken about it publicly, they have around 22,000 GPUs. With respect to the amount of racks, I don't have that information at me right now, and that's something -- that information we can provide once the transaction is closed. But as of right now, they have 22,000 GPUs. They have about 9 data centers, and they have also properties as well like Nashville that has energized capacity of up to 180 megawatts.

Just to add, fitting 22,000 GPUs and the number of racks that you mentioned would be extremely difficult.

Your next question comes from the line of Thomas Forte from Maxim Group.

Great. So first off, Chris, Tyler, Steve, Brandon, it was a pleasure working with you, and I wish you all the best of luck in your new role. And then Mike, welcome to the call. And then I apologize in advance if you touched on these in your prepared remarks, I'm juggling multiple calls right now. So 2 questions for me. Beyond Tether, how are your new President of Sales for Rumble Advertising and Rumble Shorts video efforts advancing your near-term and long-term advertising sales efforts?

Tom, this is Chris. So in terms of the Rumble Advertising Center, we hired Greg Sherrill earlier in the year, and we're seeing a lot of progress on that. We're opening up programmatic channels, and we're seeing some success with that already. I don't anticipate us to start seeing meaningful numbers on the advertising side until about late 2026 and into 2027. With that said, though, there has been some real meaningful partners like avenues that have opened up on the programmatic side as we opened up the walled garden.

On the Rumble Shorts side, that has been a very pleasant surprise for us. It's actually contributing to MAU growth. And it is -- we just set a new record here in the month of May as well. We had a record when we -- in the last quarterly call, and we have another record here in the last couple of weeks as well for Rumble Shorts. That is not monetized yet. So it's not showing up in ARPU. We intend to start monetizing that in the second half of 2026, and we hope to see that having a meaningful lift to our ARPU.

But from what we are seeing in early stages, the growth that we are seeing with Rumble Shorts and the stickiness of Rumble Shorts, is something extremely promising, and it's something that we're going to continue to invest in. And we're very hopeful that we can monetize that here in this current year.

I'll also add, we're in the process of building new functions into the Rumble Advertising Center where we're going to allow our current creator base and our current users to start advertising within the platform, something that all platforms do and they do very well like Facebook and X and Instagram where you can start boosting internally. We haven't had that function in the Rumble Advertising Center. We are looking to release that this summer, and we think that we're going to see some real traction there by giving all the creators and users on the platform the ability to advertise within the platform. So we're looking forward to that as well.

Great. And then for my follow-up, as we get closer to the midterms, what are your current thoughts on how it may drive monetization later this year? And at a high level, how should we think about your ability to monetize on that engagement compared with the last midterms and also the last presidential election?

Yes. I think we're in a much stronger position than we ever have been on the advertising front. And obviously, midterms is something that's going to be very important to us. And hopefully, we'll see that drive ARPU considerably. We've seen that previously with midterms in the past and obviously, the presidential election. We see a lot of budgets are coming in that Q4. We anticipate something similar happening for this midterms as well and obviously, the next presidential election. So we're looking to capitalize on that. And I think actually one of the really cool features that we will have is that boosting capability that I think could really accelerate and help grow that even further than we've seen in the past. So we're looking -- like I said, we're looking to roll that out this summer and have that ready for the midterm. But like all other election seasons, that's a big moment for us, and we're looking to capitalize on it.

At this time, we no longer have any questions. Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

welcome Welcome. We have a specialty episode of the Matt Kohrs show. I know many of you tuning in June in the warning at the crack of dawn. -- here, I guess, we're doing a little bit of a show at us. And honestly, I have the privilege to be sitting down with the founder, CEO and Chairman, Mr. Chris Peblowski of Rumble. I appreciate you taking the time to chat with me to chat with all the supporters of Rumble, and I think we're going to have a great conversation of not just how Rumble did in 2025, but really, where we're looking forward to in 2026. So once again, thank you for taking the time out of your very busy schedule.

Thanks for having me. Glad to have you back up in the north.

Yes. Beautiful Toronto. I think I actually brought some of the cold weather with me, but maybe next time, it will be a bit warmer.

Yes. No, I do prefer being in Sarasota, but we're here in Toronto, and we'll enjoy it as much as we can. Thanks for coming by.

Happy to. I kind of want to get this conversation going with what you were saying a little bit earlier today on your official earnings call of growth is back. Can you highlight to me and to everyone tuning in the major growth factors that you're personally excited about focusing on and that maybe we could spend a bit more time than just that quick call and really dive into the details there.

Yes. Well, let's start with Rumble shorts. The last couple of weeks, I've been at my desk refreshing some shorts and that's not a joke. We're like send them back and forth with Rick and a soft and we're looking at these numbers, and we're like, well, what's going on over here, all of a sudden, you come in the next day and we're like, this just took another leg up and it keeps going. And we're looking for that ceiling and hopefully, we didn't there is none, but hopefully, it just keeps going.

So that's been like phenomenal in the last month to watch and we're really seeing growth like we haven't seen on the platform in quite some time in that category Rumble shorts. Obviously, it's new, so there's a lot of room to grow and our audience was obviously requesting it. But just to kind of see that sequential growth over the weeks and day after day, I think like every day this week, we did 1 million unique video views. They're starting off Sunday, I think it was. So it's been wild to watch. And it's something we're like -- we're all just wondering like how far can we push it? Like -- and our algorithm is not even great like it's in the infancy of the way we want it to be. We're making tweaks as fast as possible every week. We're throwing out some new updates in the algorithm. I think a new 1 came yesterday and we're measuring that to see how it goes and seeing if that pushes things to new heights. But it's definitely been an unbelievable thing to watch.

We're really excited about that. And then meanwhile, while all this is happening, and Rumble shorts is exploding, I get a message from Rick saying, Chris, we just broke concurrent streamers as well. And I'm like, okay, hold on a second. So we got concurrent streamers at a new high peak in the last 10 days on the platform as well. That's more than we had on the 2024 election night. There's more people streaming at the exact same time as a peak than we've seen at the 2024 election, which is phenomenal, and it's amazing to see. So we're seeing growth on like the streaming side. We're seeing growth on the the Rumble shorts side. And then obviously, we saw sequential growth on the MAUs from Q3 to Q4. And I think it's like important to put everything into a perspective.

2025 was not the typical Super Bowl year that Rumble has had in the past in the sense that 2024 was the presidential election year, a lot of things happened. There was no presidential election. We lost our biggest streamer early in the year, Dan Bongino, to the FBI and just put sequential quarter growth on MAUs from Q3 to Q4 in an environment which is not exactly a tailwind to Rumble's audience was quite the achievement, I think, from our end.

So -- and then as you get into Q1 and you get into this quarter and you're watching Rumble shorts literally explode, you're watching concurrent streamers start moving again and then you have our biggest streamer come back onto the platform, it's like now you you've got all these tailwinds happening. So a little bit of headwinds in '25 overall just based on the environment and then all that kind of turning into a tailwind here in '26. So I'm excited for this year. We've got midterms coming up as well. So that's something that I think will be advantageous to us. And the platform, in my opinion, has never been more ready. We got shorts. We have an awesome level studio product, which is driving a lot of the concurrent streamer growth. We have a platform that is far more stable than it's ever been. It's -- the features are better. It's a completely different experience than what it was 3, 4 years ago. So I'm excited to capture this audience and go through this next stage of growth and really see where Rumble shorts can go, really see where Rumble Studio can go and see how far we can take this.

I think this is like on the video side, one of the biggest opportunities that we've seen in a while on the video side, all around and around the whole platform. And a lot of credit goes to the teams and the engineering teams working day and night, getting it to where it is.

I can definitely appreciate, I guess, the verbiage you used a running into some headwinds. But in 2025, you and the team seem to actually just use it as a great foundational year because obviously, as we've been here just to pick out 1 example with shorts how many quarters have we been doing these calls when people are asking abouts, shorts, shorts, you guys finally delivered on it. So I understand in terms of maybe surface level metrics, you feel like you ran into headwinds but you kind of use the opportunity anyway. And from there, you're kind of now transformative, Okay, you rolled out with short you improved Rumble Studio. And beyond that, larger business dealings, I'm seeing a stronger relationship with Tether. I'm seeing potential big movement with Northern data. So even outside of the world of content, like I said, I get that you're calling it headwinds but you easily curtailed it into really tailwinds here.

Yes. Well, that's what we did. We used the entire year to build the foundation of everything that we wanted to do. we really worked on the product to make it as good as possible. We launched multiple new products, the wallet, shorts, the studio and its new Canvas, like there's so many things that we've done. It was truly a foundational year. And on top of that, we're bolting on Northern Data as an acquisition in the middle of it. Like last year, 2025 was a year we kind of really set the table for the future. And I think now in Q1, you're kind of starting to see what that future looks like. And I try to outline that in the earnings call because like look at the hand we have right now, like we have a hand and look at it. Look what we've built, look what we have, look what's coming in the future, look at all the pieces we put together. And we might have not seen that in 2025 reap those benefits because it wasn't there, but we now have that in Q1.

