 Hi everyone and welcome back to JSA TV and JSA podcast where we're covering the latest stories, news, innovations from leaders across our industry. We're winding down PTC 2024. I'm Barb Mitchell from JSA and joining me is Augustino Valera from Escala Data Centers. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me here. Really flattered and proud. Yeah, you should be proud. It's been a great conference for you, I believe. And we thought we were going to maybe be speaking to you ahead of the awards. We were fortunate enough to get to talk to you after. So we have some exciting news to share, I believe. I believe you were nominated for three awards. You took away one, but it's a big one, an important one, outstanding data center company. Tell us all about it. Well, this award means a lot to us, especially when you think about PTC, which is an international conference. But it's somewhat geared more towards the Pacific Rim, if you think about it. And we are a Latin American company, a company based out of São Paulo, Brazil. So, I mean, this is way beyond our wildest dreams and wildest imagination to actually win an award in an international conference. That again, it's more focused towards Pacific players, et cetera. And it kind of goes to show that our playbook is really international. I think this is pretty much a confirmation of that. Because we always kind of wondered, are we just a local player, someone that can only thrive in Brazil or maybe Latin America? And this award kind of goes to show that, yes, we have a playbook that can go beyond Latin American borders, can really be a worldwide thing. So we are super, super flattered. And as you pointed out, this is probably one of the most important awards in the conference. So if we were to pick one to win, that would be the one. That would be the one. Yeah, so congratulations. We're really excited to hear that. And speaking of expansion, even within Latin America, you have some expansion planned in Chile and Mexico. Can you speak to that? Yeah, for sure. These are very important markets for us. Mexico is the second largest data center market in Latin America. And Chile comes closely behind. And they are strategic in their own significance. Besides that, Mexico have the benefit of being close to North America. So by addressing Mexico, we're actually providing their center capacity to loads that might eventually even be serving U.S. clients. And both Mexico and Chile, especially Chile, are very important hubs with regards to submarine cables. Not only existing ones, but the ones that will be coming fairly soon, like the Humboldt cable that's going to be connecting Oceania and therefore Asia into Latin America. So I think these are very, very meaningful moves that are not just simply a geographical expansion. It's really touching into other markets, bibles of the submarine cables and the boarding geographies of these places. Yeah, absolutely. And I'm also curious, I believe back in 2021, you launched the Center for Excellence in Engineering. Is that right? Yeah, the famous COE. Yeah, right. So tell us what that means for Scala. It was a super strategic decision, a bold one, I should say, because pretty much every single player, not only Latin America, but worldwide, sort of outsourced the engineers. It's a very common practice within a data center industry. Most industries, as a matter of fact, but we decided to go in a different direction and basically have a full-fledged engineering organization within Scala. We're talking about more than 300 engineers. We have just a given idea. We have more engineers than all our competitors combined in Latin America. Wow. And that gives us the ability to basically do very customized designs and adapt very fast and adapt even to higher bars when our hyperscale clients change them. So if we weren't for that decision, we probably would not be winning this award for instance. So this is definitely part of our secret sauce. Yeah. And I don't know about you, but I think from my perspective, sitting here having had the opportunity to chat with a lot of people over the course of the week, some of the topics that are coming up continue to be around AI, right? And the demands that those are putting on the industry, but the hyperscalers. And so I'm curious how Scala is set up to address that. Great question, Barbara, because it connects very much with the previous one in the sense that it would have been much harder for us to cope with the demands of AI, especially when you're talking about hard density racks, a liquid cooling net. If we weren't for the fact that we have our seal, because otherwise we would have to basically depend on outside vendors, providers to sort of help us address that having even a proper conversation with the hyperscales. But the fact that we have this capacity in-house will allow us to really have a conversation and being treated as one of the most relevant players worldwide. So the high level conversation otherwise would not have been possible. Okay, great. Well, there's, I mean, you've started the year off pretty strong here, I think. Very auspicious to start the year winning award, right? Right, yeah. I mean, you've set the bar high. What will the rest of the year hold for you? I think that basically the container expansion within America, seizing every single opportunity, harnessing the fact that Latin America has abundance of renewable power, which is something that you cannot see for the rest of the world. And who knows, we might even aspire going down Latin America. Okay. Well, we'll watch for that. So thank you so much for joining us here. I know where things are starting to slow down a little bit. It's almost we're nearing the end, and I appreciate you making the time, especially just coming off the heels of your fresh new win. Congratulations again. Thank you very much. Thanks again for having me read. Of course, yeah. Thanks for joining us. And thank you viewers for tuning in today to JSA TV. Happy networking.