LandBridge to make market debut

We mentioned Lambridge at the opening bell today, set to go public at the New York Stock Exchange, a company that owns hundreds of thousands of acres in the oil rich Permian Basin, while also being an indirect crypto mining play. Pricing below the range last night at 17, although indicated 18 to 19 this morning. Despite the return of some IPO optimism in the market, IPOs are having their best first half of the year in about three years. Joining us here at Post 9 is Lambridge founder and Chairman, David Capo Bianco. Congratulations, It's great to have you. Thank you, Carl. People will hear Permian, but it it goes beyond energy in a sense. Yes, talk about it. It does. Well, first of all, I just wanted to thank you for having me here. It's a real honor to be here in the first day of trading for land bridge our company. But yeah, it's a it's an infrastructure development play, an infrastructure writ large. The story over the next one to three years will for sure be water infrastructure development, water produced in the in New Mexico and managed across the state line in Texas. But further than that, energy writ large sand mines, we have gas pipelines, gas plants, the whole energy complex that needs to develop infrastructure. But next you move to renewable fuel infrastructure, solar, wind and then you and then the best of all, which is probably the most exciting is the digital infrastructure. You mentioned Bitcoin, but the data center story is really powerful. I was hoping you were going to lead me to data center talk about the play around that, what it, what it, what it says about the asset management, the, the, the margin story on all of that. Sure. Well, the beauty of the beauty of data centers is they take a lot of power. And as you know, historically 61% of worldwide data centers are located around Langley, Virginia. But with AI, it's no longer important to have that kind of connectivity. So what you really need is you need low cost fuel. So where can you find the lowest cost gas? Certainly in North America, maybe the world Permian Basin, Permian gas hasn't traded above zero cents for six months or so except for brief periods of time. It likely won't because of the bottlenecks getting it out of there. So you take very attractive gas, which gives you very attractively priced power. You get contiguous, contiguous acreage where we can build out solar as well and the data centers. You get an awesome regulatory environment. And because of my water companies, we have unlimited water for cooling. It's a pretty unique mix of opportunities and I think over the next 6 to 9 months, you're really going to hear a lot about how the Permian Basin will change writ large because of the data center development program. So how do you primarily make money through leases or royalties? How does it? Yeah, it's a great question. Thank you. First of all, we have operating business at 5.5 points, my private equity company. We run operating companies and Landbridge. Landbridge, though, is a CapEx light, no CapEx and a OpEx light business too. So what we do at Land Bridge is we create the opportunity, we enable the development of infrastructure. So for instance, all that data center development, billions and billions of dollars, Land Bridge doesn't pay a penny. But for every GW data center developed on Land Bridge's acreage, that's like 30 to $40 million of free cash flow without a penny of CapEx. Finally, we mentioned the calendar for IPOs in general. Did you feel like you got it under the wire? Did I feel like I got into the wire? That's a great question. Well, I will say this, the IPO tape is not amazing for energy. I think that's just reality. The way we looked at it though, Carl is we were selling just about 20% of the business and letting our new public partners in an attractive price and to win alongside of them, we'll develop a following. And what we want is a long term sustainable growth business and a long term sustainable following in the markets.