We rolled a lot of stuff out here in Q1 and now we're starting to see the fruits of that. You're starting to see shorts like on fire, doing 1 million unique video views in a single day and have done that every day since the weekend. So like plus. So it's been a journey in 2025, but it was a heads down year of build, build, build., We kind of did that in '23. We built as much as we possibly could to be as good as possible for the election in '24 that was like a lot of cloud work, a lot of like infrastructure work. We really didn't want to go down on the election of 2024. So all hands on deck to make sure we can even handle a huge night. We handled a huge night. We are like 17% of the streaming market according to stream charts, and we didn't go down. We didn't have a hiccup. on election night.

So that's what we were building for. That was like the foundation that we're building for on the infrastructure side back in '23 and '24 and then really kind of gearing up for that major election. And then once the election passed, we're going into a year where politics has become not the forefront of thinking anymore. You're not going to vote. It's been a -- it's a nonelection cycle year. It's been -- so we use that year to just build and we've built a lot. We brought in Tether. We announced the acquisition of Northern Data and we built our product to what you see today. So it was heads down working day and night, getting everything up to where we want to be, including operationally hiring a lot more people in the last year, starting to build out a sales team to do a go-to-market strategy and sales for the first time with agencies.

So it's really been a foundational year. That's the best way to explain it.

I love it. I don't want to get too much off that pathway. I have a couple of follow-up questions. But 1 thing that just popped in my mind, this growth that you're seeing in Rumble shorts, obviously astounding, is your pitch for why everyone listening to this should be using Rumble shorts, the same as Rumble itself in terms of the videos and the live streams of, hey, we care about your free speech and we're going to protect it also in this new form of video? Or is there something else like even better that you're like, no, this is really why you got to consider rumble shorts right now? Like where do you think this growth is coming from?

So it's a combination of everything. Obviously, we're like the free speech version of TikTok when it comes to Remalshorts, and that's like a competitive advantage. But even when I'm using rumbleshorts, and I've had a few people tell me this, it's like it's very informational versus when you're scrolling tick talk, there's just like a lot of degen stuff. And then when you go to a rumble, there's a lot more informational content and you're learning things as you're flipping through. So there's a little bit of a difference -- and that may be just a function of the content that we currently have. But I would say there's more than just the free speech aspect of using rumble shorts. You also have the opportunity to grow in a new a new type of platform within Rumble and really grow your live streaming channel or your VOD channel in a way that you couldn't have before.

So this is like a discovery tool. Twitch doesn't have it. So we have it. So you can use this as a discovery tool for your main channels. And eventually, there's going to be a monetization around it, the same way you have with rumble.com. So we'll introduce ads. Now I don't want to throw in ads. In fact, we've actually scaled back the ads a little bit in Q1 on rumble.com. We're down -- instead of doing 2 pre-rolls when you start the stream, we've gone down to 1. We're testing that to see if that creates a better user experience for the right balance. So we're testing a few things on the user experience to try to really optimize it the best possible way we can. And Rumble shorts won't introduce ads probably to Q3, Q4. It really depends on the growth patterns that we're seeing and whether or not we think we can do it. And if we do it, we'll start with a very low ad load. We don't want to do anything to hinder the growth that we're seeing, and we just want to continue to accelerate that. We want to blast through all the ceilings here and take this to new highs.

Absolutely. Love it. So between -- and I don't know even know if I have enough fingers to count this up, you have Rumble shorts, you're about to be dramatically ramping up sales. You're getting into the world of AI infrastructure. We're now seeing the return of one of the largest streamers you're deepening your ties to crypto and tether with Rumble Wallet.

[indiscernible] is coming -- as gold -- he's coming -- so another massive, massive streamer -- and I anticipate it's not just going to be asthma, we're going to start to see more and more coming. That's why streaming hit a record in the last week is that you're having more people come to the platform to stream on Rumble and that's what's driving that record in the last week. We're seeing like a a very high amount of streamers on Rumble concurrently at an average that we haven't really seen before. Like in fact, it's been -- we hit a peak record in the last 10 days. And that's because guys like Ashman are deciding, well, not -- it's actually probably people not as big as asthma them has decided to come to the platform and then that word of mouth goes and then now you have -- you caught the attention of someone really large on Twitch that's now looking at it. And I imagine this just continues to go out.

The product is just so much better right now. And I have to say the community and the users on the platform are amazing. Like I really do think that we have built a really amazing user base on Rumble, one that many platforms don't have. In fact, I don't think any platform has the type of user base that we do. They are high performance for our advertisers. Our advertisers right now are primarily direct response advertisers, so they rely on conversions. So they're not going to be average spending money with us unless they make their money back. So our audience spend money with our advertisers. And it's a real audience that is quite amazing and the whole community, the whole streaming community has really kind of picked up rumble in a way that we haven't seen in the past. So I anticipate that we're going to see streamers like asthma Gold continue to come on to the platform. And that concurrent stream or peak is going to hopefully hit new highs as we move into the following months.

Sitting on this side of it, it's definitely interesting to see how that snowball is rolling and getting bigger and bigger to once again, Bongino, is already returning, but now it's getting into the world of asthma gold. And I don't know if this is just Internet low, if this is just a rumor. But correct me if I'm wrong, sounds like we almost owe a special thanks to Asa's aunt. I believe she was the 1 who convinced him to check it out.

Apparently, his is a heavy user of rumble, -- so that's pretty cool to see. In fact, like we might not have a lot of users that overlap with the Twitch world, the younger streamer world. Our user base is probably quite different than that. So seeing someone like Ashman come to rumble could have a pretty big impact on our users. It's a whole different cohort of users. And we welcome that, and we can't wait to see and start streaming on rumble. That will be an exciting day when he does that. And I'm also quite interested and how he's going to stream, hopefully, uses Rumble Studio and hopefully, it attracts other streamers like him to start multi-streaming to Rumble.

So with that in mind, on the live streaming front, what's going on with the studio, what's going on in crypto, what's going on in AI infrastructure, all of that, I feel like we're talking about so many different moving parts at once. Is there a particular thing that you think the world, the platform supporters are just kind of like not quite getting the story on that you're like, "No, I think people are maybe missing the note on a certain thing?

Yes. You kind of -- we talk about that internally all the time, but we try not to be distracted by that. Obviously, we want to deliver the most shareholder value we can, and we're all heads down doing that, and we try to stay away from the noise. But when we -- when I look at this -- what this team has built and the assets that we're putting together and what this company is going to look like in 1 year and 2 years and 3 years from now, I do think that the market doesn't -- might not see exactly what we see. But I'm the kind of person that just wants to walk the walk and not do the talk. And if the market doesn't believe that, like I'll do my best to show them that they're wrong.

So maybe that creates an opportunity for everybody right now. But my job is to kick a** as much as I possibly can in the next year or 2 and really put this in a place that is quite different than it is today. I think we have all the tools in the bag. We have an amazing hand we've executed quite flawlessly with delivering on the product, getting this acquisition moving on this acquisition, which hopefully -- which is slated to close here in Q2, which is quite soon and then take that asset and take -- put that together with Rumble Cloud and really show a different company in 2027, a different revenue profile, a different EBITDA profile, something that's going to hopefully shock the markets.

Yes. I mean, you don't have to comment on this, but I'm just running some back of the napkin math and looking at when Northern Data is already doing in the earnings call, you already cited the point that they're scaling up their capacity. We're looking at their numbers. Basic math is telling me some serious jobs, and I'm obviously very excited to see how that plays out. But I appreciate you for expanding upon like what you see going on. I think it's always very cool when the CEO takes that time to kind of add a little bit more context. And on that note, I know you love engaging directly with the audience. So do you want to do a couple of questions directly from people tuning in right now?

Yes, of course. Let's do it.

Love it. So folks, if you have a question, once again, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Rumble, the company that clearly you're watching this, so you love it, you're getting a very rare opportunity to speak directly with them. what's on your mind, questions, comments, concerns, lets lite fire, and we're going to do as many as we can in the time that we're allotted. So folks let it rip.

So I see 1 here or them with names like asthma gold announcing plans to multistream, how are you thinking about attracting creators who fit your core audience mediator, i.e., mediator to also post and stream on rum beyond word of mouth.

So that's a great question because like the way the tether advertisement commitment works is really dovetails into this question. So the idea here is that we're -- we have a whole team at Rumble already that is proactively looking to bring in a ton of creators and the plan is this. We're trying to bring them into Rumble Studio. And when they go into a rumble studio, they will then multistream to all their platforms, including Rumble. But at the same time, they're in Rumble Studio, we're providing them with sponsorship ads of the rumble wallet. And that's the part of the commitment of the advertising with Tether that it's going to go to is that we'll be pushing these creators that come in using Rumble studio that are new are going to have a dedicated dollar amount behind them that they can use and Rumble studio to monetize their streams.

So as a creator, think about this, you're asthma gold. You use Rumble Studio you come in, use rumble studio, you get a rumble wallet read to tell your audience to, "Hey, come and titme, Bitcoin, Tether, USD or Tether Gold and not only is he going to get paid to tell his audience to tip them in tether USD and Bitcoin, but we're also going to be getting a streamer -- a new streamer on our platform that's using Rumble Studio and maybe selecting other sponsorship reads within Rumble Studio and bring in MAUs and chatters over to rumble.

