 Welcome, welcome. We are live from Data Cloud USA here in fabulous Austin, Texas at the Four Seasons Resort and this is our first interview to kick off Data Cloud USA where we are covering the latest stories, trends and innovations from leaders in global connectivity, real estate and the networks within. Buffy Harakitas of JSA and joining me today is Paul Voslopos of Bank Street Group. Paul, welcome. Buffy, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's a pleasure to have you today. So let's dive right in. How would you describe the current landscape of M&A activity in digital infrastructure and where do you see the market heading in 2024 and beyond? Great. Thanks, Buffy. Great question and a good lead into my presentation tomorrow at 9.30. I'll be doing on the M&A environment in data centers, but the environment has been very strong, remains strong. I think we saw a peak in 2021, particularly in data centers, 2022 also a very robust year. I think we'll be down in terms of volume of deals and in total number of deals and deal volume this year, but still very strong, still very strong year. I think you've seen some blockbusters announced already like the Compass deal. Right. For instance, you've seen Mubadala invest in aligned energy, big deal and even in the press last week, talking about Morgan Stanley infrastructure partners maybe acquiring assets in Europe. So it still remains a robust environment, albeit down slightly from our peak in 2021, but multiples are strong and deal volumes are strong. So we see that continuing hopefully, knock wood over the next year or two. Well, what regions in the world are you seeing the most activity and where do you see the next big region focus for the space? For the space? Yeah. Look, it's been busy around the world, frankly. I mean, we've been focused on the North American environment and there have been a number of big deals and a number of mid-sized deals across the board in data centers in the US, in Canada, but we see that around the world. I'd say two particular areas of focus, certainly Europe quite a bit going on in Europe. Again, whether that's data centers, independent data center providers per sale or data centers being carved out of telcos, for instance, we've seen it across the board, whether it's edge compute or hyperscale, interconnection, co-location, hybrid IT across that stack in the US and Europe. And Latin America has been a very strong environment for us at Bank Street. We've done a number of very large, multi-billion dollar deals in Latin America. We have some deals in the works right now there as well. Places like Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia, but it's around the world. Asia is a very attractive market and a number of deals. Africa is starting to get a lot of attention as well. Some new investments in places like Lagos, Nigeria, for instance. We see this demand for compute, demand for broadband transport. Certainly the need for data centers is a global need. Yeah, definitely it's a global need. And we're hearing about these regions over and over again pop up even in Greece and Italy. So tell me a little bit more about some of the growth strategies for the next wave of investment in digital infrastructure. The growth strategies of the players in the environment. Yeah, focused on data centers because that's why we're here. The demand set has been very strong. The absorption rates in terms of megawatts have been very large. I was reading on the plane on the way out here, CBERE report in terms of the number of megawatts deployed just in the second quarter was at an all-time high. So the growth drivers are clearly still there. I think the newest growth driver we're seeing is AI. I guess it's the talk of everybody. How many times have you heard it so far at this conference? Yeah, exactly. We're surrounded by it. Suddenly everyone's talking about NVIDIA and what they're doing and how AI is driving growth. And you have people in the industry predicting this is a multi-gigawatt need, multi-gigawatt demand set. So the basic growth drivers are there. I mentioned EDGE, the push to the EDGE to compute is there to tier two and tier three cities around the world. But the top seven or ten markets in the U.S. still see strong demand just in cloud and hybrid IT, co-location, and services. So across the board those same demand drivers are still there, leading to really record deployments of power and record vacancy rates in some of the top markets. Is there anything that you'd like to add today, Paul? Well, show up to my presentation tomorrow at 9.30. If I haven't plugged that already, I'll plug it. Tuesday at 9.30 we'll go into more detail. We'll have some slides and we'll talk about some of the blockbuster deals that have been happening, some of the activity that we've been involved with through the mid-couch space and some of the larger deals as well. And it's there'll be a fascinating speech followed by a panel discussing some of the some of the growth drivers behind this. Looking forward to it. Thank you, Buffy. And thanks again for joining us today and to our viewers, thanks for joining us. Stay curious, stay connected, and happy networking.