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Z Squared, Inc. Enters $50 Million Committed Equity Forward Purchase Agreement to Support AI Infrastructure Buildout

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Agreement Provides Committed Equity Capital to Execute Phase 1 Acquire and Convert Pipeline

FT. LAUDERDALE, Fla., June 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Z Squared, Inc. (Nasdaq: ZSQR) (the “Company”), a digital infrastructure company expanding into AI infrastructure, today announced the Company has entered into a $50 million committed equity forward purchase agreement with LucentHash / Data Part Capital, a trading name of Translucent Matter Inc., a British Virgin Islands company (the “Agreement”). The Agreement gives the Company the ability to fund acquisitions as they close and to stage conversion capital site by site as operational milestones are met, advancing the Company toward its Phase 1 destination of 100 megawatts of AI-ready capacity across multiple U.S. sites.

Each draw under the agreement is a separate, independent forward purchase, initiated by the Company on its own timing and priced at 95% of the volume-weighted average price over a five-day pricing window unique to that draw and subject to a 9-month lock-up by the purchaser. The Company retains full control over whether, when, and how much to draw. Capital is accessed in step with execution, not ahead of it.

The agreement is structured to align the parties’ long-term goals and to protect existing shareholders of the Company. Accordingly, shares issued under the Agreement are subject to a 9-month lock-up period, and LucentHash / Data Part Capital is contractually prohibited from short-selling or otherwise hedging ZSQR common stock.

“Z Squared is moving into a significant AI infrastructure opportunity from a position of strength, with virtually no debt on the balance sheet,” said David Halabu, Chief Executive Officer of Z Squared. “We believe this agreement strengthens that position with flexible equity capital that can be matched to acquisitions and site-level conversion milestones without adding leverage. We intend to move quickly, but with discipline, as we build toward our Phase 1 objective.”

Z Squared enters this financing with its Phase 1 strategy already in motion. The Company has signed a binding letter of intent to acquire Skycore Digital, which currently owns three active North Carolina sites powered by Duke Energy, providing up to 42 megawatts of total potential capacity (of which 18 megawatts is presently available under existing Duke Energy Letters of Authorization) — the first step toward our 100 MW Phase 1 goal. The Company is actively evaluating additional opportunities on the same criteria applied to Skycore: energized, grid-connected sites where conversion to AI-ready capacity can be executed on the timeline customers actually need, without the multi-year delays associated with greenfield development.

About Z Squared, Inc.

Z Squared, Inc. (Nasdaq: ZSQR) is a computing infrastructure company operating advanced computing equipment and expanding into AI infrastructure. The Company’s strategy is built on three principles: lead with power by acquiring operating sites where power is already flowing; build for AI workloads by converting that capacity into AI-ready colocation where the customer brings the compute and runs what they need; and scale with discipline by deploying conversion capital site by site, against signed contracts and operational readiness. Z Squared listed on the Nasdaq Global Market in April 2026.

Cautionary Note Regarding Forward-Looking Statements

This press release contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, as amended. Forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as “believes,” “expects,” “intends,” “plans,” “anticipates,” “aims,” “goal,” “objective,” “potential,” “estimates,” “projects,” “may,” “should,” “will,” “would,” “could,” and similar expressions, although not all forward-looking statements contain such identifying words. Forward-looking statements in this press release include, without limitation, statements regarding: the Company’s plans and ability to draw on the Agreement and the timing and amounts of any draws thereunder; the anticipated use of proceeds from draws to fund acquisitions and site-level conversion capital; the proposed acquisition of Skycore Digital, including the anticipated capacity, conversion timeline, and strategic fit of those sites; the Company’s Phase 1 strategy and its objective of 100 megawatts of AI-ready capacity across multiple U.S. sites; the Company’s evaluation of additional acquisition targets; the Company’s ability to convert acquired sites to AI-ready colocation capacity and attract customers therefor; expected benefits to existing shareholders from the lockup and no-hedging provisions of the agreement; and any other statements regarding the Company’s future operations, financial condition, growth prospects, or strategic plans.

