 Okay, let's go ahead and get started. I'm Dean Perine and on behalf of JSA, thank you for tuning in to our greener data virtual roundtable. Today, I'm joined by a range of specialists in the data center industry who are featured contributors to our upcoming book, greener data volume two, that will launch on Earth Day, 2024. Today, the group will talk about an important topic featured in the book, building the business case, unlocking the social and financial benefits of going green. We'll begin by going around the virtual table for some quick introductions. Panelists, let us know a little bit about your role, a quick snapshot of your organization and why the topic is so meaningful to you. Michael, we'll let you kick it off. Hi, Dean, my name is Michael Boron. I am a broker and associate vice president at Cushman Wakefield. We are a global real estate services company and I work within the global data center advisory group. It's a global group of real estate and data center professionals focused on servicing the data center industry. My team mostly works on large site selection projects, capital markets and consulting services for both operators and tenants and end users. Excellent, thank you, Michael. Raymond? Yeah, Raymond Burrell, senior sales executive for EchoSense, we're based out of Vanadingham and I am responsible for the Americas in the sales side of things. And we are focused on thermal optimization as well as capacity planning for mission critical end users, data center owners and operators. I'm looking forward to this chat. Excellent, thank you, Jason. Pete, I'm sorry, Raymond. Jason, you're next. Thanks, Dean. Jason Carlin with Flexential on the Chief Innovation Officer, which means I get to do a bunch of fun things and Flexential, if you don't know anything about that is a data center operator, builder, provider with a range of cloud managed services and interconnect products really focused in the United States, 19 markets, 41 data centers across the US. Excellent, Jason, Pete, now you. Thank you. Thank you, Dean. Yeah, Pete has been managing part of Eden 7. We're part of the Cambridge Money and Consulting Group Businesses. Principally, we are a consultancy business that helps organizations decarbonize and helps them with the strategy and really drive change into their organizations and across a number of different industries but with particular interest in the data center industry and making sure the organizations are aligned to their customers' needs and making sure that their sustainability strategies and their sustainability plans really do deliver for their client base as well. Very good. Pete, Aaron, Francois. Hi, I'm Francois Starring, so I'm a Chief Operating Officer at the Data4Group. Data4Group is a leading co-location provider in Europe with presence in Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid, Milan and Warsaw, five markets. And we have always been involved in sustainability over the last 20 years of working in data centers and I'm a big proponent of why green make business sense and I'll expand a little bit more. Excellent, thank you so much, Francois. And thank you to all the speakers. So let's go ahead and jump right in. Innovative thinkers in the business community are coming to view sustainability activities in terms of market opportunity and value creation. The twin, ECOS, Economic and Environmental Progress are no longer seen as competing but rather as complementary forces. With that question number one, in the data center context, what is some of the low-hanging fruit in terms of aligning financial and sustainability benefits? Francois, we will go ahead and kick this one off with you. Yeah, there's many low-hanging fruit still. We think we are already good on that but there's actually many, many things we can do. I'm not going to talk about PUE for user deficiencies that much but I think there's still very simple thing we can still do where you would both save money and be good for the planet. Let's say, for instance, in the data rooms, you increase temperature a little bit with the latest recommendation from ASHRAE. It doesn't change anything really on operation. It doesn't cost anything and then you improve your PUE right there and it's good to consume less electricity and it's better. Using renewable energy also is still, a lot of people already do it but it needs to be even more mainstream. Now, in many jurisdictions, renewable energy is cheaper than conventional energy. So again, you save money and you are good on the environmental front. So you talked about the two echoes, economy and ecology. I mean, clearly, they're aligning the data center industry. And there are still many areas where you can optimize like I just said. Very good, Jason, your thoughts? Sure, I agree a bunch with Francois. For us, I think it starts really very much at the design phase really before even building. So site selection and being able to change the design based on the environmental conditions of the region that we're in. For example, what we do in Oregon is quite different from what we do in Denver versus what we do in Atlanta. So it really starts at kind of a baseline at the design level of understanding what the environmental conditions are within those regions and being able to customize for that and then to also just be focused on helping our customers understand how they're using energy. We have a ton of data just on power utilization and how it's being used on our customer base and being able to help them understand kind of their thermal dynamics and what's going on. ASHRAE, the Delta T temperatures have changed a lot. It's kind of funny these days they have a customer come into your data center and say it feels hot versus what everybody was very familiar with 10, 20 years ago where it was very chilly. So things have changed a lot. There's I think things that we learn every single day. Liquid cooling is another area that can be much more efficient from the thermal load perspective. It's maybe more complicated from a lack of standards and things like that. But a very interesting space to be in and very important for us to look at our impact on the climate in our communities. Thank you, Jason. Raymond? Yeah, no, I think I'm gonna echo slightly a little bit of what Jason and Francoise are saying. I think energy efficiencies and optimization from an energy standpoint is the easiest lowest hanging fruit right now when it comes to the fact that we're very busy building hyperscale data centers. Obviously there's a huge draw from AI and other apps that run that require a lot of compute but we're really missing the boat on the stranded capacity that's already out there thermally and from an IT perspective. So I think, you know, before we get too far down the road with large capital projects, let's make sure we're using what we already have built the most efficient way possible, right? So optimizing that space, returning that cooling capacity back to you so you can then increase compute before you decide where you need to build or how you need to expand is probably gonna be the lowest hanging fruit. Obviously selfishly, that's what our software really excels at is the optimization thermally but it is frankly the lowest hanging fruit right now. So let's just make sure we're doing the right things with the energy we already are consuming. Very good point Raymond, thank you. Pete, your thoughts? Yeah, I think around the cost of things, it's clear. You know, those optimizations aside is hugely important and you can save on consumption and that's a fantastic thing. I think maybe looking at it from the other side and revenue generating and so making sure your message is strong to your customers. I think there's sometimes quite a mixed