 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for tech and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell, EVP and managing director at JSA and joining me today as part of our data cloud USA interview series. I have the pleasure of introducing to you bill claiming EVP of digital solutions at switch and also notably one of our greener data authors. So a little bit about about you bill. I'm just going to give you a little intro here before I turn it over. I just want everyone to know a little bit more about you. So so bills a technologist, well known sustainability industry leader and ranked also globally as a leader in cloud computing and data security. Most recently, I believe bill you've been recognized by infrastructure masons for things like the 2020 I am 100 award and the 2021 I masons education champion award for really your focus and your work around helping to diversify the digital infrastructure talent pool. Also, on the other side of things, professionally bill helps the switch team develop new ways to impact the digital infrastructure industry as a leader in sustainability and of course supporting switch who are also leaders in that area. As well as sustainability as well as exascale design ESG power development and I think on and on and bill I want to let you have a moment to tell us more about that when you can but but welcome first of all to JSA TV. We're happy to have you here. Thank you so much Barb I think that's like the most wonderful and warm intro I've had in such a long time you're probably the longest I've gone without saying anything and just smiling and nodding. Getting getting my getting my work out of my neck. Thank you so much for having me Barb and thank you to all the amazing people that are listening and watching this and thinking that this caffeinated chipmunk is about to entertain us. It's just water. I promise it's just regular water. I'm really glad to be here. Barb, thanks for having me. Yeah, yeah, thanks. We're really glad to have you and let's start talking about of course as I said this is part of our data cloud series. So data clouds coming up and there's separate several topics on the agenda that are have to do with sustainability and and more of course but but what do you think I want to hear from you what you think most notably people should be prepared to take away from this inaugural event data cloud of course has been in Monaco for quite some time but the inaugural US based event for data cloud. Well the first takeaway is that it's not Monaco. We're going to have these beautiful yachts in, you know, on a on a on a frame of mountains and amazing hotels, but you know, it's Texas, and it's amazing in the barbecue stage, you can buy yourself a cowboy hat and look amazing. There's going to be there's going to be some really great takeaways from this event and you know I've had a chance and if you haven't had a chance to take a look at the agenda please please do. We're going to be talking about everything from edge to managing supply chain challenges which believe me quite a few people still have a problem with, you know, marrying the concepts of 5G connectivity and bridging things like the digital divide and these giant connectivity gaps that we have here in America and obviously all over the world as well. You know, we're going to talk about things like density working with the next generation of data center professionals and Barb you said it earlier. You know, a lot of my work and just infrastructure mason's work has been with historically black college universities Latin serving colleges, you know trying to get more people of color more women's industry so there are going to be conversations about that and that the decarbonization of the future which brings me to I think probably one of the most important points. Everybody listening that we're going to be talking about is sustainability. Now, one final point. I promise bar before I stop talking is is the big difference in this conference and in speaking with, you know with four Edwards from the team over there and the conference managers, the big big difference here and what I want everyone to kind of take away is have a, oh my goodness, a reflective moment, an introspective bubble when you're at this conference because from what I've seen, almost. Yeah, I want to say I want to say every single one of these sessions going to give you something practical, practical to take away, not just something cool and meaningful but something you can measurably take away back to your organization and make some really cool, meaningful and measurable changes as it relates to sustainability. I'm confident that's going to be the overarching theme. I'm confident that we're going to be talking about everything from, you know, hydrogen to new power capacity to nuclear data centers. We never know. That might be in our keynote battle. Yeah, right. But definitely going to be talking about sustainability is going to be a big one and more importantly, things that you can practically do to enable it. Yeah, and I mean, isn't that what everyone wants from a session like this right not only great connections and conversations but real things that you can take away and apply to your business when you when you leave. A lot like you meant you've actually mentioned a lot of things that are going to be covered and a lot of great takeaways. Let's talk about your panel for a second and so you're speaking on day one I believe keynote panel on how are we managing the implications of limited space and power. Give us a little preview, little teaser. So the good news is I know this is a recorded JSA TV interview discussion, but for everybody listening literally today just a couple hours ago we had our panel prep call. And my goodness, if the hour didn't fly by, because I've just told many wonderful things that we talked about. And in some of the discussions that we had really revolved around, you know, honesty and openness and transparency in the green movement so actually what are you doing practically to make these visible changes. So we're going to discuss and I know some of the people listening to this might roll their eyes because hey you know you're familiar with what's happening in sustainability in the industry but the rest of the world and the market and the industries that are out there are not. They think that we're shoveling coal into giant furnaces to power our data centers that's not true. That is, it's not true. So we're going to talk about that a little bit kind of helping everyone in an industry. That paradigm a little bit to make sure that people really understand that we are focusing on water conservation that are focusing on really meaningful. And again, this word measurable changes to things like carbon footprints, lowering still one two and three emissions to get to a point of net zero. And listen, as a preview. And if you're