02Our Story
We were already doing this. The load changed.
May 2025
Roberto Saad brought together Thomas Flake, Charles Clement, Brant Jones, and Skip Smith to look at a crypto mining opportunity. It was familiar ground. Flake had built and operated both data centers and mining facilities, and the group had spent their careers on the power side of compute.
The turn
Mining taught this industry behind-the-meter siting before AI needed it. The discipline is the same one: find land with power, secure generation, control the cost per megawatt-hour, and run the facility well enough that the economics hold when the market moves against you. Operators who got that wrong did not survive the last cycle.
AI compute is that problem at higher density, on longer contracts, in a far larger market — and against buyers who cannot wait five to seven years for a grid connection. The team took the view that the harder version was the one worth building for.
ISS Mining was incorporated in May 2025 as a power-rich-land platform for AI, structured around that decision from the first day.
Why it stuck
Behind-the-meter was already being discussed. Almost all of it was co-location — park the load beside a nuclear or gas plant that already exists and draw from it directly. That model depends on generation already standing, in the handful of places it stands, and in November 2024 FERC rejected the expansion of the largest such arrangement in the country. The deals since have competed for a fixed and shrinking set of existing plants.
ISS Mining was built on the other version: originate the land, secure the fuel, and develop new generation on the site — behind the meter by construction rather than by adjacency. It does not bid against hyperscalers for an existing plant, and it does not turn on how a regulator rules on co-location.
The power constraint itself was never the insight, and the team has never claimed it was. Queues were public, load requests were climbing, forecasts were in print. What was scarce was the ability to execute — assemble fragmented title, hold a county commission, structure a large-load tariff, and put new generation behind the meter on ground you control. That is where projects die, and it is work this team had already delivered.