So that's kind of like the win-win-win across the board. Tether wins with their advertising, [indiscernible] gold wins with making more money and then Rumble wins by getting in the MAUs and they start using our products, et cetera. So the idea here is, yes, we're going to go after as many streamers as possible and not just streamers, but VOD creators as well and try to get them into Rumble studio and get them onto the Rumble platform to then do and then provide the advertising reads through Rumble Studio where they can make money. So this is far different than the days that we did back in the day in 2023, where we had to go and do contracts with the creator and try to link up the advertising money to try to make that a positive ROI with that.

In this case, we're just saying, hey, we have an ad budget of X amount in Rumble Studio waiting for you. Do you want is a multistream on Rumble? They either say yes or no, and then they're off to the races. So anybody that comes to Rumble like asthma will have this opportunity if they use Rumble Studio, and we'll try to get as many other creators to do the same thing. It's there for everybody. We want to bring it in for everybody. If you go and use Rumble Studio right now, there is an option for you to do to tell your audience to use rumble wallet, and you'll get paid for it. So we have an entire team right now, trying to get that word out and trying to get streamers from Twitch and YouTube to come over to Rumble and start using Rumble Studio to make money.

It's not necessarily a contract, but it will -- it is a contract theoretically terms of service on the website, but like the idea is that we're trying to bring as many people and as many new creators onto the platform using the Rumble studio as the most trap. And it's started. We're starting to see it, and it's something that we want to grow immensely here in the next couple of quarters, and this ad budget will start kicking in, in a material way here in Q3 and Q4. I mean Q2 and Q3 is when it will start kicking in.

I know this is anecdotal, but as a content creator today, I got a little look at the behind the scenes of what the new set is going to be. And I have to say for all the creators watching, it is economically easy to set up the multistream and then when you overlay those ads, I have to say, it's a couple of clicks of the bun. I've been doing this game for years and hats off to the tech team behind it. I know for me, I'm very excited to kind of get rock with it because it's just that simple. So I have to say for the creators, definitely worthwhile to check out.

Yes. We got another one, Carlson question. Any plans to advertise to users. Most people don't know rumble exists?

Absolutely. This is where we're leaning in with rumble shorts. We have a lot of new content coming in with Rumble shorts that is not political. And we're using that content to advertise to different cohorts across different platforms. We literally just started doing that today, and we're going to really scale this up in March and really invest and market the Rumble Shorts platform. We think Rumble Shortz is not only going to be like a growth driver for Rumble internally in our core audience but we also are going to use it as a most trap to really grow Rumble outside of our current core audience. So I think it's a win-win that way. It's a lot easier to get people to create channels and rumble for shorts than it is to get them to start streaming on Rumble.

So it's a much better mousetrap for us to kind of grow the platform outside of the core audience that we have.

Is the pitch along the lines of, hey, if you're already making shorts on TikTok and YouTube and Instagram Reels, my as well just loaded up here as well because if you grow, you grow.

And all the clippers out there, right, like throw it up, throw up everything, like let's get everything up there, and let's see what does well. And we're seeing Fanta the results here are fantastic. So it's an easy way to grow and rumble like right now.

That's scale to 1 million is just so fast -- and with.

669,000 1 week prior to the day we hit -- we broke the $1 million -- so like 66% growth in -- it's a little higher than that. It was like 1 point to. When we broke $1 million, we broke it big, like it was close to about 1.2 I mean at that double -- what's going to be really crazy is when we're talking about this in the future, 1 million is going to sound comically small like at that pace I sure hope so. We're going for the -- everything here. So I like it. No ceiling. What else do we have here?

Do you anticipate issues with regulatory agencies in either Germany and regards to Northern data acquisition or having a presence in EU with censorship lots.

I don't see any issues with the Northern Data stuff. Now on the censorship stuff with Rumble, I definitely do see issues with that. There's a lot of countries around the world that are just like not for free speech. They want to control everything you say and everything you can hear and see and then that's just the nature of governments that want to stay in power. They're always going to do that to try to keep control. So -- and I think Europe is in a place that's gone quite downhill on this, and I don't foresee any time soon that's changing.

So -- and when it comes to censorship in Europe on the video side, yes, obviously, that's something that's concerning and we'll navigate appropriately where we can. With respect to Northern Data, that's a total different business. That's the cloud. I don't see any kind of type of issues there at all.

Good to know. SP1 Here's an interesting one. For creators on Rumble, any comments on discoverability. It sounds like shorts is probably 1 of the most interesting tools for higher discoverability. Would you agree with that?

I would agree with that. And Mrs. Ma'am just posted something on the lines of that. I'm getting better numbers on Rumble shorts than any other short platform I opposed to, really excited for the future of shorts. And we're seeing that with a lot of different creators is that I guess the pool is a little smaller right now. So you're kind of seeing like a lot of traction with all the creators that are kind of using Rumble and already have a following on Rumble. They are able to propel their shorts much better than they are in other platforms, which is amazing to see because like that's what it's there for.

I mean is the time to strike? If you look at the biggest creators on any platform right now, 1 of the most common correlations is an early adopter. Right now, folks, this is it like it is really hard to beat the blue ocean strategy, and that's where we're at right now.

That's a first market mover opportunity for anybody that wants to get into rumble shorts if you're in there early if this thing turns out to be a huge success, you're probably going to have a high likelihood of being part of that success. So we'll do everything to continue growing that and pushing the pedal on that. Obviously, like there are some people that aren't getting as many views as they think they're going to get. And maybe that's a function of the content. Sometimes, I think like a lot of people might not realize their content is not as great. But also, it's a function of like our algorithm is not perfect either.

So give it some time before giving up on it. I do think that as the algorithm improves, it will really start picking the winners a lot better. And really -- ultimately, it will be the viewers that will decide which content is going to really take off and whatnot as our algorithm gets better.

I like it. you were speaking a little bit on the earnings call about international audiences, and this is kind of similar to that. Any ideas for auto audio translation to other languages?

So we have something -- we're really kind of getting into this whole AI space, not just because of Northern data, but also with the Tyler guys and how we're going to apply that to content on Rumble in terms of making it more informational and giving people moments in videos and translating and kind of condensing all that. All that is coming together in terms of how we're going to like we're all planning for that now. That's all in planning stages. The development on some of it has started and some development on others have not. But that is all part of the planning right now. Now that we have like all our core -- the last year has been like, we've got to build these products. We've got to build Rumble shorts. We got to build Rumble wallet. So it's like really hard to like refine other things the way we wanted to. But now that all these products are out -- and we don't have like a big major initiative like a wallet or shorts at this moment. It's all about taking everything we have and making it like super awesome. And that's what we're going to continue to do. The product teams are humming right now, and I'm really excited about that.

Definitely seems. So that's awesome. Quick 1 -- can you yes, explain what Rumble shorts are.

I'll let you do that.

Basically short-form vertical content similar to YouTube shorts, TikTok, Instagram reels generally, they're sub-60 seconds. It's just kind of a quick little dopamine hit forms of content that I can say from sitting on this side of the table, it's been requested out of this team for a while now. And obviously, we're finally getting it delivered and the numbers themselves are pretty astounding. So check it out, it's already on Rumble. You could see it for yourself. It's there, but just a different style of content, the short is form, hence the name shorts.

Cliff glitch, the algorithm is dynamically improving. Is there an AI being utilized there? Not yet. It is -- right now, we're still manually improving it. And it will -- the goal is to get it to a dynamically improving algorithm and potentially, we'll explore AI as well on that. And obviously, with the resources that we're going to have, that could be pretty easy for us in the future. But it's not there yet. Like I said, we're in the infancy of the algorithm. There's a lot of work to do on that algorithm. It will continue to get better every week.

Any plans for Rumble to get into shorts or not short sports -- you guys are already in sports.

We are already in sports. If there's an opportunity in sports to do more in sports, we're obviously interested in that. We started doing boxing matches and real premium. We got street straight boarding, which is also on rumble premium. So sports is a very competitive space. It's a very expensive space. We've spent a lot of money doing sports. A lot of our cash has gone towards that. As an investment, it's not like typically the best investment that we've seen but it's definitely something that it's a little better when you get into the more -- the smaller sports like street lake skateboarding. That's when it starts to perform a little bit better.

So like, if you take a look at like YouTube spending $14 billion on the NFL rights and stuff like that, it's I don't know how directly impactful that is to their business. But clearly, it's a game to capture as much of live sports as possible right now for the Netflixes and the Amazons and the the YouTubes. It's something -- it requires very deep pockets to compete in and it's something we're looking at, but like at a little bit of a smaller scale than there.

Interesting SP1 It's always kind of cool to see what's going on behind the current because we see it like just as the consumers of what's happening day in and day in out. So to get a little bit more insight, very interesting.

