 Welcome to JSA TV, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell with JSA and joining me today, actually for the first time on JSA as part of JSA and actually part of our data cloud USA interview series is Josh Snowhorn, founder and CEO of Quantum Lupal. Josh, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm excited to introduce you to our audience and to have you here and hear a little bit more about your business. Thank you for having me. So Josh, Josh Snowhorn here is not only the founder and CEO of Quantum Lupal, but also known widely throughout the industry for founding global peering forum and a series of innovations I think that have led to you being a sought after speaker globally not just at the upcoming data cloud USA event but in all sorts of other places and times and occasions which I'm sure you can tell us a little bit more about and then on just a personal level. I understand that you're an avid snowboarder and surfer and all around adventurous. So lots for you to share with us personally and professionally, but I'd love for you to start today by telling us a little bit about Quantum Lupal and the plans that you have for your gigawatt scale data center communities. Can you share with us a little bit about that? Of course I would love to. Quantum Lupal was founded by myself and a team of incredible executives because it really takes a team to do what we're doing. We really looked at the data center industry and the sectors building out large buildings and competing with each other either in either the hyperscalers themselves or the multi-tenant providers, public sector providers, enterprise providers and recognize that there was a massive amount of infrastructure money chasing the same kind of golden pot at the end of the rainbow. What we realized is that all those entities in the industry need land, energy, water and fiber optics. So we chose to play in what we call the elements of the data center business. But to do that, you can't just go buy a 50 acre parcel of land that doesn't fit the bill for everybody needs. We really are changing the game and that we're building a master plan data center community. Our first campus is 2164 acres. So it's the biggest data center campus in the world. It has entitlement and zoning of 1500 acres of industrial land on the campus already. It was a former Alcoa aluminum smelter. So we're actually taking reclaimed brownfield land and converting it into the data center sector. It already had existing transmission power lines feeding it, had tons of fiber optics systems already around it from ZEO and Lumen and Verizon, AT&T, Comcast and so on and so forth. And then it had a massive amount of water adjacent to it in particular seven million gallons of gray water which is treated sewage water that goes in the Potomac River every day. So all those factors were a great benefit but the real kicker on top of it we're building the biggest fiber optic ring that's ever been built in the history of our industry. It can hold up to 235,000 strands of fiber. It's all buried very deeply. We're almost finished with our first Potomac River boring that's 91 feet below the bedrock of the river and linking that up. And we're just 20 miles away from Equinix Ashburn, the center of the internet. So I think we've really reached what our industry needs for deployment of infrastructures they can go and deploy their data centers and serve the sector. Wow, amazing. And I know that when we look forward to the upcoming conference with Data Cloud USA there's a huge focus around sustainability and can you talk about how what you're doing here ties into that and what people will take away from this conference and what you may add to it? Absolutely, everybody has ESG goals. Every single cloud provider, every single enterprise I actually had a call with a government entity this morning talking about the Department of Defense and Homeland Security and their sustainability goals. So it goes across the entire industry but those sustainability goals are not just around your electrons or the energy serving you that everybody wants solar, they want wind they want renewables, non-carbon sources of energy production but they also want their data centers to be up and working. So it's not a flick a switch process to just turn everything on from a sustainability perspective and use non-carbon burning things but I think that's an eventuality that's why everybody has targets of 2030 and 2040 and so on and so forth to reach those. So what we do from a sustainability perspective we focus not just on those electrons but we focus on land use, on water use on material uses going into it and trying to use existing resources. So talk what I spoke about earlier with the campus being a former aluminum smelter it's already zoned as industrial land so we're not taking farmland and converting it that might be producing food it's already been used for industrial purposes. It's what's called a brownfield site by having industry on it that had pollution and other things in the past that then has been cleaned up and mitigated we're reutilizing a brownfield site. That's incredibly sustainable. We're reutilizing existing transmission power lines those are the huge power lines that you see overhead when you're going down a highway or something like that as big as they get. We have 230 KV lines already feeding our campus so instead of putting in new ones we're reutilizing existing lines that were literally dangling and had no more electricity on them anymore. So we're building a substation and pulling that in now. We focus on green space on the campus we have a bees and trees initiative so our groundbreaking that we did just over a month ago instead of putting a bunch of dirt and shovels in we actually