These forward-looking statements are based on management’s current expectations and assumptions and are subject to significant risks, uncertainties, and other factors, many of which are outside the Company’s control, that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied. Such risks and uncertainties include, among others: the Company’s ability to satisfy all conditions required to make draws under the forward purchase agreement and to access capital thereunder on acceptable terms or at all, the Company’s ability to achieve its Phase 1 100 MW objective on the contemplated timeline, or at all, including the risk that acquisitions, joint ventures, financing, conversion capital deployment, customer contracting, or site development do not progress as anticipated; the Company’s ability to execute its acquire-and-convert strategy, including its ability to identify suitable energized sites, structure transactions on acceptable terms, and convert acquired sites to AI-ready capacity on the truncated timelines management contemplates; the Company’s ability to negotiate and execute definitive transaction documentation for the Skycore Digital acquisition, satisfy or obtain waivers of conditions to closing, finance the transaction, and consummate the acquisition on the timeline contemplated by the binding letter of intent or at all; the Company’s ability to realize the anticipated benefits of the proposed Skycore Digital transaction, including the projected megawatt capacity and the conversion of the 18 MW available under existing Duke Energy Letters of Authorization into operational capacity; the Company’s ability to execute its post-listing business strategy and to integrate operations and personnel following the recently completed business combination; the Company’s ability to develop the technical, operational, financial, and commercial capabilities required to participate in the AI infrastructure, data center, and high-performance compute hosting markets, none of which currently generate revenue for the Company; whether expected demand from NeoCloud operators and other AI infrastructure customers for production inference capacity materializes on the timeline or in the magnitude management anticipates; the Company’s current dependence on cryptocurrency mining and the volatility of cryptocurrency markets, mining economics, network difficulty, and digital asset values, including with respect to Dogecoin; changes in power costs, energy regulation, grid conditions, interconnection queue dynamics, curtailment programs, and seasonal electricity rate fluctuations; the availability, pricing, and technological obsolescence of mining and computing hardware; the Company’s ability to maintain and expand its facility footprint and respond to localized regulatory shifts or grid instability; the continued service of the Company’s senior management, including its Chief Executive Officer; competition in the computing infrastructure, cryptocurrency mining, AI infrastructure, and digital asset industries; market, economic, and capital-markets conditions, including the Company’s ability to access additional capital on acceptable terms; and regulatory developments affecting cryptocurrency mining, digital assets, power consumption, and data-center operations. Additional risks and uncertainties are described under the heading “Risk Factors” in the Company’s Current Report on Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on April 30, 2026 reporting the closing of the business combination, the Company’s Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2026, and the Company’s subsequent filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, each of which is available at www.sec.gov.

Except as required by law, the Company undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this press release, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise.

Investor Relations Contact: ZSQR@mzgroup.us

View original content:https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/z-squared-inc-enters-50-million-committed-equity-forward-purchase-agreement-to-support-ai-infrastructure-buildout-302791528.html

SOURCE Z Squared Inc.

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Reddit Beats the Wall Street Journal. New 5W Research Finds the Prestige Press is Losing Influence Inside AI-generated Brand Answers.

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MIAMI, June 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — 5W, the AI Communications Firm, today published Who AI Cites Now — a research report mapping which publications, platforms, and sources actually shape the answers ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews produce when an American consumer asks about a brand.

The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Bloomberg, and the Financial Times do not appear in the top twenty cited domains in the 5W Citation Source Audit. Forbes is the only U.S. business publication that does — ranked #18 at an estimated 1.38% citation share. Reuters, at #7 and an estimated 2.27%, outranks it.

Why it matters: Most PR budgets are still priced for the publications that win clicks. The engines that now sit between a brand and its buyers are citing a different list — and the gap is structural, not cyclical.

Three findings:

Wikipedia (~13.15%) and Reddit (~11.97%) together account for more than a quarter of every ChatGPT citation in the United States. Only ~12% of AI citations overlap with Google’s top 10 results (Ahrefs, 15,000-query analysis) — ranking on Google does not produce AI visibility. An estimated 35% of consumers now begin product discovery inside an AI engine, per the 5W First-Stop study.

“Communications leaders are still buying placements in publications that no longer drive the answer their buyer is reading. The hierarchy is being repriced in real time — and most brands have not measured the move.” — Ronn Torossian, Founder & Chairman, 5W

Full report: https://www.5wpr.com/research/who-ai-cites-now/

Methodology: Citation Source Audit synthesizing nine independent datasets covering more than 800 million tracked AI citations across ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews. Directional estimates — not a live query audit.

About 5W

5W is the AI Communications Firm, building brand authority inside ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews — alongside earned media, digital, and influencer channels. Founded 2003. Top U.S. PR Agency by O’Dwyer’s. Agency of the Year, American Business Awards®. 2026 Top Place to Work in Communications, Ragan. Digiday WorkLife Employer of the Year. 5wpr.com.