What else do we got here? More sports in the lineup. I feel like a bunch of questions on right by and we miss them. But thoughts on the content such as Angel studio movies or shows? From Sunshine 13. So yes, in fact, we recently reached out to the Angel Studios guys. That's something that I think would be awesome to have on the platform. Maybe in the future, there's something there, but we're very interested in wanting to work with Angel Studios if the opportunity arises. So but that would be pretty cool getting their portfolio on Rumble premium, something that would definitely be interesting to me. People like rumble sure -- can Rumble Wallet be expanded at general use, I'd like to buy crypto, if I could through Rumbler Embers.

So the answer is it already is. You can buy Bitcoin from rumble wallet right now, and you can use it as just a wallet to purchase Bitcoin. You can use it as a wallet to purchase tether gold. So if you want to invest in gold, -- in fact, that's kind of 1 of the ways I'm now buying gold as a buying tether gold. Now we should do is we should do an IRR live stream going to the Vault in Switzerland and redeeming our Tether gold for a gold bar. will be there on the next great stream let's like test it. Let's go there. Let's get our gold bar, gold coin or whatever we have in our Tether gold and our rumble Wallet and redeem it for actual physical gold. I think it's like the only -- the only type of vehicle where you can redeem your coin for gold. So I think that's like super cool.

Yes, they got -- I saw Bloomberg reported that they have some like nuclear bunker in Switzerland where they're storing all gold. But I definitely know that you can go redeem it there for actual gold bars.

I'm almost picturing like Fort Knox on steroids. -- what's going on there?

Yes. Well, they were just reported to be like the single largest private holder of gold in the world. Like that's what Bloomberg, I think, wrote. And that's like that's so cool. That's a lot of gold.

Tether, -- they're operating at another level.

Ask Nicki Minaj to move her music catalog to Rumble I'll try to do that. I will -- I definitely know some people that can ask for that, but there's going to be -- I don't think she controls her catalog. It will probably be 1 of the music houses. This is actually something that we've talked about in the past. We really want to get these music catalogs on Rumble and work with 1 of the agencies. Well, all the -- I guess, the agencies that represent all these catalogs and have the rights to it. So that's something that we definitely want to do. And we definitely want to explore and bring music to rumble and be able to listen to that on your rumble app while you're in your car or whatnot or with screen off. So I think that's a great suggestion. It's something that we are pursuing, and we have been pursuing. Those are a little bit complicated in the contract side to get done, but it's something that we do want to definitely get done for sure.

Is the greater house coming back anytime soon. It was fun watching folks?

Kratos is back. I think Tim Poole used it for a good month or so, maybe more than 1 month, 1.5 months. So he just left, but it's back. It's fully functioning, and it's there.

What are you thinking about ex money competition? I don't know much about X money. I imagine it's going to be very different than Rumble wallet. The Rumble Wallet is entirely crypto, bitcoin U.S. Telerad to their gold. So I don't see that as competition. I think a lot of people always thought X was going to compete with Rumble on video. I don't see that either. I never -- they might have said that we're going to do it, but it hasn't really had any effect on us. In fact, we're still 52 million MAUs. So we're doing okay. We don't see competition from x. In fact, I think X has been complementary to helping we'll get more users now that a lot of creators can talk about their content on Rumble. So it has not -- that's not -- that's been actually like positive.

This is fun. When we need more reality TV on romo, so I guess it must really like that creator house there, people -- they need the reality TV.

Interesting. We should do a 24-hour 7-day stream forever with a bunch of creators in the house and see what happens. It's not a bad idea. Maybe we should do it. Well, tip processing speed up in the future. Right now, it takes several minutes to process. If you tip in Bitcoin, it could take like 20 minutes to process. If you tip in Tether Gold or Tether USD, it will be quite instant and if you tip in fiat, then it's instant.

The reason why Bitcoin takes longer is that the Bitcoin network has all these gas fees. And as it gets busy, it takes longer, it could take 10 to 20 minutes to set a lot.

Yes. So to clarify, that's a function of the technology. That's not really new. That's just literally how big coin operates.

Stake in Shake should advertise on Rumble, Yes, from Carlson absolutely. -- stake and Shake should definitely advertise on rumble. -- and Rumble Rick just span the chat by gifting everybody at membership and all the questions now are scrolled go Rumble, Rick. So now I missed all the questions.

That's a good note right there. I know we're running a little bit over your very.

We'll go for a couple of minutes is more -- this is great. on any thought on Rumble streams having a channel points feature and a pop-up notification for subs of multiple months. That's a question for Rick and soft. The -- so Rick, I'll let you answer that in the chat where we are on that. Rumble wallet web version. We've made it app-based. The web version is -- that's a good question. I'll have to check into that. And I'll get back to you on that, but I don't know where that is in the build-out phase right now.

He also says offline downloads and the apps are dropping soon. That's pretty exciting.

Yes. So you'll be able to download. I think that's like any day now or next week. So that's very soon. You'll be able to download and listen on the plane or whatnot. Chris, hiring me to market for you guys. I already -- this is coming from plastic quick. I already promiyou everywhere I go now. I'd quit my company of 27 years, promo in Southern California.

Well, Southern California, an interesting place, but definitely apply. We -- actually I think like many of our employees were just diehard rumble fans and applied straight from the website -- on our corporate website I think countless different people. I think Rick actually was -- watched Charlie Kirk and talked about Rumble and then he just applied. And that's how Rick got to Rumble. So that's the best way to apply is straight from our corporate website and then let them know that you're an avid Rumble user for sure, that's always helpful.

I see 1 asking about Open Claw? Are you guys planning on doing some open cloud?

Yes, yes. So we're -- hopefully, sooner than I thought, -- we basically started working on this a couple of days ago and put this at the top of the priority to kind of integrate Open Cloud with Rumble Cloud. So that our CTO, Voitek, is taking that as like top priority now for themselves to integrate into Rumble Cloud. So hopefully, we'll have an update on that this month, at the end of this month, and we'll let you know where it is, but the plan is to have this out fast.

Are you looking to use more of the amazing devs that are doing third-party rumble and other alternate socials? I don't know -- from Yankee free. I don't know if what you mean by using them like we love third-party devs and we love what they're doing, building around the platform, and we want to support that as much as we can. There's a lot of talk with Rick and everybody else with respect to that. And it's something we definitely want to push forward. I think Rick is working on an API for all of that to really take it to the next level. So this is something we're -- this is actually -- we've talked a lot about this and something that Rick and a soft are very passionate about.

And I agree, like I think that the developers what the -- some of the developer stuff that they've been making on their own is so incredible. It's like is as well. Yes, Rick is saying that more API capability is coming. So it sounds like the devs are going to have even a she's done and roll wallets are done, we can really kind of focus on a little bit of the a lot of these type of things, which the community is looking for because the big projects are big projects. They really consume a lot of time and a lot of dev power. Any plans for locals to be fully included with Rumble premium? It kind of already is, isn't it? Where is it and paid.

Yes, it's kind of -- we're kind of integrating it. There should be further integrations with that. That's something that Asaf is looking at, and there'll be more updates on that. Five years and down 50% stock price for investors that have been here and believe and like Rumble. What are you doing to crush shorts? Well, the best thing we can do is build this company in the best way possible. Obviously, we set the foundation in 2025. And we're really trying to set up for a magnificent '26 and '27, adding in Northern Data. I think the revenue profile of this company completely changes when that closes. I think as the Tether advertising commitment starts to kick in, in the second and third quarter in a material way, that has a big impact.

But obviously, I don't love the shorts at all. I'm a huge stockholder. I watch as diligently as everyone else. That's a shareholder. And I want to make them have pain. And the way to do that is to build this the best way possible and really prove it through the financials over time and prove it with making an amazing company. That's the best answer I got for you there. I would love to see nothing -- I would love to see that shorts get crushed.

All the comments by more -- there is all the.

All right. What else do we got, let's finish this off here. Can you talk about the retention and stickiness you're seeing among Rumble premium subscribers? So the Rumble premium subscribers are the best cohort of stickiness and retention that we have on Rumble. They're obviously the most loyal user of the platform. And we -- that's been something that's been growing quite nicely over the last year and more particularly more recently as well. And it's been -- it's definitely the user base. It's kind of like this counterbalance because like I got my ads team that wants impressions. And a lot of people are converting into premium and taking away impressions from my ads team.

So I got to juggle it a little bit. If we put too many ads, we get -- it will drop a lot into premium. If we put less ads, they get a little bit of -- maybe not so much premium. So -- it's like perfect. We got to find the perfect balance there with ad load and premium. But Obviously, we're trying to optimize it to make the most revenue per user as possible on the platform. And Rumble premium has been a pleasant surprise over the last year. I think we launched it like late 2024 and really kind of pushed it out around elections post election time. And it's been a very, very stable, steady, growing product for us. And we continue -- we hope to see that continue the way it's going. It's been great. And as we bring in more people from the top of the funnel, like more users, hopefully, that will only accelerate the premium as well and accelerate the ad load as well, too, like we obviously want -- that we want the ad business to do very, very well.

I know YouTube subscriptions have a small fractional rate of paid to given watch time similar to ad rates as Rumble rev share with channels a portion of real premium subs?

