 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell coming to you today from Monaco where we're together at Data Cloud 2022. Joining me is Dean Nelson, founder of Infrastructure Masons. Great to have you, it's been a while. Yeah, it's been three years, well almost three years. We were back here in 2019. Three years ago, yeah, yeah. I know it's so great to see you in person. You know, it was great last night. We got to hear some great news from you and just a little background for those who may not know. I know, you know, Infrastructure Masons, iMasons has done so much great work around initiatives, supporting education, diversity and inclusion and of course, sustainability, which leads us to your new announcement and your new initiative. Can you tell us about it? Absolutely, so last night we announced the iMasons Climate Accord and so this is a coalition of companies coming together to reduce carbon and products, power and materials and data centers. So we had 71 companies. So we announced 70 last night, but right at 6 p.m. GI partners came in. So John Shaputis, thank you very much. But we have equity firms as well as 35 data center companies, almost every major player in the business is in it. We had AWS, Meta, Microsoft and Google, as well as 14 product companies, three software companies, it's amazing. And within less than six weeks, we went from an initial meeting to having the Climate Accord announced with 70 companies in. So inspiring, it was so exciting, I will say, to be there last night and see you present it live. Tell us a little bit more about the history of what brought this into being and so quickly, as you said. Well, actually we've been doing this for a while. So if you think of iMasons, we launched the Sustainability Initiative back in 2020. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, we brought the hyperscalers and a whole bunch of people together and we said every click improves the future because digital infrastructure should positively contribute back to the economy as well as society without harming the planet. So that was our, I guess, origin of what we were trying to do and then there's a lot of other work along the way. But we have an advisory council and that is a grouping of our foundation partners as well as industry luminaries that come together, senior people that really care about this stuff and we decided we're going to have our next AC meeting at someone's house. So I called Christian Bellotti over at Microsoft and I said, could we do something at your house in February and will this bring all the advisory council members together? And so we did all the protocols and everything but we had 40 people there, 40 senior leaders and it was dubbed Shea Bellotti because it was at Christian's house and in that we had one thing that we were actually focusing on, one. Can we actually come up with something that we as an industry can do together? Now that sounds very simple but when you think about 40 executives that run some of the biggest portfolios in the world with lots of initiatives and lots of things that they're doing already, how do you take those people and say, can we unify, unite on one cause that's going to accelerate the timeline of carbon reduction in our race towards net zero? I mean it's a big deal and what I loved about it is the people in that room really care and so we were all very motivated to figure out how we can compound the impact when it comes down to all the work that all these companies are doing and so in that meeting we were six hours at Christian's house, you know, meals, talking, whatever else but we dove into working sessions and at the end we had five different groups read out their findings and the synthesis of all that was we all agreed that we are aligned in carbon reduction across digital infrastructure. Okay, everybody totally agrees we've all made commitments to it and but we don't have a common carbon methodology like an accounting methodology. So all these key themes came out of it. We had one other follow-up meeting that was March 17th and then from that point until last night we had 70 companies joined and what's neat is the hyperscalers were leading the conversations and one of the biggest themes in there is they are, if you think about it, the market movers are the buyers. So if we can now decide how we can influence the way that we're actually managing this because there's two big buckets so I'm going into a lot more detail but there's two buckets here. One is embodied carbon and the other one is carbon intensity and the source energy. So embodied carbon, what is it, where is it? So we said materials, it's all the stuff that is in a data center concrete, steel, copper, anything else that does to build a facility. The second one is products. So think of generators, UPSs, PDUs, servers, switches, et cetera. Each of those, the materials inside as well as the products themselves have embodied carbon. There's a carbon history of those things. So what we said is can we just create a QR label or a carbon label? That carbon label will now show the history of that product or that building which is a sum of the materials and the products in the building. We'll have the carbon history which means that now we've got all the stuff in there that we can report up. Secondly, we now look at the source energy for the data center and we say what is the carbon intensity? How much solar? How much wind? How much coal? How much other things? And now you add up the embodied carbon and the actual source energy carbon and you will know real-time carbon of that data center. Now an important point of this and by the way, in this book which you all must read and thank you very much, JSA. Look at him, I'm self-floating. In the chapter here, this was, we had to set the baseline. And that baseline is this. There are seven million data centers. There's 105 gigawatts of capacity built around the globe. We consume 594 terawatt hours of energy and that translates to 2.4% of the world's energy drop. That's digital infrastructure. That's our industry. But we had to have a baseline because when we have the baseline, now we have a starting point. Okay, the climate accord's now saying, we're going to measure embodied carbon and carbon intensity and power in that portfolio. That's every company that's driving digital infrastructure. Then we can see how much progress we're making. Because if you don't have a starting line, you have no idea if you're making the progress you want. And that's part of, thank you for, you know, intro-ing the book, Greener Data launched, you're a contributing author. It launched on Earth Day so last Friday. It's already a best-selling book. So congratulations, you're a best-selling author. But really, you know, in it, you're talking about all of those things and creating the roadmap and the background and allowing people to understand how they can make a difference and contribute in what some of those, the really, you know, some of the more technical steps that they need to consider. But how, then, you know, can people in the industry get involved? I know last night you talked about some ways, exciting, by the way, that 70 went to 71 already, you know, before the night was even over. But how can people get involved in the climate accord? Absolutely. So if you go to imasons.org slash climate accord, you'll see the information about it and there's a button for companies to sign up. But also what's interesting is that individuals can sign up. Because IMasons is a professional association. It's about uniting the builders of the digital age because it's the people that make this happen. They happen to work for great companies, but those companies are not great without those people. And so we unite those people as a community on these efforts and we have four of them. So is education, diversity, inclusion, sustainability, and technology. Now, the reason that this is all coming together and why this book is so important is if you think of the 24 authors in the 20 chapters that are in here, they all have different perspectives. I read through this book and like, okay, so take Gary Connolly, right? And he's talking about bees. I had no idea that the efforts he was doing in Ireland to go back and it's all about the community and that ecosystem, but they're putting in bee elements of this in data center areas. But that's like one of the chapters. I totally didn't understand. So there's 20 more of those in here. Right, from global thought leaders in our industry with, to your point, different perspectives and different ways of learning. Insights. Yeah, actionable insights from industry leaders. Yeah, thank you for that. Thank you. We appreciate having you. I think it's always great to hear from you. Congratulations on the climate accord. Thank you. So inspiring. You're always doing such great work. We appreciate it. We are happy to have you. And join us again. I mean, we'll see you probably at ITW, right? In two weeks from now. Yeah, and so by the way, if you're not, if ITW come over to the JSA event, is I think we're at book signings and stuff. I mean, I'm signing books, what the heck is this? Anyways, I've never in my life thought I would be published or be a best-selling author. And thank you to JSA for what you guys have done because Jamie and team, it is incredible that a book could be published in less than five months from inception to delivery. I've never heard of that. And already be a best-seller. Yeah. And we must say, and part of a movement, right? So hashtag greener data, join the movement towards greener data. Yeah. So thank you, Dean. Thank you for joining us today. And thank you, viewers, for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking.