 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Noland here in sunny Miami, Florida for Metro Connect USA 2022. Joining me today is Wes Swenson, the CEO of Nova Data Centers. Welcome Wes to JSA TV. Thank you for having me. Welcome back, I should say. Yes. For our viewers who may not be familiar with Nova Data Centers, you had an incredible year. Can you tell us more about your data center in Utah? Yeah, so we built a data center starting in 2019 in Salt Lake City, Utah. It's 100 acres. It's built for 200 megawatts and 1.5 million square feet. So we launched it just last fall, it went live and we also acquired a 50 acre operation in Colorado Springs as well last year. Wonderful, so I hear that you have a lot of futuristic capabilities that focus on sustainability, innovation. Tell us about some of those features inside the data center in Utah specifically. Yeah, so holistically, it's what I would call holistic sustainability. So it's not just the big check marks, but for instance, we're at high elevation by design at about 5,600 feet and that's so that we can use the cold ambient air coming off of the Wasatch Range as the storms come across and bring in that cold air. It's also by design that it's low humidity, but just enough humidity at what we call the wet bulb temperature between temperature and humidity that it's perfect for data centers. We're in an area that has renewable energy credits with solar farms available to it. A lot of aspects, even from, we don't really allow plastic bottles on the premises. We provide reusable water bottles. We have water filling stations with filtered water. We've tried to do as many aspects of environmental consciousness, waterless cooling, so we don't use any water to do our cooling. It's all driven off of heat exchange coils, ambient air, which we pull off of the mountain range, about almost 80% of the time in the year to just cool the servers for free. Wow, that is incredible. Not only by design, but by culture as well, by the way that you're talking about the water bottles and different initiatives, so that's wonderful, leading by example and design. And then I did hear that there are some other features that are very unique, Braille throughout the data center, something like that, tell us about that. Yeah, so where I got to do this from the ground up, I really wanted inclusivity and for people with physical challenges from A to Z really. So within different viewing areas, we provide Braille reading on some really nice railing as well as different like podiums so that if they have any questions, they can read through Braille and understand it that way. We also do access ramps that are actually part of the architecture. It's not as an afterthought. It's actually in our main areas that if anybody has physical challenges, that it's much easier to access the data center. We even provide walkers on site for clients to store their bags securely with their own codes because we don't allow certain things into the data center. Through our portals, when you enter the data center, it's touchless security. So you just wave your hand or use your cell phone for access. We issue codes to visitors before they get to the data center and it opens the gates automatically as they approach. Just a lot of things that we've put a lot of detail in as far as accessibility and the future conveyance of the data center, how will it age over time? So we've tried to do as many things like that as possible that we can think of today and make it as future proof as possible. It's a great combination of marrying the customer focused approach with technology and even sustainability and through science. I'd love to go check that out and it looks like a science experiment or a science lesson waiting to happen with innovation, of course, top of mind. How do you see data centers like yours with Nova data centers playing, shaping the data center industry? Well, I guess my view of it is that if you look at the evolution of data centers over the internet's about 30 years old but the evolution of the data centers they went from closets to rooms to floors in a building to buildings and now campuses, entire master planned campuses. The one thing that I still think we forget sometimes is the humanistic side of it. Even the carpet that we've selected for the data center is a fractal design and by science it's supposed to be more relaxing. It has a kind of a nature effect built into the carpet. It's called fractal carpet. Things like that, the colors, the quality, even of the bathrooms, these are bathrooms that are comparable to a five-star hotel because who doesn't like to go to the bathroom in a five-star hotel, right? Things like that, even our, we have fitness facilities, we have F1 car simulators, golf simulator, but even the entire architecture is really built about around a more humanistic approach. The design of the building is a Scandinavian minimalist kind of Asian approach with floating roofs. Landscaping has fire pits, a waterfall feature, reflecting pond and we've also replicated like linear features from say the monolith in 2001 Space Odyssey built to the 149 dimension. Just a lot of aspects, we do artificial grass, so we're not using sprinklers, we use drought resistant plants, like just a really holistic new approach to what it means to both the systems and to the people that operate in them. That's incredible and it's so true, with technology you do to some degree could lose that humanistic approach and you're making sure that is forefront and top of mind for everyone. Well, we appreciate you having you here and we want to make sure that our viewers can stay up to date with Nova Data Center, so where can our viewers go to learn more? Yeah, please just go to www.novva.com, nova.com. Two V's, gotcha. Two V's, we have two V's. Well thank you, Wes, we appreciate you. Thank you, appreciate it. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA Podcast, happy networking.