So a lot of what we're doing with the ruble premium is we're sharing that into the rumble creator program. So the run will create -- a lot of that money is going into the loyal users that are using the CRADA program. And that's kind of how we're channeling that revenue into the greater economy is through that creator program. We're actually looking at that very -- whether or not that's the right move or we should do a combination hybrid. So it's something that we definitely are looking at and thinking about extensively.

We're slowing down a little bit.

Yes, I think we answered pretty much everybody out there.

Awesome. Well, folks, SP1 For those of you who turned in and got some of the insights from Mr. Pavlos himself, obviously, thank you. And to you, Chris. Obviously, it's always a pleasure to sit down and see what's going on. I congrats to you and the company on the momentum and hopefully a couple of quarters from now, we're talking about even bigger and better numbers. Always a joy. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. And looking forward, like I'm really looking forward to sitting here 2 to 3 quarters away from now and the next quarter and the next quarter. But most what this company will look like at the end of this year. I think by the time we're in Q4, talking about Q3, it could be a very different company over here. So I'm very excited about the Northern Data stuff, and I can't wait to show the world what it's going to look like.

I myself truly excited to see where this is going to be going. Once again, to you, folks, thank you for tuning in, and we'll catch you next time. Thank you.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Rumble Inc.'s Q4 2025 Earnings Call Conference Call. [Operator Instructions]. This call is being recorded on March 5, 2026. I would now like to turn the conference over to Shannon Devine, Investor Relations for Rumble. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Chris Paaske, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Rumble; and Brandon Alexandra, CFO. A press release detailing our fourth quarter and full year 2025 results was released today and available on our Investor Relations website. Before we begin the formal presentation, I would like to remind everyone that statements made on this call may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking.

All forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this call and should be considered in conjunction with the company's cautionary statements in our earnings release and the factors included in our filings with the SEC. Future company updates will be available via press release and the company's identified social media channel.

I will now turn the call over to Rumble's Founder, Chairman and CEO, Chris Pawlowski.

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us. 2025 was a year where my team went heads down building and expanding the Rumble product building out our sales operation and putting together assets that would transform Rumble into an impactful player in cloud. I'm happy to say we've successfully executed on these initiatives. As we enter 2026, we have reached a critical inflection point, and Rumble is now primed for a new era of aggressive growth. I'm going to start with 3 rumble video product initiatives that have been completed and a growth update.

First, we address user feedback to make the platform more resilient. Our design, interface, stability and features are now far more competitive with YouTube and even exceeding in specific areas. Second, launching Rumble Wallet with Tether to become the first major platform to allow tipping in Bitcoin, USD tether and Tether Gold was another key initiative that we brought to the public in the first week of 2026.

By leveraging Tele's stablecoin technology, we now have a solution for creators to bypass the friction and predatory fees of traditional payment rails. Third, Rumble Shortz. After carefully listening to our community, we introduced Rumble Shortz to deliver better user discovery of content.

Rumble shorts rumble shorts are short vertical videos that play in a continuous swipeable feed, which introduces a fast, engaging way to watch and interact. Users can easily consume shorts from their favorite content creators, discover new ones and send tips to rumble wallet, which fuels platform growth and enables monetization.

After being in a nonelection year and moving into a midterm election year, early signs are showing that growth is back. In Q4, MAUs are up quarter-over-quarter, driven primarily by international growth. And more recently, less than 10 days ago, Rumble hit a new all-time high of concurrent streamers on the platform. Dan Bon Geno is back as of February, and AsmanGold, a top twitch streamer expressed that he is going to be joining Rumble. But it doesn't end there.

After only a month since the launch of Rumble shorts on the web and only a little more than a week or 2 on Android and iOS, the results are staggering. Rumble short has been delivering records. And to quantify that, as of this past weekend, it broke the 1 million unique video views milestone in a single day, up from 669,000 in only 1 week prior. It's still very early, but our teams are blown away with the success we've seen so far.

We plan to market Rumble shorts heavily given the stickiness and early response from our core audience. Now on to sales. Regarding our sales organization. As we have mentioned many times, prior to the 2024 election, brand sales faced significant headwinds. Since the 24 election, some of those headwinds have shifted into distinct tailwinds as we captured several brands, including Netflix Morgan & Morgan, perplexity, Crypto.com, and most recently, we've added Paramount, Amazon Prime and Fox Nation.

To capture this opportunity, we appointed Greg Sheryl as President of Sales, who has had senior leadership positions at Magnite AT&T and Comcast. Greg has already made strides in repositioning Rumble within the advertising ecosystem, improving our product as we seek to build meaningful integrations across demand-side platforms and supply side platforms and building a professionalized sales operation capable of converting our massive reach into high-value brand partnerships.

While we work through the product development cycles, partnership and sales pipeline, we expect to see the returns in the back half of '26 and primarily into 2027. In the meantime, our content teams have been working diligently to capitalize on our recently announced $50 million per year advertising deal with Peter over the next 2 years. The strategy is simple. Use the $100 million commitment as the advertising anchor to bring in incremental major influencers and podcasters to the platform. It's an incredible opportunity for the company, and we have been laying the foundation in recent months to capture this revenue opportunity.

We expect this to materially ramp in the second and third quarter. The excitement for Rumble as a video platform and the sales infrastructure being put into place is at the highest we've seen it. Growth is back and the platform has never been more ready to capture the moment as we move into the midterm election year.

Now let's talk about cloud, which is equally as exciting but even more transformative. We continue to expect that our acquisition of Northern Data will close in the second quarter of this year and we are as excited as ever about this transaction.

Specifically, earlier today, Northern Data announced they are on pace for roughly 85% GPU utilization by the end of February 2026, which is an incredible accomplishment. This utilization represents the incredibly strong demand in the market.

Since finalizing the definitive agreement on November 10, 2025, we have met with several GPU as a service customers and presented the industrial logic for the acquisition.

The reception has been quite positive, not only from a variety of such customers, but also key strategic suppliers in the GPU ecosystem. These market participants see significant value in Rumble's Northern Data acquisition and have expressed keen interest in rumble delivering black well generation GPUs.

Furthermore, many of these customers and suppliers have expressed the desire to begin working together as soon as possible. The pace and size of this growing pipeline, including strong black well demand has been extremely encouraging. The pipeline in Northern Data's improved utilization demonstrates the level of growing GPU as a service demand and Rumble couldn't be better positioned to serve it.

As I said when we announced we're going public, Rumble's ambition was to compete with YouTube, Google Ads and all the hyperscalers. With the addition of Rumble Shortz, you can now add tick Talk to the list. Every day, our team continues to build is 1 day closer to realizing that vision.

As we move through 2026 I think it's important to contextualize the hand we have. Midterm elections are around the corner, and our video platform is in the best state it's ever been to capture the potential audience growth. Second, our sales team is energized by a favorable ad market.

Third, we expect Tether's advertising commitment to materially start to ramp in the second and third quarter. Fourth, we expect our acquisition of Northern Data to close in the second quarter of 2026, which we strongly believe will be transformative and redefine our revenue profile.

Fifth, as detailed in Northern Data's announcement earlier today, Northern Data is nearing 85% GPU utilization, evidencing extremely, extremely high GPU demand. Sixth, multiple customers and suppliers have expressed interest in working together on GPU as a service opportunities as soon as possible and seven, rumble shorts is on absolute fire.

I have to say it's never been more exciting to be at the helm of this company, and I cannot wait to see what this company looks like later in the year.

I will now take you through our fourth quarter and full year 2025 financials at a very high level before turning the call over to the operator for Q&A.

For the full year 2025, we reported revenues of $100.6 million an increase of 5% compared to $95.5 million in 2024, our first time achieving this $100 million milestone. For the fourth quarter, we reported revenues of $27.1 million, a sequential increase of 9% from $24.8 million in the third quarter of 2025 and and a year-over-year decrease of $3.2 million, of which $2.8 million was attributable to a decrease in audience monetization revenues and $0.4 million to lower other initiatives revenues.

The fourth quarter year-over-year decrease in audience monetization revenues was driven by a $5.5 million reduction in advertising, tipping and platform hosting fees, partially offset by a $2.7 million increase in subscription and licensing fees.

The decrease in other initiatives revenues was due to a $0.5 million reduction in advertising inventory monetized by our publisher network, partially offset by a $0.1 million increase in cloud services.

ARPU increased to $0.46 for the fourth quarter, up 2% sequentially from the third quarter of 2025, a continued positive indicator of our monetization progress. Average global MAUs reached $52 million for the quarter, an 11% sequential increase from Q3, driven primarily by our initial investment in international expansion. Cost of services in the fourth quarter decreased 26% year-over-year to $25.6 million primarily from an $8.8 million reduction in programming and content expenses.

For the full year, cost of services decreased by $31.1 million to $107.4 million, primarily from a $33.9 million reduction in programming and content expenses, offset by an increase in other cost of services of $2.8 million.

Adjusted EBITDA loss for the fourth quarter was $16 million compared to a loss of $13.4 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. For the full year of 2025, adjusted EBITDA loss improved to $74.3 million compared to a loss of $92.1 million in '24, an improvement of $17.8 million, primarily driven by the reduction in programming and content expenses and revenue growth.