Media Contact
press@5wpr.com

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SOURCE 5W Public Relations

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CIQ expands Fuzzball to full multi-cloud so AI and HPC teams ship faster and spend less, with absolute workflow reproducibility and portability

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Fuzzball intelligently meta-orchestrates AI and HPC workloads across CoreWeave, AWS, GCP, OCI, Azure and on-premises infrastructure from one control plane

RENO, Nev., June 4, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — CIQ, the enterprise software company behind Rocky Linux and the Fuzzball AI and HPC orchestration platform, today announced full multi-cloud support for Fuzzball across CoreWeave, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and Microsoft Azure. Enterprise teams define an AI training, inference or HPC workflow once and execute it across any of these environments or on-premises infrastructure, with Fuzzball routing each job automatically to the optimal destination based on cost, performance and data locality.

Enterprise AI and HPC teams pay a compounding price for every cloud (or system) they run on: rebuilt pipelines, rewritten deployment scripts, profiling, testing and validation, before a single workload can run on a new infrastructure. That cost scales directly against the speed the business demands. Fuzzball eliminates it and completely levels the playing field.

A genomics team that validates a sequencing pipeline on AWS moves it to Azure or OCI without modifying a single line in the workflow definition. A model training job that requires H100 density routes to CoreWeave automatically, while a data-sensitive simulation stays on-premises by policy. The workflow definition, container images, data orchestration and job sequencing remain identical across every environment. Teams reach production faster, access better GPU capacity at lower cost and carry no operational overhead for every cloud they add.

“AI teams today are asked to ship faster, control costs and maintain sovereignty over their data, simultaneously, across infrastructure that was never designed to work together,” said Gregory Kurtzer, CEO and founder of CIQ. “We built Fuzzball to solve that problem at the architectural level. When your workflow definition abstracts its requirements properly, you get portable access to every GPU environment the market offers and the freedom to route to wherever the best price, performance and data policy lives. Controlling your infrastructure and workloads is what enterprise AI infrastructure requires for production, and no other platform delivers it.”

One control plane across five clouds and on-premises
Fuzzball’s multi-cloud architecture rests on a provider-agnostic workflow definition. The file that describes compute jobs, data movement, container images and resource requirements carries no cloud-specific logic. Fuzzball’s orchestration layer translates that definition into concrete infrastructure on whichever environment sits underneath, whether that means Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Oracle Cloud, AWS or CoreWeave.

Fuzzball federates across all five cloud environments, alongside on-premises clusters. It simultaneously evaluates available environments at runtime and routes each job to its optimal destination. Enterprises gain the GPU density of CoreWeave, the breadth of three major hyperscalers and the sovereignty of on-premises infrastructure from one control plane, with no separate toolchains, deployment scripts or IAM models per provider.

One security model across every environment
Each cloud deployment is provisioned through a two-phase automated process that stands up a complete, production-ready cluster without manual intervention. Fuzzball maintains one IAM model, one set of RBAC policies and one secrets management posture across every cloud it runs on. Static credentials are eliminated at every layer: Workload Identity on GCP, Managed Identities on Azure, Dynamic Groups on OCI and IAM Roles on AWS. Security and compliance posture travel with the workflow, not the cloud.

“Fuzzball turns multi-cloud from a liability into a competitive advantage,” said Bjorn Hovland, president of CIQ. “Five clouds used to mean five IAM models, five deployment pipelines and five sets of operational overhead, with complexity and risk being multiplied.”

Availability
Fuzzball’s CoreWeave, AWS, GCP, OCI and Azure deployments are available now. On-premises deployment on clusters built with Warewulf, VMware or bare metal remains a first-class target. Organizations evaluating multi-cloud AI and HPC infrastructure can request a demo at ciq.com/products/fuzzball.

About CIQ
CIQ is the founding support and services partner for Rocky Linux and a leading provider of enterprise Linux infrastructure. CIQ delivers commercially supported Linux offerings, high-performance computing solutions and AI infrastructure to enterprises, government agencies, research institutions and supercomputing centers worldwide. CIQ’s products include the Rocky Linux from CIQ (RLC Pro) family of operating systems, Ascender Pro for IT automation, Fuzzball job-based container orchestration, Warewulf cluster provisioning and Apptainer, the leading container system for high-performance computing. For more information, visit ciq.com.

