Envirotech Vehicles Inc. (NASDAQ: EVTV) shares climbed about 15% in premarket trading Friday following an announcement from Azio AI Corporation that it has received a purchase order from EVTV for 28 next-generation ASIC compute systems. Azio AI confirmed that payment for the initial tranche has been received in full.
Azio AI indicated that it expects to start delivering the ordered ASIC systems in the coming weeks. The company said the units are slated for installation inside EVTV's liquid-immersion-cooled modular container infrastructure platform, a system for which EVTV retains lease rights to the containerized, power-backed infrastructure.
Under the terms of the collaboration framework described by the companies, EVTV will take ownership of the physical ASIC compute systems while continuing to hold lease rights to the containerized power infrastructure. Azio AI will assume responsibility for hardware integration, system configuration, and performance optimization.
Azio AI's engineering organization will support the deployment process, including validation and efforts to streamline operations. The engineering team noted in the announcement that it includes senior integration personnel who have prior experience at NVIDIA and in other high-performance computing environments.
The initial deployment has been structured as a validation exercise designed to demonstrate several operational and economic attributes under continuous-load usage. Specifically, the project aims to validate sustained high-density power utilization, the effectiveness of immersion cooling, resilience of uptime, and the compute economics when systems run under continuous-load conditions.
During this validation phase, the ASIC units are expected to run specialized SHA-256 compute workloads that generate Bitcoin yields while establishing operational benchmarks intended to inform scalable expansion to multi-megawatt deployments.
Key points
- EVTV stock rose roughly 15% in premarket trading after Azio AI received a purchase order for 28 ASIC systems and confirmed full payment for the initial tranche - impacts equity markets and small-cap tech investors.
- The ASIC units are due to be delivered in the coming weeks and will be deployed in EVTV's liquid-immersion-cooled, containerized infrastructure platform - relevant to data center and infrastructure sectors.
- The collaboration assigns ownership of compute hardware to EVTV while Azio AI manages integration, configuration, and performance optimization - important for operations and hardware lifecycle management.
Risks and uncertainties
- Delivery timing is described as expected to begin in the coming weeks - there is uncertainty about the exact delivery schedule and potential delays, affecting deployment timelines and related capital planning.
- The initial deployment is a validation phase focused on sustained high-density power utilization, immersion cooling efficiency, uptime resilience, and compute economics - outcomes are not guaranteed and will determine feasibility of scaled multi-megawatt expansion, affecting the data center and mining sectors.
- Operational streamlining and performance optimization are roles assigned to Azio AI's engineering team - the effectiveness of these efforts will influence uptime and yields during continuous-load SHA-256 workloads, with implications for crypto-mining economics and infrastructure utilization.