Neel Khokhani: The Patient Investor

Interview with key investor that helped turn IREN into an AI leader backed by $9.7bn investment

Suspended over the Bass Strait at night, in a single engine aircraft, Neel Khokhani learned the lesson he would later build a fund on.

Below him, black ocean. Above him, no visible horizon. His inner ear, deprived of any reference, began to insist the plane was banking left. The instruments, calmly lit on the panel, said the wings were level. One of those signals was lying. He had been trained to know which.

He flew on the instruments. He landed in Tasmania.

It is the moment he comes back to when markets panic.

“You do not survive that flight by listening to your inner ear,” he says. “You trust the instruments.”

Khokhani runs Epochal Corporation, a Dubai based private investment firm managing roughly $100 million in asset-backed, infrastructure-style positions. The fund is built on a single stubborn premise: that financial markets, like a disoriented pilot, routinely mistake feeling for fact. His job, as he sees it, is to know the difference. So far, the record suggests he does.

He was twenty two when his boss fired him from a job as a flight instructor. Khokhani had developed a habit of telling the man how to run the business better. The parting line stuck with him. “Neel, if you think you know so much, go and do it yourself.”

“You survive by trusting a system that other pilots have stress tested for decades. Capital is the same.”

He had $5,000 in savings and no aircraft.

What he did next would now be called a pre-sale. He uploaded a coupon offer to a discount website, heavily reduced flight lessons, paid upfront. Within twenty four hours, strangers had bought $180,000 worth. He used the cash to buy a plane and open a school.

A decade later, that school, Soar Aviation, was the largest pilot training operation in Australia. Three campuses. Fifty five aircraft. Hundreds of graduates now flying commercially. Khokhani eventually sold half the business at a reported $65 million valuation. The lesson he took from it had almost nothing to do with aviation.

“Most businesses are mispriced because most businesses are mismanaged,” he says.

That sentence is the entire thesis.

When Khokhani looked at flight schools as a student, he saw operators who loved the romance of aviation and neglected the arithmetic of it. Aircraft sat idle. Costs drifted upward. Schedules excluded the working adult who could actually pay. The gap between how the business was run and how it could be run was visible to anyone who bothered to look. Most people did not bother.

He began to suspect this was true of nearly every industry.

“I did not set out to become an entrepreneur”

“I did not set out to become an entrepreneur,” he says. “I set out to become a pilot. But I was always investing, whether I called it that or not. Every aircraft I bought and every hangar I leased was a capital allocation decision.”

After stepping back from Soar’s operations, he moved into full time capital allocation. The framework he brought with him was unsentimental and short to describe. He looks for asset-heavy businesses trading cheaply against replacement cost. Strong balance sheets, preferably no debt. Real net income, not promises of it. Meaningful insider ownership, so management eats from the same plate as shareholders. Neglected sectors where competition is thin. And a plausible catalyst capable of surfacing value within a year or two, so the wait is finite.

“Returns are a byproduct,” he says. “The discipline that produces them is built before the investment is ever made.”

The clearest illustration of the framework in practice is IREN, the data centre operator. In 2022 the stock was already down roughly seventy percent from its IPO, trading near $8. Khokhani began accumulating then. It continued to fall. Wall Street had largely written the company off as a distressed Bitcoin miner. Khokhani saw something else. He saw power-connected industrial infrastructure being valued at less than the cost to build it. He saw a balance sheet with no debt, which meant no clock, which meant time. Time, he likes to say, is the rarest form of optionality.

He kept buying. He eventually became one of the company’s largest shareholders.

When the AI infrastructure cycle accelerated, the market reframed what IREN was. The company signed a $9.7 billion contract with Microsoft to provide AI cloud capacity from its Texas campus. Its market capitalisation moved above $15 billion. None of this, in Khokhani’s reading, was the creation of value. It was the recognition of value that had been there in 2022, in the wiring and the substations and the energised land, and that the market had simply refused to see.

“The price moved,” he says. “The asset did not.”

From Dubai, he is now developing what he describes as a contrarian thesis on artificial intelligence. The world frames the intelligence revolution as a software story. Khokhani thinks it is a physical one. Data centres, power infrastructure, advanced packaging facilities, edge compute nodes embedded inside hospitals and factories and ports: these are the real assets underneath the revolution, and they are, in his reading, systematically undervalued by a market still dazzled by code.

‘he is now developing what he describes as a contrarian thesis on artificial intelligence’

“A business is a physical thing first and a financial thing second,” he says. “Hangars, simulators, aircraft, instructors, students. Each was a constraint solved with cash, not optimism. The age of intelligence is no different. Someone has to own the ground.”

The temperament required to hold these positions through the drawdowns is the part he says is hardest to teach. There were quarters when revenue was slow and every voice in the room suggested a pivot. He did not pivot. Pilots, he points out, are trained on procedures refined over decades because emotion becomes unreliable under pressure.

Investors face the same problem, but most never build the procedure.

“You do not survive a long career in the air by improvising,” he says. “You survive by trusting a system that other pilots have stress tested for decades. Capital is the same.”

The boss who fired him at twenty two went bankrupt some years later.

Khokhani is still compounding.