Active Energy
From Coal Pellets to Gulf Data Centres
Good Morning Team.
I’ve another speculative pick for you to consider today.
Active Energy.
Speculative means high risk (so please consider your risk profile before continuing). We are operating at the nanocap end of the market here.
The company began as Cinpart in 1996 and then became a biomass-fuel company selling a patented coal-replacement pellet called CoalSwitch.
It has — since a leadership change in January 2025 — morphed into something else. A nanocap vehicle racing to build a digital infrastructure and crypto-mining hosting platform across the UAE, with tendrils now reaching into Saudi Arabia and Bahrain.
Let’s dive in.
The pivot
The transformation traces to two appointments: Pankaj Rajani as Non-Executive Chairman and Paul Elliott as CEO, both installed in early 2025 after AEG’s accounts had fallen behind and trading had been disrupted.
By the time the company published its H1 2025 interim results (for the six months to 30 June 2025), the numbers told a story of a company on fumes — a £400,000 loss, just £30K in cash on the balance sheet, and reliance on a £500,000 convertible loan facility of which only £200,000 had been drawn.
Two oversubscribed fundraises totaling £2.85 million in the following months gave the new management room to act, and they used it to launch four parallel strategic pillars:
Reviving CoalSwitch through a partnership with Indigenous Canadian Energy (ICE)
Building a UK rooftop solar and battery storage pipeline
Adopting a digital-asset treasury policy
and (by far the dominant story since) building out UAE digital infrastructure for AI hosting, HPC and Bitcoin mining
We will focus on this latter pivot.
Buying pre-energised grid connections
The single idea that runs through almost every UAE-related announcement is this: rather than build new substations and grid connections from scratch — a process that can take years and tie up significant capital — AEG buys existing, energised grid connections from third parties and overlays modular digital infrastructure on top.
The pitch is speed and capital efficiency, and the company has been consistent in repeating a key comparison - a UK new build grid connection and substation typically costs between £1 million and 1.5 million per MW, whereas AEG’s UAE acquisitions have come in at roughly £500,000 to £600,000 per MW/MVA equivalent — something like a 50% discount to replacement cost, by management’s own framing.
Three deals illustrate the model.
Ghummud, a 3.5 MVA live connection in Abu Dhabi (about 2.975 MW of available load), was first flagged via signed Heads of Terms on 10 March 2026 and completed on 9 April 2026 for total consideration of £2 million — split between £1 million in new shares (909,090,909 shares at 0.11p, locked in for 12 months) and £1 million of cash deferred over a year, with first-year operating profit from the site applied against the final deferred tranche.
Kazna followed a week after the Ghummud HoTs (17 March 2026) - a smaller 1.5 MVA connection from an unrelated vendor, acquired for £850,000 (£450,000 equity, £400,000 deferred cash).
Taweela came next, announced 23 April 2026 as non-binding Heads of Terms only - 2.5 MVA for £1.25 million, priced explicitly at £500,000 per MVA, split evenly between equity and deferred cash.
Each deal follows an identical template — premium-priced equity with a lock-in, cash payments pushed out 6–12 months, and a return profile pitched at roughly a three year payback once the site is fully contracted.
Add it together and, per the company’s own April 2026 tally, AEG had assembled roughly 15.5 MVA across Ghummud, Kazna, Taweela, and its original 8 MVA ‘core development site’ — built, in CEO Paul Elliott’s words, in under 12 months.
At an assumed $450,000 million of revenue per MVA, management pegs the full 15.5 MVA portfolio at roughly $7 million of annualised revenue once everything is contracted and energised.
That figure (before you start complaining) is like nearly every revenue figure in this story, comes with the standard caveat that it depends on utilisation, market conditions and contracts that in some cases don’t yet exist.
Flagship site and Bitdeer
As noted above, before any of the bolt-on acquisitions, there was the original project - an 8 MW (later referred to as 8 MVA) facility announced on 1 October 2025 as the first stage of a stated 300 MW UAE pipeline, with Abu Dhabi National Energy Company approval for the initial connection and an application already in for a 25 MW upgrade to 33 MW.