You will see in our financial statements and net loss for the fourth quarter of $32.7 million, which compares to a net loss of $236.8 million in the fourth quarter of 2024. And I want to note that the prior year figure included $184.7 million in the change in fair value of derivative liability related to the Tether strategic investment.

We ended the quarter with total liquidity of $256.4 million, including $237.9 million in cash and cash equivalents and $18.5 million in Bitcoin Holdings.

Our Bitcoin holdings are carried at fair value and remeasured each quarter. For the full year, net cash used in operating activities was $70.4 million, an improvement from $87 million in 2024. As Chris described, we entered 2026 with momentum across video, advertising and cloud.

The tether advertising commitment, the build-out of our sales operation under Greg Cheryl and the pending Northern Data acquisition all represent meaningful catalysts for revenue growth.

We have the liquidity, the strategy and the team to capitalize on each of them. That concludes my prepared remarks. Before I turn the call over to the operator, I invite you all to join Chris this afternoon at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time in an exclusive post-earnings interview with Mac Kors to be streamed live on the MatCorsRumble channel. That concludes my prepared remarks. Operator, we're now ready to open the line for questions.

Thank you. [Operator Instructions]. One moment, please, for your first question. Our question comes from Thomas Forte, Maxim Group.

Great. So first off, Christiana, congrats on the broad-based momentum. I have 3 questions. I'll go 1 at a time. The first question I had is -- how is the addition of Greg Sherrill as your first President of Sales Roma advertising expected to change your go-to-market strategy?

Tom, this is Chris. Thanks for the question. So traditionally rumble prior to the 2024 election was not pursuing brand dollars for various different reasons. -- mostly because we are boycotted and weren't able to work with a lot of the agencies prior to the 2024 election.

That has completely changed post 2024 election. So the environment is much different -- and as I stated earlier, a lot of brands have started to work with us that I previously mentioned. And the idea with Greg now is to finally go on the offense to those agencies and start bringing the ad dollars, not by taking phone calls, but going and being proactive and going to the top and the largest agencies in the world and getting those ad dollars into the rumble advertising center.

Both for video, for our publishers for eventually our new Rumble shorts product, et cetera. So the strategy going forward is going to be very -- it's going to be very much on the offense, and it's going to be going and getting net new ad dollars from big brands.

Excellent. And then you sort of tease my second question there. So how might a new content type such as Rumble shorts serve as a catalyst for advertising revenue?

So in this stage right now in this quarter and in the next quarter, we're going to keep advertising off rumble shorts and really kind of just press as hard as we can on the growth and see how far we can push that. Obviously, we're seeing some pretty amazing internal results that I already went through. But coming later in the year in Q3 and Q4, my teams have already kind of developed what that is going to look like and how we're going to start inserting that we were looking at taking a very similar approach to Instagram and tick Talk in terms of integrating ads that will all come through rack and maybe we might use some other partners to help us with that.

But in the very short term, we're going to just kind of keep the ad load off until we get into the third quarter and kind of evaluate there. The last thing we want to do is kind of hinder this growth that we're seeing.

So we're going to we're going to push that as high as we can and see where that takes us before integrating the ads. But the ads is definitely a component that is very important. We're going to need to monetize for the creators and that is going to be something that we must do I see us doing that by the end of the year.

Excellent. And then last 1 for me. So can you briefly explain how your current relationship with content creator and former Deputy Director Dan Bongino, as similar to and different from your prior relationship before you left the platform to join the FDI?

Yes. So I can't get into the specifics of agreements, but I will say that prior to going to the he brought his content onto the platform, and that was his choice. Post FBI, we now have its content exclusively, the video podcast exclusively on the platform. That -- that's as much as I could say without getting into the details, but it is used. The video podcast is exclusive to Rumble as it stands right now, and it was not contractually exclusive prior to that.

Thank you. Our next question comes from Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer.

Definitely always keeping it interesting, not boring. I'll ask Sid and I'll jump back in the queue and then follow up. So first, I think you made a point that engagement kind of benefited from international. And so if you would strip that out, like the ARPU would have actually increased more on a quarter-to-quarter basis. I don't know if there's just some more color you can give us there.

Jason, this is Chris. So yes, we saw some -- we saw international growth. We've obviously been pushing the international in the last quarter by launching a bunch of new languages. Our monetization in the international markets is very negligible, very low in comparison to the U.S. market. So if you were to look at it on a U.S. basis, then yes, I would say that would be correct.

But at this point right now, we're kind of still testing the international markets and whether or not we peel that out and kind of look at ARPU in different countries, it remains to be seen, but we just kind of want to see what really sticks internationally and what works internationally. And then obviously, what markets are going to be easiest for us to monetize internationally and then kind of go from there before we we peel out those ARPUs with different countries.

Okay. And then on Northern Data, what still needs to happen for the close in second quarter, just take us through what's left in the process.

So at this point right now, we're on track to close in the second quarter. It's -- that's kind of been the schedule since the very start. So everything is running on schedule. -- and on track to close for the second quarter. Obviously, there's -- we still got to go through the tendering process, et cetera and that's all on schedule to close up by the end of the second quarter.

Okay. So like literally, like outside of some like, I don't know, procedural or document or something like is there any way at which any other data shareholders could block the transaction at this point by not tendering.

Not that No.

And then I guess, congrats on the positive gross profit in the quarter. It looks like the minimum guarantees were down like another $1 million sequentially I mean, Brandon, do you see the pattern like that pattern of like lower minimum guarantees continuing into '26? Or do you plan to reinvest the tether add commitments into like more content and kind of almost like start again with the minimum guarantees.

Yes. If you kind of take a step back to where we were a year ago, we talked about kind of reducing those minimum guarantees and moving materially towards breakeven. But with the tether investment and the opportunity we have there with the tether contracts, I think we said we're going to kind of hit the gas again and start investing again.

So I think you'll see some of those investments continue to grow over 2026. And -- but at the same time, we've learned a lot from a lot of those contracts. And we would like to and we plan on moving more towards having profitable agreements.

So you'll see a continued increase in cost, but we expect the revenue to be increasing at the same time.

Our next question comes from Rohit Kulkarni from Roth Capital Markets.

A couple of big picture ones. One on just the drivers behind kind of the advertising sales growth, maybe breakdown ARPU versus audience growth? What are the next 2 to 3 quarters given the org that you have and the new ad units and new ad surfaces. Maybe just break down, how are you thinking about the algorithm behind ad sales growth.

I would love to get your thoughts. And then I have a couple of follow-ups.

Thanks, Rohit, for the question. So when it comes to ad sales, we're anticipating that Greg and his team start to ramp up later in 2026. Obviously, the ad sales cycle is can range from like 6 months to a year with the big brands, you got to get to the upfront, and then you got to get the you got to get your bookings, the RFPs place the orders in and then get them out the door. So we see that as like a 6-month to a year cycle with the big brands for any kind of meaningful spend.

Obviously, with RAC, we have a significant amount of inventory to monetize. We're very ready on the technology deployment side of the ad sales. And on the sales front, Greg just recently started in the -- I believe, in January. So he's only been on the ground for a couple of months. So it's been a lot of initial meetings.

And then once those initial meetings conclude, he goes into basically getting the bookings and then we go from there. But I see this all kind of material in late '26 and then primarily in 2027. And -- but like you mentioned, we do have some other upcoming ad units like with rumble shorts later in the year. There is a possibility this could make an impact in the [ 26th ] year in Q3 and Q4 as well.

Okay. And then I guess to the extent just on the AI cloud and Northern data, to the extent you can provide any more color on like how should we think about just the return on investment and kind of how much CapEx do you feel you would you need to do over the next kind of 12 months, 24 months? And how do you keep up with a space that is increasingly fragmented and probably getting very competitive.

Yes. So this is actually a great question. What we've seen in the last couple of months is the demand is unbelievable in this space. The demand for GPUs even for the H 100s and definitely for the black wells, the GB 300s, it's off the charts from our perspective.

And is Northern Data continues to get the utilization up then, as you saw, around 85% by the end of this quarter. We're really in a position where we're going to have to invest and really grow this business. And obviously, that is the intent here is to grow it and grow it rapidly.

So we're meeting with a lot of customers -- the way in which we want to execute on that is we want to secure the contracts in hand from these customers and then go out and and purchase the GPUs. So that way, everything is in a very good way for the company in a way that will provide us really good returns.

So we're out there meeting these customers as we speak every day and we're really kind of setting up the future here for when this transaction closes. And also even if it happens prior to the transaction, Rumble Cloud will -- is very open to doing deals prior to the transaction closing as well because we do have the capital on hand and these investments look to have really good returns.

So we're very keen on moving as quickly as possible, potentially with some of the clients we've already met with.

Okay. Great. And 1 specific 1 on the AI cloud, if you could. Is there a specific kind of amount of megawatts or number of GPUs that you feel you could scale up to by end of this year or in 12 months after the transaction closes, that centric that investors would love to track.

That's more of a Northern data question. But what I can say is that there is capacity to scale immediately in some of their data centers with the GB 300 and that is something that we're very much looking into. There's an immediate scaling that we could do with the current data center set that they have. And then obviously, they have other sites like Maysville that require development and have a lot potential there.