watching this, we might talk about new kinds of power sources working behind an off grid solutions we're going to talk about new edge architecture, and we might even talk about SMR small modular reactors to potentially welcome the future of the nuclear power data center now, I'm not going to give any more away because that's going to be a topic for the panel. That was a good, yeah, you don't, you don't want to be a spoiler, right. Yeah, but that's, yeah, it's, yeah, like, like you said before, there's a lot to talk about a lot, a lot of reasons for people to, to show up and tune in. And let's switch to switch. See what I did there. To switch. So can we talk about a little bit about sustainability initiatives specifically that you're working on at switch to help reduce carbon emissions. Yes. And, and again, it's interesting because like, I knew you're going to ask this question right and I'm so excited about all the things that we're doing at switch that I have to keep my answer as short as possible. So, you know, thanks for switching to switch, but we had switched switch to green. I'm going to stick to my day job. All right. Here's what we're doing that's ultimately very, very special. You'll you'll read time and time again that switch from day one is always tried to operate on 100% green renewable energy and we do that in all the markets but we do above and beyond anybody else is you're welcome to go on our website and take a look at our patent books right. We try to design natively as much as we can around sustainable architecture architectures we can. Now that partly involves 700 plus patents that we've got in the industry, working with you kinds of designs that do things like biomimicry. That's actually mimicking nature's efficiency into the data center things like fan technologies and stuff we can talk about that for much longer time. Let's talk about some of the real things that we're doing in the industry that are really, really meaningful beyond, you know, optimizing a fan and creating like these independent systems at a very, very, very large scale. I'll give you a couple of examples. We are working on a really special solar project out in the state of Nevada because guess what we have a lot of in Nevada. We have a lot of sun, plenty of sunshine. And so it's, it's a 500 megawatts plus of solar capacity it's going to be back by about 850 megawatt hours of Tesla mega pack batteries it's $1.3 million project that's funded by our partners and we see working with us as well and it's all behind the grid. So no burdens are being placed on an aging infrastructure that is extraordinary in itself but here's the other really big one that I want to talk about water. We, you know, we in the data center industry get painted as as really inefficient users of water now water is important for the data center right sometimes you can have waterless cooling there's a lot of really new designs out there but for large part of a lot of people out there water is used or liquid is used to make space heat from electrical equipment. So what do you do when you have hyperscale data centers you're going to need a whole lot of water. So what we've done is we are partnering in the state of Nevada to build a 16 mile 4000 acre foot effluent water pipeline. And the entire goal is at full build out our Citadel campus up in Reno is going to be about 8 million square feet and consuming upwards of you know 850 megawatts at full build out. And the goal here, barb everybody listening is to have that entire campus. I kid you not run on 100% recycled effluent gray water through a treatment plan. It's not just hey you know what yay switch is doing this it's also being a good neighbor because we're building more data centers everybody's building more data centers. So how do you become a good steward of the community and the environment. This kind of project and I know there's others that are doing this this kind of project it removes nitrates for the local river it in increases the capacity of being able to build homes by 25,000 residences. We actually are helping save endangered species in the local area because we're not polluting local rivers actually not even taking any water from those natural resources it's all self contained. I think that's special. I think water conservation in this industry is going to have way more of a spotlight than we've ever had before in the past, and leaders in this space are going to take water conservation and even throw in a new acronym water usage effective as if you want, a meaningful and again measurable level where we can go back not just in the industry to the world and say, here's what we're doing in the data center space. Here's how everything that you do every click that you make is actually pretty sustainable. Yeah, what a what a great future that would be for the industry it's something everyone's talking about and working towards and it's fantastic to hear this from you and. And I think for our viewers who are probably going to want to hear more from you they're going to want to find you a data. I'm sure and they're going to want to come listen to you on your on your panel. And if they want to find you and learn more about switch. How can they, how can they do that. A very good question barb I, in case you haven't noticed I'm not shy. I love talking about these technologies and just just helping people understand more gradually what we can do how we can together as a team. Cross industry create a more sustainable future and understanding that every single click has an impact on what we do and how we live. If you've got more about me, yours truly you are welcome to visit my website bill claim and calm you can check out all of my latest work I'm also contributing editor to data center knowledge data center frontier information we can a whole other really great publications in our industry and you can also see where I'm including data cloud USA and then obviously to learn more about my organization switch just visit switch.com there's a beautiful little link right up top about all of the amazing sustainability projects and initiatives that we've got going on. Check out the videos. You know check out what we're doing and listen if you're really curious, go on a tour. I mean these facilities are really cool. Yeah, thank you so much you know, we could talk for an hour I think, but we agreed ahead we weren't going to you right. Let's try not to but there's so much to see and so thank you so much for joining us we'll do this again, right and, and we look forward to to seeing you in Austin we hope everyone tuning in will come out as well. And so, thank you that's again data cloud USA in Austin September 14 and 15. If anyone wants to register you can go to data cloud USA.com. And we'll see you all there we'll see you in Austin and, and that's it. Thank you. Thanks for joining us. My pleasure. See you everybody soon. Bye.