 Hello. Welcome back, everyone, to JSA TV and JSA Podcast. We are streaming live from DCD, Virginia, talking about the latest stories, trends, and innovations in the digital infrastructure community with leaders such as long-time friend of JSA and a well-frequent guest, I would say, on JSA TV, although we've never had the chance to do this interview together. So very excited to chat with you again here, Sean Barney from JLL, you are VP of Data Center Strategy for the Americas. Welcome. Thanks for having me. I always love the collaboration with JSA. Yes, same here. So we'll just dive right in here. So you actually spoke earlier today on a panel that explored the very hot topic of AI and, of course, in the data center environment. What were maybe a key takeaway or two that you want to highlight from that? Oh, it was awesome. People laughed. They cried. Definitely the best panel of the whole show who doesn't like to start the day off with some AI. So I have a bit of a contrarian take on AI, which is really, really interesting. But first of all, it's an exciting, the broader context is it's a really exciting time to be alive in the industry. We're in the midst of the fourth industrial revolution. Data is our currency, and AI plugs right into that. We are seeing just an amazing thing going on, which started about a year ago when chat GPT dropped kind of public live and boom, overnight a million users and then the street got interested in this and suddenly companies that couldn't even spell AI had AI based value props. And then boom, here we are a year later, everyone's doing it. It's part of every company's product strategy and all the hyperscalers are chasing this stuff. And at the same time, all the co-location clients I work with are figuring out how to do this and have a hybrid environment. But the contrarian part of this that I take away is AI, despite kind of appearances on the surface, is actually driving sustainability, which is really exciting. And it's because of this creative destruction, AI really pushed us into this uncomfortable zone where we've had to change the basis of design for how we're building and designing data centers. The power density has increased logarithmically in really a few months. So we're scrambling, we're doing new things, but it kind of really pushed us out of this evolution approach to changing data center design into this kind of revolutionary approach. And part of this is cooling. So with these immense densities that we're seeing in AI, cabinets of 50 kilowatts to 100 kilowatts, it's crazy. I designed and ran 20 kilowatts to the cabinet back in my Microsoft days 15 years ago, and that was a big deal. Boy, we're never gonna get bigger than that, and then poof, literally overnight, this logarithmic change. So because of that, air cooling really doesn't work so well anymore. If you see FD, how these super dense cabinets work with where he goes, we can't move fast, air fast enough anymore to cool them off. So after years of kind of lingering out there on the fringe, liquid cooling is a thing now. That's what we have to do. And liquid cooling is super green, super sustainable. This is good news from a sustainability standpoint because the thermal properties of liquid are far greater than air. And when you liquid cooling, you get rid of all your air cooling infrastructure, the chillers and the loops and the towers and the condensate and the water treatment and all that type of thing. So that's one way AI pushes sustainability. All that stuff just goes away. Another big sustainable part of AI is the fact that your use of water is reduced. Water is becoming a big issue. Like in the US West, for example, folks have to do really creative things to conserve water. If you're using liquid and recirculating that liquid efficiently, that's a really sustainable thing. You're suddenly not consuming all kinds of water. And then the really interesting part of what's going on with AI, because of the scarcity of power and the inability to get these huge tracts of land and power, I see AI finally kind of giving a rebirth to the edge. And with that, with building smaller AI data centers, high density, one or two or 3000 square foot facilities with several megawatts of critical load, I see this being done at the edge in existing buildings. So adaptable reuse. And this is really, really exciting. There's 30 billion square feet of commercial real estate in just the US alone. It's a lot of buildings. We need to reuse them. We're actually pretty good at this in the data center business. 350 Cermak in Chicago is a great example. Hudson, QTS in Atlanta, all these facilities were former manufacturing sites, warehouses, so on and so forth. So that's condensing a lot of ideas into a short soundbite, but I'm hopeful for sustainability vis-a-vis AI, because it's really pushing us to really change the way we're doing things, the way we've done things for the last 20 years or so. Yeah, I like to what you said about AI pushing, pushing the data center industry into revolution instead of evolution, which is how things have been moving along for quite a while, right? So that's a really great point. So we also want to talk on the sustainability front. We'll just continue that line of thinking. So greener data, have a nice little, I happen to have a copy here of volume one of greener data, which launched last year. So we are launching volume two Earth Day next year. And of course, Sean will be a part of that as you were a part of the first time around. So could you give us a little preview into what your chapter will be about? Yes, it's a perfect segue because it's the same context. So circularity, reuse, years ago, we were real good at circularity and doing building reuse, for example. We need to get back to this thinking. How can we be more sustainable by doing reuse? So when you reuse a building, for example, you're not knocking down a structure and paving over it and building new and all the embodied carbon that comes with the steel and the concrete and so on and so forth. There should almost be a carbon accounting credit when you reuse a building for the obviating of this carbon consumption. So circularity and reuse, everything from water to air to buildings. And I have some pretty interesting parallels and examples in everyday life about how we can think less disposably. I think this has been kind of a societal problem. We've been thinking as a disposable society. We don't fix things anymore. We throw them away. One of the solutions I'm proposing to sustainability in the data center space as we grow and we scale is an adaptive reuse mindset around real estate and technology and other things. So really excited to put all that down on paper. And of course I'm almost done as the deadline is approaching, just like all the other authors. You heard it here first. He's almost out with this chapter. So as we look forward to 2024, believe it or not, we are nearing that mark rapidly. What topics do you think will be most important to JLL's customers next year? Yeah, well, of course sustainability. This is huge, huge. We've got corporate sustainability reporting directive. We're in the recording period. We have to report soon. We just released a product to help our customers measure and manage or the carbon footprint. The industry's been clamoring for this. We're excited to get this out to help our clients be more sustainable. About 81% of our top 50 clients have ESG goals from the board level. But only about 19% actually have funded programs to remedy that and do reporting. So we're gonna help with that. So sustainability is really big and then AI. Our clients are very interested in how they either do hybrid AI and traditional data center environments. They build new for AI. And again, they find power and buildings to host these super dense AI environments. And that's where the adaptive reuse comes in. So again, it's a great time to be alive in the industry. All this new stuff pushing us to new limits and job security for all of us for a long time. So I'm really excited to help my clients tackle this stuff and probably more importantly, help the environment by being more sustainable. Yeah, excellent. Well, you full circle. That was a perfect wrap up. Thank you so much. Sustainability and AI, of course, huge, huge topics for 2024. And thank you so much for Sean for joining us today. Again on JSA TV. Well, thank you. Shout out to JSA. Thank you. All right, and thank you to all of our viewers back home and here at the conference. We're live here at DCV Virginia and happy networking.