But yes, there is immediate capability to scale with current -- with some of their current sites.

We have a follow-up question from Jason Helfstein, Oppenheimer.

Like 2 more -- so on the $150 million that Tether has committed to spend for data center usage. How are you thinking about prioritizing them? So is it like if you have more demand than you can fulfill with the $150 million, do you does tether get prioritized lower for outside clients or they get prioritized first or TBD, us any other there?

Thanks, Jason. So yes, we're going to treat tenant like any other customer, any other paying customer with their demand, if the commitment that they have, we're going to have to obviously expand and provide them and invest and provide what we are committed to providing them.

And obviously, depending on their needs and the way they scale, we'll accommodate that as well. But my philosophy here is that, obviously, there's a lot of demand in this AI space. There's a lot of people that want to make commitments and pay for 100s or black walls and whatnot. We're here to just kind of step on the gas pedal and really grow this business. That's the intent. That's why we're acquiring Northern Data.

And we obviously have a lot of potential customers even outside of outside of Tether. And we're looking at all of them, and we want to service as many as we possibly can. And obviously, Tether is 1 that we definitely want to service as well.

And then just on your comments about like the brown, the dolphins, the Buckinghorse you've been signing up. I mean we can kind of see what the other initiatives line in the model as far as revenue. I mean it doesn't look like at least so far, any of these teams have been meaningful to revenue. I guess like when they scale up, it's almost like, I guess, like place hold it like is it like, okay, each team, are these like few hundred thousand dollars, $0.5 million -- just kind of when I look at it, right, like other initiatives as revenue has gone down by $400,000 from the beginning of the year to the end. Obviously, some clients have moved in, some moved out. But I guess like how big, for example, could like this NFL business be just as an example.

Well, I can't speak to specific contracts and deals on our current cloud side. But the way we look at sports as a category is that they're very kind of new in the cloud space. they're really just starting to use video in terms of like keeping all that data and analyzing all that data for plays.

And we see this as a pool that will grow quite significantly in the later years to come as they continue to keep more content in the cloud and scale with us and do more things. that's just like 1 segment.

For us, it's -- we're looking at all different segments, not just NFL teams. But we're looking in various different other areas as well. But yes, in terms of sports, we do see like long-term potential there to grow them.

Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. And this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Rumble update call. [Operator Instructions] Please note this event is being recorded.

I will now turn the conference over to Shannon Devine, Investor Relations for Rumble. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. I'm here today with Chris Pavlovski, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Rumble; and Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether; and Zachary Lyons, Deputy CIO of Tether.

Before we begin the formal presentation, I would like to remind everyone that statements made on this call may include predictions, estimates or other information that might be considered forward-looking. All forward-looking statements are made only as of the date of this call and should be considered in conjunction with the company's cautionary statements in our press release and the factors included in our SEC filings. Future company updates will be available via press releases and the company's identified social media channels.

I will now turn the call over to Rumble's Founder, Chairman and CEO, Chris Pavlovski.

Thank you, Shannon. Good morning, and thank you for joining us. I couldn't be more excited to be here today and have Paolo, the CEO of Tether, alongside me. Today marks one of the most important days in Rumble's history. Last night, we announced 3 transformational milestones that will forever redefine who we are and where we're headed.

One, our exchange offer for Northern Data. This redefines what Rumble is. We become an instant AI infrastructure leader with land, lots of power, data centers and GPUs. Two, Tether's $150 million GPU purchase agreement, which solidifies an immediate anchor customer, providing the foundation for revenue scale. And three, Tether's $100 million advertising commitment, which will fuel our video platform business by helping reshape how creators monetize by using the Rumble Wallet.

Collectively, this positions Rumble as one of the most important disruptors in technology, spanning video, cloud, AI and payments, all anchored in: freedom, privacy, independence, and resilience. Rumble is no longer just a video platform. As you can see with our newly released investor deck, we unveiled it's the foundation of a new Freedom-First ecosystem that will fiercely challenge the likes of Microsoft, Google and Amazon.

We built one of the most engaged communities online with 47 million monthly active users, but that was only step one. We then built an advertising ecosystem that can access over 1 billion ad requests per day, followed by an emerging cloud platform and soon the Rumble Wallet, but it doesn't end there. Today, we're going big. We're extending that mission into GPUs, data centers and AI. And further into the future, we will open up pillars around web tools and a productivity suite, which will include e-mail and file storage.

This future of Rumble isn't about competing within the old systems. It's about redefining with something better. With the full backing of Tether, Rumble will create an entire tech ecosystem rooted in freedom across every pillar of business we do, giving consumers and businesses the control they deserve and are seeking.

Now let's talk about Northern Data. Northern Data is one of the world's leading AI infrastructure companies with significant capital deployed in a highly attractive base of hard assets. Through this acquisition, we're adding over 22,000 GPUs, 9 data centers, of which 4 are owned, land, power, data centers and GPUs, we will now have the assets to immediately scale in the enterprise space. It also positions us as an international player overnight with Northern Data's footprint across Europe and U.S. complementing Rumble's prominence in North America.

Most importantly, it launches us directly into the fastest-growing market in technology, AI infrastructure. Next, the $150 million GPU purchase agreement from Tether, $75 million per year over 2 years following closing of the transaction. This agreement is a validation of the combined platform we're building. It gives us immediate contracted demand and more importantly, we will become the infrastructure vehicle of one of the most visionary customers in the world. It's not just a commercial commitment, it's a strategic alignment with the largest player in digital assets and the most widely used dollar stablecoin with more than 500 million users, commits to this level of engagement, it signals to the market that Rumble's infrastructure is ready for prime time.

And then there's the $100 million advertising agreement from Tether, $50 million per year over 2 years tied directly to the Rumble Wallet. This is about transforming the future of payments within the creator economy. Specifically, this commitment will be used to fuel massive creator growth on the Rumble video platform, bringing in a whole host of new creators to promote Rumble and promote the use using the Rumble Wallet while live streaming to their viewers. Payments and the freedom to transact are key pillars of our vision, and this partnership will quickly make this vision become a reality.

Simply put, when you put all this together, this is the moment Rumble hits its next inflection point. We've catapulted into the AI market, secured hard assets, sizable revenue and global reach. The acquisition is propelling our vision to bring a new freedom-first ecosystem to the market as a new ways forward for tech from media, advertising and payments to land, power and data centers to AI and beyond, our ecosystem will be a fierce competitor to big tech built upon core values to support our freedoms anchored in: privacy, independence, and resilience.

I said this on our last earnings call, and I think it's fitting to end on it again. Since the $775 million transaction with Tether closed back in February, our mandate has changed. YouTube has Google, CoreWeave has Microsoft, Anthropic has Amazon and Rumble has Tether. We've always been ambitious, but today, we sit in a different position. Our mandate is growth. And unlike big tech, it will be aggressive growth while protecting a free and open Internet.

It's an honor to turn this call over to Paolo, the CEO of Tether.

Thank you, Chris. I speak on behalf of the entire Tether team by saying we are excited to partner with Rumble and help you reach the next level. Hello, everyone. I'm Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether. For those who don't know us, Tether was born in 2014 as the world's first stablecoin, a simple but revolutionary idea, a stable digital dollar on the blockchain. This was the beginning of the stablecoin industry. And today, Tether supports over 500 million active wallets and tens of millions of families, many in emerging markets such as Argentina, Turkey, Nigeria and everywhere else in the world.

In 10 years, that idea has grown. And today, we issue the most liquid and widely used stablecoin in the world with over $200 billion in assets. These are everyday people who have been forgotten or ignored by the traditional financial system. But Tether is more than a stable coin company. It's the stable company. We are building resilient infrastructure, advancing financial sovereignty and pioneering a future that's decentralized, resilient, stable and powered by artificial intelligence.

At our core, we believe in freedom of money, freedom of speech and freedom of thought. These values drive everything we do, but our mission is much bigger. We are building infrastructure across finance, communication, artificial intelligence and energy, because freedom requires resilience in all the systems. Our investment in Rumble is about building infrastructure that protects these freedoms. We share the same vision of creating open platforms as a counterweight to centralize censor-prone big tech.

Rumble's vision aligns perfectly with ours, to create open platforms that stand as counterweight to centralized censor-prone tech giants. By investing in Rumble, we are not just investing in infrastructure. We're investing in Freedom-First future for the Internet and AI. This investment deal is the beginning of a new chapter for the Internet.

For too long, a handful of corporations have controlled the flow of information, the servers that host our content and now the GPUs that power AI. That concentration means they decide who builds, who gets to build and which ideas are allowed to exist. AI today is not limited by creativity or vision. It is limited by access to computing power. And when computing is centralized, so it is control.

Rumble's bold acquisition changes that dynamic. By combining Rumble's independent-first platforms with Northern Data infrastructure, they are creating the conditions for open access to AI tools and intelligence at scale. This matters most for the decentralized population, the creators, the researchers, the communities and the nations who cannot and should not have their future dictated by big tech gatekeepers. The vision is simple, an open infrastructure for intelligence where no single company or government sets the boundaries of thought, creation or speech. That is why this transaction matters.

