 Welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast where we're covering the latest stories, trends, and innovations with leaders in global connectivity, real estate, and the networks within. I'm Emily Scherer for JSA, and I am joined today by Stephen Sprockhold of EdgeConnex. He is the Vice President of Program Management for AMIA. And EdgeConnex, of course, a data center leader reimagining the future of hyperlocal to hyperscale data center services. Stephen, it's great to have you here this morning. Thanks for being here. Thank you very much, Emily. Yeah, it's great to be in Oslo today, although it's a little bit rainy outside. Yesterday was a much more beautiful day with great sunshine. That's so true. Yeah, and were you able to get out and enjoy it yesterday? Yeah, in the evening we took a small stroll. Oh, good. Yeah, we did the same thing. So, yeah, and got dinner down by the water. It was really nice. Yeah, Oslo is a great place to be. It is. It is. Great. And you're in Amsterdam. We were just talking about this. Yeah, I'm usually based in Amsterdam if not visiting one of our project sites. Excellent. I love that. So, not far travel here for Stephen today. Having a great time in Oslo. And Stephen, tell us a little bit about your role as Vice President of Program Management for AMIA on the EdgeConnex sustainability team. Yeah, sure. So, as a Vice President of Project Management for AMIA, I oversee our data center builds across Europe. Right now we are building seven data centers. So, yeah, that's quite the pipeline that's going on. But how does that relate to sustainability? Well, in my day-to-day work, I see what it means to build a data center. The amount, the sheer amount of materials, effort, labor, all that sort of stuff that goes into the build. And that also poses the question to me of like, how can we do better? How can we take better care of our environment? And what can we implement to get the results that we want to become carbon neutral while also at the same time growing our data center business? Because everybody's coming to us with, hey, could you build us a data center or hey, we want to go there. So there's a significant demand for this. At the same time, another challenge that I'm really excited about in how can data centers help there is you see many congested electricity grids out there. Getting grid connections is more and more of a difficulty. So thinking about ways how what sustainable solutions are out there that we can help resolve this make me very excited to also be part of the EdgeConnex sustainability team. Absolutely. It sounds like you guys have so much going on. Seven data center builds. That's huge. And I'm worrying about the sustainability aspect. You are a busy man, I'm sure. Oh, no rest for the wicked. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, great. Thanks for sharing that with us. And in 2020, EdgeConnex launched its customer people planet strategy by implementing its holistic ESG sustainability policy. Could you explain a little bit more about EdgeConnex's path to sustainability and that carbon free energy pilot plan? Yeah, so one of the important key drivers of our sustainability is not only look towards CO2 emissions. Yes, CO2 emissions are very important, but let's say we live in a world where there are no CO2 emissions, but people are still not making a fair wage or there are still many accidents on job sites. Then I don't know if that's still the place I want to live in. Yes, the weather outside is probably nice, but it's not the world where we want to live in. So our holistic view is to incorporate social elements as well in our sustainability policy. And more importantly also to be transparent and accountable towards the results that we publish. So if there's something that's not going all right, we will publish that. We are accountable for those results and that's more of the G of governance where we really strive to improve our policy and achieve our 2030 goals. Absolutely. And we talked so much yesterday about greenwashing, so really the important piece of transparency there in publishing those ESG reports. So transparency is just so important and if you look at all the various sustainability reports that are out there, I think one step as an industry that we can take is just make sure that we report all the same metric. Right, yeah. Well, yeah, that might take a while, right? That might take a while. A lot of stuff to be done on that level. But you also see is that this is slowly also with European regulation and many other things slowly moving towards a common standard. So that will be a great result to get that accountability and accountability and transparency. Absolutely, yeah. And so much of what's been talked about here today. So it's great to get everybody in the same room talking about what those metrics look like. Absolutely. Now let's talk about the social component of ESG policies and engagement. How does EdgeConnect work with local communities to become a good or better neighbor? Well, what we do is, and I think one of the examples is with one of our data centers that we had in Amsterdam. It had a permit, everything was done, but the local residents had an issue with the noise coming from our data center. And in that case, it is easy to say as a company, hey, I've got my permits. Hey, the municipality cannot enforce because I'm doing what I'm supposed to do. We felt that that is not the proper way how to deal with your neighbors because you're the one who is benefiting from the data center. And they're left with all the negative externalities of noise, light, and that's pollution. So we took their message to heart. We started the projects to see how can we reduce noise levels. Of course, the local residents wanted it to go faster, but there's also due diligence from our end that we need to do. We can't just simply put up a screen or just simply change settings because that can have unintended side effects to our operations. But during the summer, we were able to reduce noise by about six to eight decibels depending on the frequency. So that's an 80% reduction in perceived noise. And we need to see how the results come in over a year's time, but likely we're able to reduce the mechanical energy consumption by