Media Contact:

Cristin Connelly
Cathey Communications for CIQ
cristin@cathey.co

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SOURCE CIQ

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Kinefinity Vista Full-Frame 6K Digital Cinema Camera Announced; More Info at B&H Photo

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Pro Video News: Kinefinity introduces the Vista Full-Frame 6K Digital Cinema camera featuring up to 6K50 video, an articulating touchscreen, and interchangeable lens mounts.

NEW YORK, June 4, 2026 B&H is pleased to share the new Kinefinity Vista Full-Frame 6K Digital Cinema Camera. Positioned as a more affordable option for creators, this compact camera features full frame 6K capture at rates up to 50 FPS and up to UHD 4K at 100 FPS in Super 35. Available with user-interchangeable Kinemount, ARRI PL, and Sony E mounts, the Vista camera enables users to choose from a remarkably wide range of both cine-style and still photo lenses.

Kinefinity VISTA Full-Frame 6K Digital Cinema Camera  https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1966966991-REG/kinefinity_vista_full_frame_6k_cinema.html

Built around a full frame 6K CMOS sensor, the Vista camera provides up to 14 stops of dynamic range for rich, nuanced imagery. An integrated OLPF (optical low-pass filter) includes UV and IR cut filters for blocking unwanted wavelengths. It offers flexible recording options, including a built-in 256GB SSD (220GB user-accessible), a single CFexpress Type B card slot, and USB-C video output.

The internal SSD and the CFexpress card slot can be used simultaneously for dual recording. Recording options include ProRes 422 HQ up to 6K50 and UHD 4K120 for creating beautiful slow-motion sequences. The Vista camera’s color science features include KineLOG3, built-in Rec. 709, neutral LUTs, and the ability to use custom LUTs for monitoring or for “baking in” your color palette.

One major update from previous generations of Kinefinity cameras is the Vista camera’s articulated onboard monitor. This 4″ OLED touchscreen with 700 cd/m² brightness can flip out and rotate up to 360° for optimal viewing. It offers tactile Record, Playback, and Menu buttons, five-way navigation, and three customizable function buttons for easy control. Dual USB-C ports provide multifunctional use with one offering a direct link for live streaming, monitoring, and full camera control via your iPhone and the Kine app.

The other USB-C port can be used to export video directly from the internal SSD or as a webcam for an iPhone, Mac, or PC host. Either of these ports can provide a 5V, 2A, non-PD output for powering a Kinefinity EAGLE e-viewfinder or mobile device. The Vista can be powered via its two-pin LEMO power input or by using Kinefinity GripBAT 2Si batteries or widely available Sony L-series type batteries.

Preorder the Kinefinity VISTA Full-Frame 6K Digital Cinema Camera https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1966991-REG/kinefinity_vista_full_frame_6k_cinema.html

Learn more with Explora Blog Kinefinity Vista Cinema Camera https://www.bhphotovideo.com/explora/video/news/versatile-6k-capture-with-the-compact-kinefinity-vista-digital-cinema-camera

About B&H Photo Video

As the world’s largest source of photography, video, and audio equipment, as well as computers, drones, and home and portable entertainment, B&H is known worldwide for its attentive, knowledgeable product experts and excellent customer service, including fast, reliable shipping. B&H has been satisfying customers worldwide for over 50 years.

Visitors to the website can access a variety of educational videos and enlightening articles. The B&H YouTube Channel have an unmatched wealth of educational content. Our entertaining and informative videos feature product overviews from our in-house specialists. You can view the B&H Event Space presentations from many of the world’s foremost experts and interviews with some of technology’s most dynamic personalities. Tap into this exciting resource by subscribing to the B&H YouTube Channel here. In addition to videos, the B&H Explora blog presents new product announcements, gear reviews, helpful guides, and tech news written by product experts and industry professionals, as well as our award-winning podcasts.

When you’re in Manhattan, take a tour of the B&H Photo Electronics and camera store, located at 420 Ninth Avenue. The techno-carousel spins all year round at the counters and kiosks at B&H. With thousands of products on display, the B&H Photo SuperStore is the place to test-drive and compare all the latest gear.

The B&H Payboo Credit Card offers the industry’s best instant savings and special financing, subject to credit approval. Visit B&H’s Payboo Page to learn more and apply.

Contact Information:
Geoffrey Ngai
B&H Photo Video
212-615-8820
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/

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SOURCE B&H Photo

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