It is not the scale for the sake of scale. It is not -- it is scale for the sake of freedom. The Internet should serve people, not the other way around. Together, we are making that a reality. The Internet and now AI has become concentrated in the hands of few corporations. They decide what you can see, what you can say and soon what you can even think. That is not innovation, that is control. Freedom-First means breaking the step cycle. It means building technology that is independent of gatekeepers, resilient against censorship and align with the values of privacy transparency and choice.

Today's big tech model thrives on centralization. They own the servers, the algorithms, the data and ultimately the truth, but truth cannot be owned.

And now Rumble is flipping that model on its head. We're moving from centralized platforms to open ecosystems from surveillance-driven business models to privacy-first tools from gatekeepers of intelligence to communities in control of their own intelligence. This is more than a business strategy. It's about ensuring that AI doesn't become the next layer of centralized control, but instead, it becomes a tool of empowerment for creators, for entrepreneurs, for nations who want independence in their digital futures. A Freedom-First Internet and AI stack is no longer optional. It's a necessity if we want innovation to serve people, not corporations, not governments and not special interests.

We'll open up the line for questioning.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer.

Congratulations on announcing the deal. Can you help us a little bit from a financial perspective, I mean, just whether -- it seems like the deal is like initially going to be dilutive, but then obviously, you believe over time, it will be accretive. We can kind of do the math on the advertising impact that -- from the advertising investment Tether is making as well as the investment in the cloud contract and GPUs. But I didn't see any specifics around kind of the financial impact on the slide. So I don't know, just give us some modeling help maybe as we're just trying to think about like how dilutive it is initially and then kind of like over time, how this becomes accretive.

Jason, this is Chris. Thanks for your question. So with respect to guidance, we're not providing any guidance. You can kind of refer to the press releases that we put out last night. But obviously, the -- we have this large advertising commitment from Tether to the tune of about $50 million per year for 2 years. That will kick off in 2026. And then the GPU commitment is obviously that happens post close, which is anticipated to be in the first half of 2026 as well.

Okay. And just maybe a follow-up. Any update on kind of between the 2 companies, the kind of wallet and kind of further expansion of the financial transactions with the platform?

Yes. So we're planning to release the Wallet to a larger user base in the coming weeks and then have it open to the entire user base by mid-December. So we're on track for, I would say, about in a month from now, it should be opened up to everybody and to a pretty large and sizable cohort in the coming weeks here in November.

And then just maybe last follow-up, and I'll go back in the queue. Any update on how you're thinking about functionality of that Wallet beyond just for content creator payments, any other kind of functionality you've been discussing with Tether?

Yes. So with respect to the Wallet, it's a noncustodial wallet. So it can be used for -- it can be used by anyone for basically anything. But obviously, it will be deeply tied into the Rumble platform for tipping. Obviously, the vision here is to have the Rumble Wallet be used for more than just tipping. Eventually, we'd like to see creators get paid that way or they can choose to get paid that way. We really want it to be a real economic engine around everything we do on Rumble, even from advertising to cloud to creators. But in the first iteration, we're looking to launch it strictly around the tipping for creators.

Paolo, if you want to add anything to that by all means.

Yes, absolutely. It's important to note that the United States are the biggest remittances corridor in the world. And remittances more and more happen through stablecoins and especially USDT and soon, USAT, that is Tether's domestic stablecoin. So we see also the Rumble Wallet as a way to onboard people and workers that work in the United States and want to send money back home to their families, maybe in Central South America or Africa or Southeast Asia, for example. And so I believe -- we believe that the Rumble Wallet will become a centerpiece of that economy that is growing. Note that between 20% and 40% of the GDP of many emerging markets is remittances. And so we plan to position the United States and the Rumble Wallet into those huge corridors.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question is coming from Francesco Marmo from Maxim Group.

Two for me, if I may, one for Chris and one for Paolo. So Chris, you guys keep on posting impressive results in terms of your revenue per user. I was wondering if you could give us a sense for what's driving those?

Thank you for the question. So what's driving the ARPU is the Rumble Advertising Center and the sponsorships that are -- the advertising sponsorships that are happening on the platform. What we're starting to see on Rumble is that brand advertisers are coming. They're coming slowly, but they're starting to come, whereas a year or 2 ago, we didn't have any. We now have a few of them, such as Crypto.com and now you're seeing Perplexity. You have these brands now spending on Rumble, which didn't exist a year ago. So that's starting to move the needle a little bit. We'd like to see many, many, many more brand advertisers join, and we're hopeful that will happen in the coming years. But it started -- you're starting to see a little bit of the action happening with the larger advertisers, and that's what's helping drive the ARPU.

Great. And then if I may, one quick one for Paolo kind of like big picture global maybe. Paolo, I was wondering if you can give us a sense for like how do you see the adoption trends of crypto and kind of freedom-based financial tools in general differing across the U.S., Europe and Asia? And what factors, whether it's regulatory, cultural or technological, do you think are driving those regional differences?

Thank you. I think that I would like to start from the concept that for the last 5 dozen years, society was built upon the concept of peer-to-peer and decentralization. People were for both information and money. People were meeting at the dinner table, where we're discussing, we're talking directly without intermediaries. At the same time, people were exchanging value like cash and gold coins or salt in the beginning directly peer-to-peer.

I think what we -- what happened in the last 30, 40 years, both for information and communication and money has been an insane centralization and hands of just a bunch of 2, 3 big companies. That is unprecedented. That is putting at risk the fabric of society itself.

So with Rumble and Tether and this acquisition that Rumble is making, we want to create a counterbalance. We want to ensure that both communication, streaming and finance all become, again, freedom tools will become, again, a way for society to grow to become more stronger, to become more independent because that's how innovation starts. Innovation cannot grow, cannot thrive under -- in the hands of just a few companies.

So that's why it's important to create the first huge conglomerate that unifies all the ethos and the philosophy of a stable society, at the same time, has the tools, the technical tools, technical innovation and the capital to continue to grow that vision and has the ability to create technology that empowers people rather than empowers one single decision maker. So that cannot only be about communications, that cannot be only about money. It cannot only be about intelligence. You need different pillars to build a stable society, you need communication tools. You need energy access. You need financial freedom and access to financial services for everyone in the world and not just the reachers. And also you want accessible intelligence. That is the global mission of -- that is shared across all our companies.

Our next question is a follow-up from Jason Helfstein from Oppenheimer.

Just want to dig in a bit more on the fundamentals in the quarter. Obviously, as the earlier person pointed out, you had healthy growth in ARPU in the quarter. That being said, we did see a bit of a decline sequentially in users, obviously strong usage, et cetera. So I guess can you just comment any kind of just broad commentary what you're seeing as far as like usage on the platform sequentially, if there's anything to call out that was a headwind in the third quarter? And then -- and then just on cost of revenue, just any kind of commentary where we are with sort of the minimum guarantees because it just felt like -- yes, just any kind of color that would just help us there, maybe as we're just thinking about the gross margin going forward.

Jason, so I'll touch on the MAUs. Consistent with like previous years and what we see in the summer is like creators like Steven Crowder and Dave Rubin, they take off months, a month or in some cases, even more during the summer months. And this has kind of an impact on the MAUs a little bit as a lot of creators stop live streaming during the summer months. And then that obviously starts to pick up in September. So that's -- we're seeing like that typical seasonality that we always see with respect to the creators in the summer months.

In addition to that, it's obviously not -- it's an off -- it's post the presidential election year. So it's a little softer because of that as well because of the election cycles. But obviously, we anticipate in 2026 as midterms come around the corner that the election cycle news will provide -- we'll give it back a better boost.

With respect to the creator contracts and the guarantees, I think what's really important here is to call out the $100 million Tether advertising spend, which kind of changes the game for us on how we pursue creators and contracts. Typically, as you remember, back in 2023 and 2024, as we pursued creators to bring them to the platform, the idea was to try to -- we would model them based on getting them to a certain point of breakeven and bringing them advertisers. We no longer have that problem. Tether is now -- is going to be the large advertiser here that is going to allow us to go and bring the creators, and we're going to -- and they're going to be funding -- they're funding that advertising to the tune of $100 million over the next 2 years. For us to go aggressively go get those creators where we'll make profit on, and we won't have that issue of looking for advertisers to come in.

So that's a complete game changer in us pursuing creators onto the platform and allowing us to step on the gas pedal to really grow the platform in 2026 and in 2027. So I think if there's one thing to take away on the advertising commitment deal is that this is what -- I believe there's a lot of exciting growth potential here, especially on the MAU front and the creator front because we're going to be going -- we're going to be stepping on the gas, bringing in creators. And every creator we're going to bring in, we have the funder of the advertiser, which is Tether, and we're going to be making a profit on that. So it's a completely different model in terms of creator acquisition than it has been in '23 and '24. So that's probably the most exciting part about the advertising commitment.

Thank you. We've reached the end of our question-and-answer session. And ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude today's teleconference webcast. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day. We thank you for your participation today.