i-80 Gold's Young: Recapitalized, Fully Funded, and Targeting 600,000 Ounces by Phase Three

## A recapitalized i-80 Gold

Richard Young, President and CEO of i-80 Gold, sat down with Rick Rule ahead of the 2026 Rule Symposium, held in Boca Raton, Florida from July 6 to 10, 2026. The setting is promotional: i-80 Gold sponsored and exhibited at the event, and the video description carries an explicit disclosure that Rule holds i-80 Gold shares personally. The description also warns that symposium attention can create demand and lift a share price with no change in company fundamentals, and that these securities are often thinly traded and high-risk.

Young opens with his own resume. He says he was hired at Barrick Gold in late 1990 and was part of the team that built out Gold Strike in Nevada; several people from that era have since joined i-80 Gold's board or work alongside him. He also built and sold a mid-tier gold producer in West Africa, worked at Argonaut in Ontario, Mexico and the US, and spent part of his career raising capital for smaller-cap developers. Rule maps those three experiences — building, turning around, and financing small caps — onto the three problems Young now faces. The Nevada connection is what Young emphasizes: i-80 Gold's holdings trace to assets that Barrick and Newmont passed over during portfolio clean-ups, and they sit along what he calls a highway that runs across northern Nevada, linking to Barrick's Battle Mountain and Carlin ground.

## Four past producers, already permitted

Young describes four past-producing gold properties previously owned by Barrick and Newmont. His framing is reactivation, not greenfield: these have production history, existing permits — the company is asking federal and state regulators to re-permit what has already been done — infrastructure in place, and geology and metallurgy already understood.

The inventory he gives: 14 million ounces (Moz) of gold, split equally between the measured-and-indicated category, the more confident resource bucket, and inferred; plus 200 Moz of silver on the same even split.

The production trajectory: roughly 50,000 ounces this year, rising to about 200,000 ounces when phase one of the three-phase development plan completes next year, and to more than 600,000 ounces when all three phases land over the next five to six years.

## The valuation gap

Young, describing himself as an accountant, sets the resource picture against the equity. He says the recapitalization is complete, the company is fully funded, and no further equity issuance is needed: about 1.2 billion shares outstanding, and a market cap he estimates at roughly $1.8 billion — under $2 billion on his own rounding. Against that, he says that based on the original preliminary assessments published about a year ago, at current metal prices, the net asset value (NAV — the estimated value of a company's assets less its obligations) is about $10 billion after tax. He adds that opportunities inside the portfolio sit outside that figure, and that management's focus is delivering the growth plan and delivering that value.

Rule himself frames the gap as a $1.8 billion market cap against a net present value substantially in excess of that. Both numbers are the CEO's, delivered in a sponsored setting, and much of the resource behind the NAV sits in the inferred category rather than the higher-confidence one.

## Capital: about $2 billion, and the autoclave

Asked about capital intensity — the money actually required to reach that NAV — Young says the three phases need about $2 billion. Roughly half is Mineral Point, which he compares to a Round Mountain-scale mine: a 20-plus-year life at roughly 300,000 ounces of gold-equivalent production. He says capital intensity on Mineral Point is at or below comparable projects of its size, and that phases one and two are capital-light.

Of the other roughly $1 billion, Young says about half is the autoclave refurbishment, which he costs at a little over $400 million.

## The autoclave as the strategic asset

Young explains the processing split for a non-mining audience. Nevada has two types of mineralization: oxide and refractory. Oxide ore can be heap leached — stacked on pads and chemically leached — or run through a conventional mill. Refractory ore has to be cooked, which is what nature did over billions of years; industrially that means an autoclave, a pressure vessel that heats slurry under pressure, or a roaster. Permitting both was straightforward 30 years ago, Young says — he built both at Gold Strike — and is considerably harder now.

i-80 Gold is, he says, one of only two companies in Nevada with a permitted autoclave, the other being Nevada Gold Mine. The Lone Tree refurbishment is underway and he targets completion in the fourth quarter of next year, at a little over $400 million, and puts the asset's standalone value at roughly $1.5 billion.

Two payoffs. The immediate one is margin: i-80 Gold currently tolls material — pays a third party to process it — and Young says the autoclave will save about $1,000 to $1,500 per ounce of margin that currently leaves with the toll miller. The strategic one is optionality: a permitted autoclave makes high-grade refractory deposits economic, because they truck well — they carry enough grade to be worth moving — but no single company would fund and permit an autoclave to process them. Young puts payback at under two years, on roughly 20 years of throughput through a facility with a 40-year life, and frames the longer prize as buying stranded deposits that need autoclave technology, at low cost.

## Catalysts and the one policy dependency

The five gold projects inside the three-phase plan enter their consequential year. Young says i-80 Gold is running the largest infill and step-out drill program in its history — infill drilling goes between existing holes to upgrade the resource, step-out drills outside the known footprint to look for more — over the next year, and will complete three feasibility studies for its three underground projects plus pre-feasibility studies for two oxide open pits within 12 months. He expects the projects to get larger as a result.

The sequencing change is the part to watch. The plan was built 18 months ago, before the last U.S. federal election. Young says the administration that emerged is, in his words, not only business-friendly but binding-friendly, and that the company is now looking at ways to optimize and accelerate Mineral Point — the asset that sat in phase three when the plan was written and is now the most valuable in the portfolio. He calls commencing permitting and then construction over the next few years a key catalyst, targeting half a million ounces as the decade closes.

## Where this leaves an investor

Three things temper the presentation. The valuation gap depends on metal prices holding and on the resource converting under study — Young's figures come from preliminary assessments roughly a year old, not from the feasibility studies now underway. The growth plan leans on a permitting and political climate he describes as favorable, and Mineral Point's acceleration is a stated intention, not a permitted project. And the setting is promotional: a sponsored symposium interview in which the host discloses owning the shares, with Rule noting directly that being featured can raise demand for a security without changing fundamentals.

Young directs questions to Katarina DeRosa, newly appointed vice president of investor relations, whose email appears in the company's press releases.