The pre-sale story here is strong on paper — 35% of capacity sold before construction even began (6 October 2025), rising to 60% by mid-December.
Projected annual revenue for the site moved between $3.5 million and $3.8 million across different releases, at roughly 50% gross margin.
What’s worth considering is how the completion timeline slipped. ‘Operational by end of 2025’ (October) became ‘towards the end of January 2026’ (December), then ‘mid-February 2026’ (the January business update), then ‘handover by end of April, ahead of energisation’ (March, with the company citing permitting delays, Ramadan, and ‘regional logistical considerations arising from the recent Middle East crisis’).
By 22 May 2026, the site was described as merely ‘prepared to receive’ modular infrastructure — still not energised, roughly four months after the original target.
I mean, it’s understandable but we need this over the line soon.
On the other hand, the relationship with the site has evolved.
On 24 April 2026, AEG signed a non-binding Letter of Intent with Bitdeer Middle East Technology, a subsidiary of $4.5 billion NASDAQ-listed Bitdeer Technologies Group, to pursue a joint mining structure whereby AEG provides power, hosting and infrastructure and Bitdeer supplies mining equipment and technical expertise.
Each party keeps its own assets with revenue split between fixed infrastructure fees and a profit share on mining output.
Four days later, the companies agreed in principle that the 8 MVA site would serve as the pilot deployment for this structure, with indicative (unguaranteed) economics of roughly $300,000 per MVA per year in infrastructure revenue plus about 8.3 BTC per MVA per year in mining output.
By 5 May 2026, AEG disclosed it had actually redeployed infrastructure originally earmarked for the 8 MVA site over to the faster-moving Ghummud facility instead, reallocating the pre-sold clients in the process — perhaps a tacit admission that the flagship project’s own timeline had become the bottleneck, even as the Bitdeer relationship continued to be framed as the centrepiece of the long-term strategy.
A reshuffling of priorities, perhaps. But everything’s still on the table.
Stacking the partnership ecosystem
Beyond the bolt-on acquisitions and Bitdeer, AEG has layered in several other relationships that read, collectively, as an attempt to de-risk capital intensity by spreading execution across partners.
In January 2026, the company signed a non-binding MoU and then Heads of Terms for a UAE joint venture, structured through a new SPV called Active Mining Group: AEG would hold 60%, with two local partners — Segments Cloud Hash FZ LLC (technical/ASIC mining operations) and LC Group FZE (commercial and sales relationships) — each holding 20%.
That same Active Mining Group entity resurfaced on 7 May 2026 as the counterparty in a perhaps more eyebrow-raising deal - a services and facilitation agreement with the Private Office of Sheikh Mohammed bin Ahmed bin Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Nahyan and Black Road Investment Group, intended to support an Abu Dhabi mining licence and aggregate an initial 50 MVA of capacity across sites tied to Black Road and the Sheikh’s Office — a substantial step-up from the 15.5 MVA secured so far, explicitly positioned as the route to AEG’s 100 MVA ambition.
Then, on 16 June 2026, AEG signed a GCC distribution agreement with Fog Hashing, a modular HPC/AI infrastructure supplier, intended to standardise equipment across its sites and support future AI workloads alongside crypto hosting.
Each of these is, individually, the kind of relationship-building you’d expect from a small operator trying to punch above its capital base.
Collectively, they also mean a very large share of AEG’s eventual capacity — the 50 MVA Sheikh’s Office tranche alone is more than three times what’s currently secured — depends on counterparties and structures that remain non-binding, in some cases barely a month old.
Ergo, the potential at a circa £6 million market capitalisation is significant - but execution risk is the key variable.
First cash from Ghummud
After 18 months of projections, AEG finally posted an actual revenue number on 2 June 2026 - Ghummud’s first full month of trading generated AED 404,000 (about $110,000) net to AEG, at roughly 97% fleet uptime.
Annualised, that’s about AED 4.85 million ($1.3 million) a year — which the company was careful to flag as ‘illustrative only,’ not a forecast, with no guarantee current trading continues.