planted 50 trees. So a little bit different initiatives from the perspective of green space and open use so it'll be almost a park-like environment around the data centers going there. And then from a water use perspective that's tremendously important. So the reutilizing treated sewage water instead of drinking water for cooling is a very important thing for us. And it goes down to the concrete next door to us is a huge mine that actually excavates the materials to create concrete. So we'll take those materials from that mine right next door to us and use that to produce the concrete that's serving the facilities on campus. So it's truly from top of the stack all the way down to the bottom that we're putting this in place. Yeah, fully integrated approach to sustainability from your perspective. Yeah, it's so great to hear that. And I know that actually at the conference you're actually speaking you're on the agenda to cover automation, right? What do you plan to talk about there? So we're really excited about this. When quantum loophole as a company we aren't massively staffed. We don't have hundreds of people. Our team, our seasons executives who are executing a strategy of deployment to serve our customers. But again, we just play on land, energy, water and fiber. So how do we succeed in that to support our clients? One of those things we're doing on the interconnection side we're putting Telecent robotic cross-connect machines to actually patch the fibers together. Now that might sound like a novel idea but what we're doing is actually to scale to support eventually millions of strands of fibers interconnecting millions of square feet of data center space. If you try and do this from the beginning and do it in an automated fashion you can create resilience for the clients in connecting. So a cross-connect physically might take you once you order it in a data center might take you 12 to 24 hours or sometimes up to a week to get put in place. And sometimes they do an RXTX reversal or they don't prove it well and the connection doesn't happen. Well, imagine if you now have to do 10,000 connections one human being has to be at each end clicking that together and making sure it tests and works. If you use automated machines to do it it can actually do the cross-connect in two minutes it'll test it before it connects it together and we can implement it very rapidly. So a thousand cross-connects in theory could be 2,000 minutes instead of hundreds and hundreds of hours and a lot of human labor to make all that happen. So that's just one example of automation we're doing and we're excited about it. Yeah, I mean it feels like the industry's talked for some time about how automation may help operational efficiencies but it's sometimes slower to sort of take on some of these initiatives. What's your message to the industry in terms of how this can help everyone can sort of reap the benefits of this? I think what I would always say is that our industry is stodgy and it's not for the sake of gray beards like me and being older and we're set in our ways. I think when you really think about it if you're an electrical engineer or an HVAC engineer or a telecom engineer if it breaks, the buck stops with you, right? You're the one who may have implemented that process. So from an engineering perspective it's hard for engineers to take risk because risk represents the risk of failure. And if that fails, then your business fails your customers fail and everything else. So I think from an industry side it's been a slow process to those things. An example is moving away from generators as an example on the backup side trusting uptime in the grid or new long duration battery technologies things like that, taking away the warm blanket that a generator represents in your backup systems is hard to do. So I would implore the industry to think at the scale of what we're thinking gigawatts of power being deployed on a mass scale campus take that opportunity to think out of the box and start really opening your eyes to maybe technologies that create innovation around automation around sustainability and around cost and helping them achieve those goals. So we work hand in hand with our customers to help those things out and hopefully we succeed. Josh, it's been such a pleasure speaking to you. I feel like there's so much more you're just a plethora of information and insights and I know we chatted a bit before about how you have shared some of that with the industry and how you're contributing to the overall learning and growth of our industry and we really appreciate that. We appreciate the time with you here today and hopefully we'll have lots more of it in the future. And so where can we send our viewers to learn more about Quantum Loophole? You can go to quantumloophole.com. That's our website to be able to look at things and certainly attend Data Cloud. You'll hear me on panels and our CTO Scott and Opel will be there. Scott built data centers for above net for Yahoo and then for Apple. He's put billions of billions of dollars to work in the data center industry so he's a great insight as well. So reach out to anybody on our team we're happy to share what we're doing, hop on a Google Earth tour on Zoom and all kinds of fun stuff. And we're just providers helping to support the industry. Yeah, fantastic. Thanks again so much for joining us. Josh on this episode of JSA TV in preparation for Data Cloud USA which of course is coming up in Austin in September, September 14th to 15th. We hope to see you all there and good luck to you Josh with all your speaking and networking that you'll be doing at that event. We look forward to seeing you there. And to our viewers, thank you for tuning in to JSA TV and JSA podcasts. Happy networking.