
Aether Holdings – This Week in FinTech February 7, 2025


Million Dollar Listing: Ukraine
We can now throw Ukraine into the “let’s buy a country” mix. On Tuesday, President Trump essentially demanded Ukraine hand over its rare earth minerals to America as payback for the hundreds of billions of US taxpayer funds sent its way for war efforts.
“We’re telling Ukraine they have very valuable rare earths. We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earths and other things,” Trump said.
What’s so special about Ukraine and it’s rare earth mineral supply?
Well, after having announced a massive Ai infrastructure project called The Stargate Project, those rare earths would not only come in handy…
But they may be necessary for the project to succeed.
You see, Ukraine may be sitting on Europe’s largest known deposits of rare earths, like lithium and titanium. But it’s Ukraine’s potential for even rarer, rare earth’s that could propel Stargate from project to completion.
Have a look at the map below.

This shows the location of Ukraine’s known resources. While its confirmed Ukraine has vast lithium and titanium deposits, it may hold palladium dysprosium, neodymium, and yttrium, gallium, indium, and tungsten (among others) …
All of which are critical raw materials needed for data center operations.
With a $500 billion Stargate Project promise on the line, and hundreds of billions of US taxpayer dollars already invested in Ukraine…
Trumps “deal” could make an awful lot of sense for both parties.
For more on rare earths and usage in data centers, go HERE
A Case of Great Timing Leaves NVDA Investors Fuming
Say what you want about Nvidia CEO, Jensen Huang, but his timing is impeccable. It was revealed this week, Huang had been offloading shares of NVDA to the tune of $14 million, a week!
The revelation comes as the company, and its shares, were already rattled by news from China, which showed its DeepSeek Ai technology to be on par (at least) with ChatGPT.
Importantly, DeepSeek does NOT use the latest, most advanced and expensive NVDA chips in its processing, and is capable (allegedly) of computing without massive data centers and was developed for just $6 million.
But, while Huang’s $14 million in stock sales a week is wild, it gets even wilder. Filings show he sold a whopping $323 million worth of shares in July… long before anyone even knew or heard about DeepSeek.
Of course, news of his stock dump (although pre-planned Rule 10b5-1 sales) did not sit well with NVDA investors who were already reeling as the stock slipped by nearly 20% on the DeepSeek news.
“It signals the stock has jumped tremendously and they’re getting a little nervous about it. If they don’t have confidence in the stock, then why should I?
“What I want from an executive is to be very bullish on the stock. I want the executive to be thinking all the time: ‘Boy, this is really going to be worth a lot more soon’…
“And not, ‘Oof, I better sell some because I’m experiencing the vertigo of having all my eggs in one basket.’ I want all of their eggs in one basket,” NVDA shareholder, Nell Minow told Forbes of Huang’s stock sales.
However, by Thursday of this week it looks like that basket is doing just fine.
It was announced that a ban on DeepSeek was being considered for federal employee devices, and Alphabet (Google) will be investing $75 billion in Ai this year. A 43% increase over 2024.
To see Huang’s history of stock sales, go HERE
Forget the Data Center Power Crisis, this is Crazy!
Mining Bitcoin, “writing” Ai generated essays, and performing billions of digital tasks in microseconds takes a lot of computing power… and whole lot of electricity.
In fact, according to the International Energy Agency, global data centers consume between 260 and 360 Terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity annually. That’s enough “juice” to power the entire globe, for an entire month.
But while new industries are being developed to address this growing crisis (like small, localized nuclear reactors), there’s another crisis brewing which may be equally difficult to tackle…
Water.
Earlier this week, Visual Capitalist released a graphic showing how much water was being used by Google data centers back in 2023, before the AI boom. And, as you’re about to see, it’s a lot!
Of course, data center servers generate a significant amount of heat, and a significant amount of water is needed in their cooling systems.
But this much?
Google’s data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa, used 980 million gallons of water in 2023.
Mayes County, Oklahoma complex used 815 million gallons, Berkeley County South Carolina used 763 million gallons. The list goes on…
In all, Google’s global data centers consume 6 billion gallons of water a year. That’s enough water to fill 9,000 Olympic sized swimming pools. Keep in mind, these numbers come from just a single company’s data centers.
As more and more data centers come online (think The Stargate Project), we could end up with a real water crisis on our hands.
See Visual Capitalist’s graphic, HERE
MicroStrategy Gets Even More Micro
In the digital world, everything eventually gets smaller, faster and cheaper. And for a company that’s been in business for 36 years, MicroStrategy is following suit by getting smaller…
In name only.
On Thursday, the company announced it will be nixing the “Micro” and changing its name to “Strategy.” Ironically enough, the company’s operations are far more micro focused than ever before.
Since 2020, the company has been concentrating, almost singularly, on purchasing Bitcoin. And, as of the latest reporting, “Strategy” has become among the world’s single largest holders of BTC, with nearly a half million Bitcoin. That’s more than the US Govt and Marathon Digital Holdings (MARA) combined.
But…
If Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies enter another crypto winter, or BTC simply trades in its current rage for months on end, the company could be in trouble.
Have a look at this chart.
This is the three-year performance of MSTR vs. BTC/USD. Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, has wildly outpaced the gains of Bitcoin (for various reasons).
But, like we said earlier, should cryptocurrencies experience another winter, MSTR stock is likely to join them.
On Wednesday, the company reported a larger-than-expected loss, $670.8 million in Q4… even as it accumulated BTC at breakneck speeds.
For more on MSTR’s rebranding “Strategy” visit HERE