$0.85
$7.50
bear $0.85
base $2.25
bull $7.50
margin of safety $1.25
market price* $3.11
New Era Energy & Digital (formerly New Era Helium) is converting a legacy West Texas/New Mexico oil, gas and helium producer into a power and land developer for AI data centers. The company's near-term flagship project is the Texas Critical Data Centers campus, 493 acres in Ector County near Odessa, Texas, which it now owns outright after buying out its joint-venture partner's remaining half-interest for roughly $70 million in the first half of 2026. Legacy gas and helium sales, which once represented essentially all of the company's revenue, have shrunk to just $36,000 in the second quarter of 2026 (from $209,000 a year earlier) and are no longer economically meaningful; the business is now almost entirely a bet on the data-center buildout. That bet took two concrete steps forward this summer. On August 14, 2026 the company obtained its first construction-related approvals for the campus -- a development/drive-approach permit from Ector County and a notice-of-intent approval from Texas environmental regulators to begin grading -- and disclosed that a subsidiary of its Phase 2 power partner, Thunderhead Energy Solutions, had filed for an air permit sized for roughly 550 megawatts, which together with Phase 1 would put the site's total planned capacity near 757 megawatts. Then, on September 21, 2026, the company signed a 20-year power purchase agreement for 200-207 megawatts with a Vistra Corp. utility affiliate, with power expected to begin flowing in the third quarter of 2027. Management calls this the difference between "a site with a power plan" and "powered land," and that is a fair characterization: a signed, two-decade contract with an investment-grade counterparty is real evidence the site can be built, not just planned. Vistra also took a 5% non-voting interest in the powered portion of the project and a right of first refusal on future development there -- a real cost of getting the deal done, but also a signal that a sophisticated infrastructure investor is willing to put capital behind the site. What is still missing, as of the most recent quarterly report (period ended June 30, 2026) and as of this writing, is a customer. No data-center lease or tenant agreement has been signed. Powered, permitted land is worth more than raw land, but the company has not yet converted that into contracted revenue, and it typically takes hyperscale tenants many months to commit even to a fully powered site. The balance sheet has been transformed since our last look at this name. A wave of financing completed in April 2026 -- roughly $112.5 million of equity, $26.2 million from warrant exercises, and a $20 million draw on a new $290 million term facility from Macquarie -- pushed cash and restricted cash to $84.8 million and stockholders' equity to $138.6 million as of June 30, 2026, against only $36.1 million of total liabilities (most of it the Macquarie term loan). Two smaller notes were fully repaid in the same period. Management states that this financing resolved the substantial doubt about the company's ability to continue as a going concern that appeared in its audited 2025 annual report; we independently agree, given that cash on hand now covers roughly three years of the company's current operating cash burn (about $10.9 million in the first half of 2026, or roughly $21-22 million annualized) even before any further borrowing. The cost of that transformation has been heavy, continuing dilution. Shares outstanding have roughly doubled every six to nine months over the past two years -- from under 13 million in 2024, to about 28 million at the end of 2025, to roughly 55 million in the first quarter of 2026, to about 106.6 million by early August 2026 -- and stock-based compensation alone ran $14.2 million in just the first half of 2026, on a company with barely half a million dollars of revenue. A large block of investor warrants (roughly 16 million shares, struck near $2) remains outstanding and is likely to be exercised, implying more dilution ahead. First-quarter 2026 results were also restated upward in loss by $1.8 million in August 2026 because of a stock-compensation accounting error -- worth flagging as a data point on the reliability of the company's near-term financial reporting, even though it does not change the underlying story. Because there is no meaningful earnings history to build a cash-flow forecast from, we value this as a land-and-option story rather than an operating business, anchored to the audited balance sheet and adjusted for the specific, dated developments above. In the bear case, the powered, permitted site does not attract a tenant within a reasonable window. The company keeps building out infrastructure and continues its historical pattern of funding itself mostly through new stock rather than the debt facility, so share count keeps climbing while underlying land value does not grow enough to offset it; the legacy oil, gas and helium business, now nearly wound down and still carrying a fresh $1 million environmental remediation accrual for legacy New Mexico sites, adds nothing. That lands at roughly $0.85 per share -- below today's balance-sheet value of about $1.30 per share, reflecting continued burn and dilution without a tenant to show for it, but well above a wipeout, because the cash and land are real and the debt load is now modest. In the base case, the site's newly powered, permitted status -- the September 2026 Vistra agreement plus the August 2026 construction approvals -- leads to a Phase 1 tenant or partner within the next two to three years, roughly consistent with the 16-20 month hyperscale deployment timelines the company has described, funded increasingly through the Macquarie debt facility rather than pure share issuance, which moderates but does not eliminate further dilution. Phase 2's 550-megawatt permit application is still just an application at this point and gets no separate credit in this case. That lands at roughly $2.25 per share. In the bull case, a Phase 1 tenant signs relatively quickly given the site's now-powered, permitted status and Vistra's involvement, Phase 2's permit is granted and converts into a second power agreement on similar terms to the first (extending a pattern the company has just demonstrated it can execute), and the buildout is funded predominantly through the debt facility rather than further heavy share issuance. That case is worth roughly $7.50 per share. We have not given any value in any case to the company's much larger stated multi-gigawatt New Mexico land pipeline, since no permits, power agreements or tenants exist yet for that land. Given the binary nature of tenant-signing risk, the unresolved dilution overhang from outstanding warrants, and the recent accounting restatement, a wide margin of safety is warranted. The margin-of-safety price is around $1.25 per share, well below the base case.