Set against the site’s own ‘fully built out’ target of roughly $1.8 million in annual gross revenue once maximally utilised, a $1.3 million run-rate from month one — while utilisation is still being ramped — is an encouraging early data point.
It’s also exactly one month of data on a site that took roughly nine months longer to deliver than originally suggested, so treat it as first proof rather than a trend.
I will note that almost every small cap takes much longer to ‘get there’ than they first hope, so the delay shouldn’t infer revenue risk.
Saudi Arabia and Bahrain optionality,
Parallel to the UAE buildout, AEG has been laying regulatory groundwork elsewhere in the Gulf.
It secured a MISA Entrepreneur Licence in Saudi Arabia on 20 January 2026, allowing 100% foreign ownership in eligible sectors, followed by approval from the Kingdom’s Research, Development and Innovation Authority on 12 February 2026 — a step that lets AEG progress toward incorporating a Saudi SPV and applying for full investment licensing.
Neither milestone involves a site, a contract or committed capital; both are best read as option value on a future Saudi expansion rather than near-term revenue drivers.
The same applies to a 3 June 2026 announcement that AEG representatives would meet Bahrain’s Economic Development Board at a London industry event — useful relationship-building, explicitly described by the company as early-stage with no certainty of any resulting deal.
But.
It could lead to blue sky.
Legacy businesses
It’s easy to lose track of AEG’s original UK renewables and CoalSwitch businesses amid the UAE news flow, but they’re still running.
On the renewables side, AEG signed Heads of Terms in August 2025 for a 150 MW battery storage facility at Fonmon Castle in the Vale of Glamorgan (AEG fronting £40,000 for planning and grid applications, reimbursable plus 5% of first-year rent on consent), built out a ten-site UK rooftop solar pipeline advised by veteran solar developer Brian Glendinning, and signed a 25-year, £830,000 power purchase agreement with Cambridge City Football Club in December 2025.
On CoalSwitch, the company completed a strategic review in December 2025 and recommitted to the technology through a partnership with ICE, whose CEO Richard Spinks originally named CoalSwitch during an earlier stint running AEG.
The two companies are jointly developing a validation plant in Poland, co-located with a municipal combined heat and power operator supplying roughly 40% of a city’s district heating — intended as a reference site for future commercial deployment, expected to be operational around mid-2026.
None of this moves the needle the way the UAE story does, but it’s worth noting as additional potential upside.
Crypto treasury
AEG’s deal structures consistently minimise upfront cash requirements by leaning on equity issued at a premium to the prevailing share price, locked in for 12 months — a sensible mechanism, but one that still means new shares hitting the market on a rolling basis.
The share count is key- 3,918,923,304 ordinary shares as of 9 March 2026, growing to 5,225,482,784 after the Ghummud completion shares on 9 April, and then to roughly 6.8 billion after the £1.3 million placing that closed in early May (1,575,757,576 new shares at 0.0825p, a 23% discount to the prior close, representing 23% of the post-placing share count).
That’s close to a 75% increase in shares outstanding in under two months. More deferred-cash obligations from Kazna and Taweela, plus whatever financing the Sheikh’s Office/Black Road 50 MVA tranche eventually requires, suggest this dilution pattern isn’t finished.
This isn’t a negative, but the bottom line is that when you pay for assets with shares, two things count.
Whether the party you issue the shares to intends to hold, and whether you assets you add to the balance sheet are going to be worth the dilution.
The first part is for the company to answer, the second I think - yes they very much are - but you need to be aware of the strategy before you invest.
Layered on top is AEG’s digital-asset treasury policy, capped at 30% of working capital, which in September 2025 included a $100,000 allocation spread across Solana, BNB, Dogecoin, Pepe, Toncoin, Shiba Inu, ENS and Pudgy Penguins — a basket skewed heavily toward highly speculative, momentum-driven tokens rather than core holdings, managed on 30–90 day cycles.
From December 2025, the company also began directing spare mining capacity toward proprietary Bitcoin production for treasury purposes.
Whatever you think of the UAE infrastructure thesis, this treasury approach adds a second, fully separate layer of crypto-market exposure on top of it.
