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This caught the eye of Canadian capital markets legend Frank Holmes, CEO of US Global Investors and co-founder and Executive Chairman of HIVE, who became a mentor and major influence in Kilic's entrepreneurial journey. In a pivotal move in 2021, Holmes invited Kilic to spearhead HIVE's global blockchain infrastructure solutions as President and COO, focusing on mining for Ethereum and Bitcoin. Bitcoin is mined with ASICs and Ethereum was mined with GPUs (graphic processing units), powerful servers that HIVE operated in its early days, with a notable $66 USD million landmark purchase from Nvidia in 2021. In 2022, everything changed. Ethereum underwent a transition from "proof of work" to "proof of stake," and in a single day the entire global system of Ethereum block validation ceased—and so did HIVE's Ethereum mining business. "Imagine a business unit doing $55M USD of annual revenue suddenly ceasing to exist," Kilic says. "How do you survive? Innovation, of course." With a deep understanding of the complexities involved in Ethereum mining, which demands extensive GPU arrays, Kilic navigated the company through the critical Ethereum merge in September 2022. His exemplary leadership earned him the CEO position at HIVE in January 2023. In 2023, HIVE Digital Technologies shifted its focus, converting GPUs from mining alternative coins into a strategy for Bitcoin exchange to weather a drop in daily earnings from $150,000 to $30,000. With Holmes' vision and Kilic's leadership, HIVE pivoted to AI, significantly enhancing its GPU infrastructure. This past year, HIVE grew its high-performance computing power tenfold, preparing it to capitalize on the growing demand for HPC and AI tools using its Nvidia GPUs. "HPC (high-performance computing), once known as supercomputing, represents the pinnacle of computing power for scientific research," Kilic explains. He cites the use of GPU-based supercomputers by companies like ExxonMobil to analyze 3D seismic data for oil exploration. Additionally, the surge in demand for GPU computational capability in AI is driven by large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT, which Kilic points out, stands for generative pretrained transformer, a widely used architecture. It was a clever pivot, to resuscitate the GPU business in a post-Ethereum world. "To realize $100 million of revenue you would need upwards of 100 MW of power in Bitcoin mining, but with AI you can do this with less than 10 MW of power," Kilic says. "Furthermore, AI revenues are approximately five times greater than Ethereum mining with GPUs." Kilic has led the organization through three years of change and adaptation with agility and a very specific brand of leadership. "I'm a hands-on problem-solver and innovator," Kilic explains. "Navigating open-ended problems by framing the right questions and finding their answers has been key to my business success. I am also grateful to have one of the best teams in the biz." The next move? Establishing HIVE as Canada's premier AI infrastructure provider, focusing on owning and operating tier 3 data centers and HPC setups with cutting- edge Nvidia GPUs for sophisticated AI tasks. Currently, HIVE has tier 3 GPU operations in Stockholm and Montreal with plans to grow its footprint another tenfold in the next year through expansion in Canada. "I've travelled to Silicon Valley three times in three months," Kilic says. "We are working with global AI leaders including Nvidia; however, I would love to see Canadian AI infrastructure provisioned on the world stage." Kilic envisions businesses leveraging open-source LLMs on privately accessed servers, prioritizing ownership and data privacy. This approach surpasses using generalized tools like ChatGPT, which, despite its capabilities, lacks privacy for sensitive data analysis. "Our goal is to fuel the AI revolution for businesses, likening it to how smartphones democratized computing power," Kilic states. "Our servers will empower businesses with open-source AI, enabling them to utilize custom-tuned LLMs on their own data sets for a genuine competitive advantage." Learn more at hivedigitaltechnologies.com Connect on @HiveDigitalTechnologies | @HIVEDigitalTech | @HiveDigitalTechnologies | @hivedigitaltechnologies Email: hiveIR@hivedigitaltech.com Created by Canada Wide Media in partnership with HIVE Digital Technologies " HIVE's vision is to be Canada's premier AI infrastructure provider, to own and operate tier 3 data centers running cutting-edge GPUs for sophisticated AI computation. "

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