 This is JSA TV, the newsroom for data center and telecom professionals. I'm Dean Perina, JSA, and we are coming to you live. That's right, live in beautiful Fort Lauderdale, I almost said Fort Worth again, Fort Lauderdale, Florida at Metro Connect 2023. And I am here now with my new best friend, Mr. West Swenson. West is the CEO of Nova data centers. And the reason I say West is my new best friend is because this interview is coming earlier than anticipated, and you were very, very gracious to do this with us earlier. So West, thank you so much. We appreciate that. So West, for our viewers that don't already know, why don't you tell them a little bit about Nova data centers? So Nova is a recent startup, but not a startup in the data center world. I had a previous company that I sold in 2017 and started Nova at that time. We started our first building in 2022 based in Salt Lake. We added our third location this last year and hope to have another three locations by the end of 2023. So you started in 2022 and you have how many locations already? We have three now, and we'll add another three this year. So expansion is on the horizon. Expansion is the name of the game, that's correct. I get it, I get it. You also made a pretty significant announcement at the end of 2022. You want to tell us about that? Yeah, so we did announce our Las Vegas location in North Las Vegas and that is a beautiful facility being built right now and it goes live at the end of this year. It's about a 60 megawatt critical load data center and one of the first new operators in that area in a long time and we're thrilled to be in that city. Yeah, a lot of people like to go to Las Vegas but for other reasons than data centers typically. What makes Las Vegas the right place for you? Yeah, so it is part of our broader strategy to build a really in-depth data center distributed architecture in the west. So we plan to have almost eight data centers in the major cities in the western United States including California to offer our clients interconnected wholesale data centers in the west to give them many options and Vegas is really a great outlet for California data traffic. So we think it's a really good low-cost alternative to that market and it fits really well with our water-free cooling that we do in the desert. So we're very drought sensitive and we think it's just a really good fit for the company and who doesn't want to go to Vegas once in a while. Yeah, maybe I'm going to have to come visit. Yeah, absolutely. There's always a good excuse to get there. Exactly, I'm sure you hear that a lot. But some other markets, interesting markets, Utah being one of them and the Salt Lake Tribune recently mentioned, Nova, what you want to tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, I think you're referring to an article they did on data centers in that area and that included the NSA's data center, the government data center. One of the things we're known for is water-free cooling and it was an article on how much water different data centers use and I think the others were 150 to 300 million gallons a year and we were a million and that's for toilet flushes and landscaping. And if I could get rid of both of those, I would. Maybe the employees might not approve, but yeah, that's about all we use for water. So we're super low water usage in that area. All of our data centers are water-free. So obviously sustainability is a big topic of discussion, not just at Metro Connect, but across the industry and has been for the better part of the last two or three years. Some of it, we hope to get to a certain point. Some of it real on the ground stuff that folks are doing. Talk to us about your sustainability efforts. Yeah, I mean, it is it's part of our core culture. So when we do our designs of our buildings to start with, they're even angled at the proper direction of the sun to reduce the amount of sunlight on direct equipment. We do an R120 insulation on our buildings. The one in Salt Lake has 14 inch thick exterior walls with three feet of rock wall between that and the data center so that we keep the climate stable regardless of the outside temperature. And then on top of that, we do local renewable energy credits with the local providers. So we try to buy 100% of renewable credits to offset our energy and then of course water-free and we use different green construction methods. We try to bring local materials in, local vendors as much as possible and reduce carbon footprints from shipping. So yeah, we try to keep it in every facet that we do. I love it. I mean, I suspect, I mean, obviously the water-free considering where you're building is pretty imperative. But some of the other stuff that you're talking about, it's to me now thinking about it. I'm not building data centers. It seems like a no-brainer. You know, let's make sure that we are positioning this to make sure that we are keeping things cool, cool the best we can. That means keeping it out of the direct, you know, minus side of the sun and things like that. So that fascinates me. That's the first I've actually heard anybody say that, ever. So yeah, that's very cool. Yeah, we do try to be really holistic about our designs from the beginning to the end. If we envision, I mean, the internet's only 30-some-odd years old, we envision our data centers to have a 30 to 40-year life and we build them with a lot of adaptability. We eventually see liquid cooling to the chip and other cooling methodologies on the horizon and even hybrid redundancy or what we really focus on as resiliency of the design. We see a lot of changes coming over the next 10, 20, 30 years and we'd like the data center to adapt to that in the greenest way possible. You are teeing up my next question better than I ever could myself because normally the question is, tell our viewers a little bit about where you see the industry growing in the next one to two years. But I'm going to ask it a little differently. Where do you see it in the next 30 to 40 years? A lot different than it is today. Same, same, but let's dream a little bit. What do you think? Yeah, so I think, I mean, if you think about data centers in general, these are the most expensive insurance policies probably on earth. We're spending, you know, anywhere from seven to $10 million per megawatt to build redundancy if the grid drops or if fiber drops. So we build an enormous amount into that. If you can imagine that data centers in the future have a distributed architecture and that capacity when a data center drops power could the compute move to another data center with capacity within milliseconds? Then when the data center comes back up, the capacity moves back over really kind of a fluid live architecture. I see that as a vision. I also see clients beginning to discriminate their data. And what I mean by that is they're going to build in a lot of AI, not to overuse AI, but they will build in a lot of AI that a photo you took five years ago does not need to sit in the same mission critical data center that's running your autonomous car to avoid a cyclist. Today we treat data pretty much the same in redundancy in data centers. And I think with the amount of compute that's gonna grow over the next decade, it's a force disruptive change that will come about either by strategy or accident, but eventually we're gonna discriminate against data and decide hot, cold, actionable. We're gonna get so much more sophisticated about how we handle that data in data centers in the future. There's really no way around it. Partly cost, but just resource. The amount of resource we put into backup, mission critical data should not necessarily be the same for a cat video 10 years from now. So you truly were right to that point. That's the first I've ever heard anything like that. I love it. I love it, that data fluid architecture and being, prioritizing those packets is fascinating to me. And it feels to me like it's totally plausible, probable. It should be anyway. I think so. I think it could save us a lot of, to be green again, right? And then cooling technologies will change. I mean, most of the cooling architectures we deal with are born out of old HVAC technology and that will change as well. I think it's just, I think companies are more, the amount of computers grown so quickly over 30 years we can't help but be more sensitive to our impact on the environment. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I feel like we could probably talk about this for another two or three hours. But yeah, I mean, you think about where HVAC was, is and where it could go. It's not unlike energy production. And we talk about putting the data center closer to the end user, but also as close as we can to the energy source, for efficiencies there. So lots to talk about. Let's do this again sometime. Let's do it. My pleasure. Yeah, I would love it. Yeah, very good. So for our viewers that would like to know more about Nova, why don't you tell them where they can go? www.novva.com, Nova. Awesome, Wes, thank you so much. Thank you, my pleasure. You bet. And thank you viewers for watching JSA TV. We'll see you soon.