The bottom line
AEG’s argument for itself rests on four pillars holding together: a genuinely capital-efficient acquisition model (premium equity plus deferred cash, funded partly by the assets’ own operating profit) that’s already delivering one revenue-generating site; structural Gulf tailwinds in ultra-cheap power and surging AI/HPC demand that several much larger players are also chasing; a partnership stack (Bitdeer, the Sheikh’s Office/Black Road, Fog Hashing) that, if even partially realised, would multiply secured capacity well beyond what AEG could fund alone; and a management team executing fast — fifteen-plus MVA assembled in under a year, with first cash flow arriving roughly on the timeline they originally sketched, even if individual site timelines slipped.
This is a genuine nano-cap. AEG’s own disclosures put the share count at roughly 6.8 billion following the May 2026 placing, against per-share prices that have moved in the 0.08p–0.11p range across recent transactions disclosed in the RNS — implying a market capitalisation in the low single-digit millions of pounds, though live quote sources I checked in mid-June 2026 disagree with each other by a factor of several times (a function of how thinly traded and quote-stale these sub-penny AIM names tend to be). If you’re pricing this stock, get a real-time quote rather than trusting any single number — including mine.
What to Watch Next
A few concrete events could move this story materially:
Completion (not just Heads of Terms) of the Taweela acquisition.
Energisation of Kazna and a second/third month of Ghummud revenue data to confirm the run-rate is holding or growing.
Conversion of the Bitdeer LOI into a definitive, binding joint mining agreement, including final commercial terms on the profit-share mechanism.
A concrete capacity commitment under the Sheikh’s Office/Black Road 50 MVA framework, as opposed to the facilitation agreement alone.
Getting the Saudi SPV incorporated and licensed, turning two years of regulatory approvals into an operating entity.
My bottom line here is that the company has evolved into a fast-moving infrastructure buildout play with real first revenue behind it.
The reason for the disconnect between the market cap and the potential is perhaps faith-based. The market wants to see execution in the coming months, and if it comes, we could see a re-rate.
How large a re-rate?
Unlike many, it won’t be sentiment based. Pure numbers - revenue and profit should the operational story continue to convert into contracted, billable capacity.
At current scale, AEG is effectively sitting on roughly 15.5 MVA of assembled or operational capacity, which management has suggested can support something in the region of $7 million in annualised revenue.
Against a market cap of £6 million, this basically places the company in a bracket where it is still being valued less on cash flow and more on proof of execution.
The revenue pays for the market cap in one year.
If execution continues and the platform expands towards something closer to 50 MVA — whether through completion of current acquisitions, conversion of non-binding agreements or further bolt-on deals — the revenue base begins to shift.
On a simple linear assumption, that would imply something in the region of $20–25 million of annualised revenue potential. Even applying conservative infrastructure-style valuation multiples of 1–3x sales, that alone would justify a step-change in valuation into the £15 to £75 million range, depending on how much of that revenue is considered durable, contracted and repeatable.
It’s actually quite hard to guess where in that range we might land because the market only ever really cares about sticky recurring revenue.
At the more ambitious end of AEG’s roadmap — closer to 100 MVA of capacity — the numbers begin to move into a different category altogether.
On the same broad assumptions, you are talking about $40–50 million of potential annualised revenue. In that scenario, even a relatively modest multiple would imply a valuation many multiples above today’s level, while a stronger ‘AI infrastructure/HPC/ digital energy’ narrative could push that significantly higher still.
What we’re looking for is a transition from a sub-scale, event-driven microcap to something that starts to look like a functioning revenue-generating infrastructure platform.
The upside is stepwise, and heavily dependent on whether capacity turns into consistent cash flow. If it does, the gap between current valuation and implied operating scale will become difficult for the market to ignore.
As risk plays go, this set-up looks strong.
Because ultimately, the only question is whether revenue is compounding faster than dilution and execution slippage.
Given the current revenue, dilution should be for growth only.
And right now, while much of the future pipeline is not yet locked in, the answer is clearly yes.