 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Laura Nolan, coming to you from VirtualPTC 21. Joining me today is Phil Lawson-Shanks, Chief Innovation Officer for Aligned. Welcome back to JSA TV, Phil. Well, thank you for having me back. It's a different way of meeting, but it's working. Absolutely. Well, first, could you tell us, tell our viewers about Aligned and your role? Certainly. So Aligned's been around several years now. The company was founded on the premise that we needed a data center that really focused on sustainability and the environment. So the founders created the company. They looked at everything very differently, basically threw up the rulebooks and the fundamental design criteria of how you build a data center, how you design it, how you deploy it, how you operate it is radically different. And back when they did that, frankly, people didn't really worry too much about environmentals. It was just a boom industry. Now, not only are the entities ours having a seat at the table from the hyperscalers and the customers, but they're really dictating who they work with and how this industry is moving forward. Phil, I understand there were some big announcements from Aligned over the past year, including significant improvements to Delta Cube. The company's patented and award-winning data center cooling technology. It's been called a game changer in data center design. So can you tell us why that is and then more about Delta Cube? Certainly. So when you design a data center, the biggest element that you need to take care of is the cooling. That dictates everything, the size of the space, the matter capacity the client can put into their cabinets, how the cabinets are laid out. All of that is based on the cooling. So the Delta Cube itself, a four foot by four foot cube, is capable of 146 kilowatts of heat rejection in four feet. Now, when you compare that with a legacy technology like a DX cooling or a crack or a crawl, those units are typically tall foot, long, you need a foot of clearance between each one of them there, six feet high, four foot deep, and they'll do a hundred kilowatts of heat rejection. So obviously, you see those ringed around the room and that dictates the airflow and what the clients can put in there. Without Cube, we put three of them in a stack. So we called that the array. So now you've got over 400 kilowatts of heat rejection in four feet, which basically is the equivalent of four of those large units in four feet. So we just line the walls as we need to with those devices and that gives us our clients the ability to basically build their infrastructures they need to and they can grow as they need to rather than having to put down a pre-described stamp of, you know, all the hot gear in the center that's where most of the air flows and then giving progressively less power towards the edges. They can have anything up to 50 kilowatts in all the cabinets or mixed density across that infrastructure. Let's talk about mid 2020. That's when a line began construction of its second hyperscale data center campus in Ashburn, Virginia. I understand it's one of a few in the area that draws critical power from multiple and then diverse sources to achieve maximum redundancy. So can you give us an update on the construction and then how it will impact that data center region? Certainly. Well, Ashburn has always been an important place in the data center community. It was one of the first points of interconnection back in the day when the internet became a commercial entity. And as a consequence, most of the peering happens there and it is spread around the country and around the world since then. But with this close proximity to DC, for all government contractors and all that work there, it's just always going to be a significant place on the market. So we took some land actually very close, actually adjacent to the original unit site, which was one of the first interconnection points and really why Ashburn is Ashburn because of that building. So we bought land adjacent to that. We built our first building, which we built in record time, still the fastest from permit to vertical in the marketplace. And we filled that. We sold it very, very quickly. We started our second one several months ago. That'll be, in fact, the first 12 megawatts will be commissioned in the next 30 days. That building is capable of 120 megawatts of capacity. So in that marketplace storing from three different substations, the energy that we procure as well is all offset with renewables. That's very important to us and to our clients. And everything we do, the way we design and build and operate, is specifically geared to be the most sustainable and the most environmentally sensible in the industry. Very exciting. We will be watching for sure. Well, let's talk about some more headlines that aligned was involved in basically setting a best in class example for the data center industry regarding environmentally and socially sustainable growth. So can you tell us more about aligns data center sustainability initiatives? Certainly. I want to start with our supply chain. A couple of years back, we realized that everyone's looking for the same equipment generators, UPS is one odd switchgear. We went out, worked with our suppliers and we took down 50 megawatts of capacity from all our suppliers. So that gives us the ability to draw those down very, very quickly. And also we containerize all of that equipment. So it's designed and built in offsite, which is very important when you're looking at, if you've looked at any data center built, there's trades all over the place, there's metal shards everywhere. And with the best will in the world, you're never going to clean all that up. So you get a lot of leaching of metals into the water system, which obviously isn't good. We don't have that. We just drop those containers in. And as a result of that methodology, the way we design and build, and also our safety metrics, we were able to use a new type of loan mechanism. So we were the first to take down a linked loan of a billion dollars based on our sustainability programs. And they're very strictly controlled with our safety aspects, our PUE, how much energy we actually draw down, the type of energy we procure. So we're looking at this as a pretty big game changer for particularly for the hyperscalers who are very, very keen to be carbon neutral in the next several years. So not only are we able to draw down funds from the financial institutions to accommodate that, but also our design principles, the materials that we're using with everything that we do, everything we do is based on sustainability. Lots of news from aligned and lots to stay up to date with this year for sure. So can you tell our viewers where they can learn more about aligned and then follow the latest news? Certainly. So you'll find us on the social media engines, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, or our website alignedenergy.com. Okay, you heard it from Phil. You know where to find him and learn more about aligned. Thank you for your time today, Phil. Always a pleasure. Thank you. And thank you viewers for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcast. Happy networking.