about 5%. Wow, that's great. Still fingers crossed on it. After full years of operation, we can accurately, transparently and accountably report on those numbers. But that would be a great benefit to the local community. And I think that is for an existing data center. What we have all experienced here is that data centers are not looked at as favorably as maybe 10 years ago. So that means that you need to get the support of the communities to build a data center because otherwise you're not going to get a permit. And we have seen examples of those I think across Europe where companies were like, hey, I can build a data center in India. Yes, you could. But then the local residents revolted and said like, no. Yeah, let's push back. So that means that you need to think about how do you share the benefits of that data center? How do you make those benefits tangible for those residents? Because simply saying jobs is not sufficient if you have a local artist living nearby because there's just not that much of a perceived benefit. Reaching out, creating a park, creating a more interesting building that they can look at. Those are items where you can look at how to make sure that the community benefits district heating could also be one of those items. And even as you said, just being a good neighbor about it, being transparent, listening to them about what their concerns might be. Let's say that you test your generators. If you test your generators every Monday morning at 6 a.m., yes, you could do that. But I'm sure a lot of people will wake up. Not very happy. Not very happy. So if you say like, what we have done anywhere where we are, local residents have our operations team phone number. If for some reason they had a late shift or whatever, they can tell us, please don't. And we can adjust the testing schedule. Absolutely. And just being there, picking up the phone, so important. Absolutely. And it sounds like that's what you're doing, the 80% noise reduction, huge, and fingers crossed on the final numbers. So that's great. Now let's talk trends a little bit. Through your experience, how do you see the industry evolving as sustainability shifts to the spotlight? What do you think will have the biggest impacts? I think what we have is two trends at the same time. So one is more focus on sustainability. At the same time, what we referred to earlier is the tremendous growth of the industry. Right. Right now we are seeing the results from machine learning and automation of business processes, all going to the cloud, requiring more data center space, and we're building those data centers today. At the same time, I'm sure that everyone has heard, or at least the listeners have heard of chat GPT and AI. Yeah, of course. Which will mean an even further growth in required data center capacity. Right. So that means that the materials that we need to build those data centers will exponentially increase. Well, at the same time we want to reduce our carbon emissions and footprint. So those are two tangents that are opposing. But I think as we are at a crossroads, I think the industry will come up with solutions and together, sometimes just small changes, continuous improvement like we did at the site where we were at noise reduction and reduced the energy use of the cooling machines. And sometimes it will be more fundamental shifts, but I think those two will come together somewhere later this decade. Absolutely. And we'll see that the data centers of 10 years ago are vastly different than the data centers that we will build in 2030. Absolutely. But that doesn't mean that we need to wait until 2030. We should get started now. We need to start improving every iteration. And even the incremental change, like you said, and just, yeah, there's so much that can be done. I feel like conferences like this, data cloud ESG, important conversations happening, people coming together to figure out what those changes need to be. I mean, there are manufacturers here still have a couple of meetings planned here with those to talk about, hey, how can we together collaborate in improving the existing machines? And also what do you need from us to design this new silver bullet machine? Yeah, absolutely. No energy use. Fantastic cooling. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully that's where we'll be by 2030, right? That's where we're headed. Yeah. And I think one thing that one part of a question that we missed earlier on was the carbon free pilot plan that we have. I think that is also an important driver based on accountability and transparency that we mentioned before. Yes. What you see now is that companies report zero kilowatt hour emissions because their facility is connected to a solar park or they have a solar PPA. Unfortunately, solar PPAs don't work necessarily in the Northern Hemisphere's winters because there's not much sunshine. Yeah. But you can offset those. You can act like the solar facility according to the greenhouse political produce power throughout the year. Yeah. Our carbon free energy pilot program is trying to meet on an hour by hour basis our consumption with renewable energy sources. Those can be hydro, sun or solar and wind. Right. That means that at any time during the day there's renewable energy source providing us with the electricity. So we can truly say then that we had zero fossil fuel powering us through the winter. There are still challenges because we run two successful pilot programs. Challenges are still related to regulation. We do that according to current energy laws in all the various geographies around the world and sometimes within a country itself. Yeah. But this will be a major step for the industry and also a major driver to the flexibility that grid operators want to see. Yes. On how are we going to power our data centers through the winter or power our data centers through that misty cloudy wind still. Right. Right. What do we do when there's no sun out? Yeah. Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing that with us. Thank you for being here. It's been great to have you and hear all of these insights. So we thank you for joining us today. Yeah, no problem. Absolutely. And to our viewers, we remind you to stay curious, stay connected and happy networking.