message on the strategy that's being delivered and how it's articulated to the client and how it's aligned to the client as well. And sometimes it gets very much important to the technical detail of it but actually really making sure that it can speak to the customer is quite important. So maybe that's more of a revenue generating opportunity rather than the cost saving of things but clearly the cost saving is hugely important. I think some folks agree with you. I'm seeing a lot of thumbs up coming from the listeners right now. Michael, final thoughts on the question? Yeah, I'm gonna echo most of what's already been said but coming at this from a sustainability perspective for site selection, loosing food is always locating within a market that already has access to green power. The closer to 100% the better. Challenges are that a lot of those markets are seeing longer timelines to connect but even with that we're seeing groups look at sites with longer and longer timelines with the intention of securing that power. And we really are seeing impact investment decisions between markets. So, and if you have all things being equal between two markets, but one has a cleaner grid the cleaner grid's gonna win most of the time. Very, very good point. Question number two, what new thinking will help position sustainability as a strategic business goal? The question again is what new thinking will help position sustainability as a strategic business goal? And Michael, we're gonna stick with you on this one first. Yeah. I'm of the mind just working with our kind of thing. These decisions are largely gonna be driven by end users as well as regulation in the market. I mean, on our end user side we're doing quite a bit of RFPs and RFIs out to data center operators within market. We have dozens of questions that rank providers based on their sustainability and it does materially impact what our recommendations are. While cost is important right now with the overall economy, we're seeing more and more weight get placed on those sustainability metrics over time. And they are seen as a risk over the life of a lease. So if you're approaching it from the tenant's perspective they're trying to look at and assess a site beyond just even what the initial term of the lease is. So they're looking at the site five to 10 years what potential regulations are coming down the pipeline. Will that affect this site? How will that affect my cost of operation? It's a very expensive task to have to move those deployments into new facilities. So it's something that we're seeing more and more of it goes beyond the initial financial terms of the deal. And I mean, because of that operators have to look at this. I mean, we're already seeing it and most markets in North America and Europe newer, more efficient data centers and greener markets tend to have lower vacancy rates than older facilities that are less efficient. You can go into most markets in North America and you'll find that to be the case. Pretty good, Michael. Thank you, Pete, your turn. Yeah, I think we see it across a number of different industries and not just the data center side of things, but around the collaboration has took quite a lot. Innovation is really important. So if we're thinking about what new things have been done, I think organizations are coming together and it might be competitive, maybe not so much, but within the same supply chain of a major customer. That is something that is talked about quite a lot and innovation forums around that. Also, introducing and it isn't consistent across every business case that's ever been put together, but introducing carbon pricing into business cases. So really starting to get the business cases moving on the back of the environment and side of things. Now, all business cases have to stand up on their own feet from a financial point of view. But sometimes they do get pushed back in the short term because they may not stand up to something that needs to be delivered in the next six months. So I think we're seeing that more and more and it comes in different flavors to be fair, especially if you're a global business and how you keep your assistance here in carbon pricing, but that may well be an element of stuff to come into the market organizations thinking. Excellent, Pete, thank you. Jason, what new thinking will help position sustainability as a strategic business goal? Yeah, we talk a bit about data. And since it's interesting right now, just the impact of AI on our industry, I think I saw a stat yesterday that envidia shipped 900 tons of H100 GPUs last quarter. They require a ton of power and space and cooling to go make that happen. And don't see that slowing down anytime soon, which really means the impact of AI just from a consumption basis in the data center space is massive. So I think the opportunity to take AI and sort of apply it against some of the challenges that we're having and we're talking about here is also quite substantial. And so I think being able to use the utilization data, power data, consumption data and start to automate ways to be more sustainable and more cost-effective and efficient is the right way. We've got a customer that is a massive SaaS customer that uses automation to really change their workload dynamics from a power consumption and cooling consumption capacity on demand without any human interaction all year long based on their seasonal dynamics and what their use cases might be during tax time or during the holidays or whatever it might be. So I think there's really some great technological advances that are just right around the corner with the improvements around AI, the accessibility and IoT. Very good, Jason. Thank you, Raymond. Yeah, I think there have been some good answers so far. I'm going to take a slightly different fact. I believe that from the beginning of sustainability when we brought out originally and we started to think about how do we be more sustainable when it comes to infrastructure? I believe lifecycle costs need to be prioritized over first costs. So the first cost mentality right now is driving a lot of monthly, quarterly and annual decisions from all businesses. And sustainability really drives home the value in a lifecycle perspective. So if you can envision that iceberg showing the tip of the iceberg outside of the water, the bulk of the cost or lifecycle costs are underneath the water. And that's where you can crash and run into that and it can cause major issues for you later in your business's future without having those costs under control. So I think if we move to a lifecycle perspective when making these types of decisions sustainably, then obviously green winds every single day of the week. There's never going to be a scenario where you're going to regret all the trees that you saved or the amount of energy and the carbon emissions that you've reduced 10, 15 years down the road, especially if you start to brand and associate your brand with this investment. So maybe construction costs go up 10%, but then you're seeing, realizing a savings over many years later, 50, 60%, right? So at the end of the day, I think having the courage to spend a little more upfront, to design and build and manage and operate sustainably is going to deliver all the end results on the backend when it comes to your brand, your partnerships and the growth of your business, the stable cost structure. So if not even improving that by having these efficient technologies. So I'm thinking that's where the shift needs to happen. We need to stop watching the stock ticker and start thinking about our long-term impact of our decisions. I think some of our viewers agree with you based on the art emojis and thumbs up coming around, but Francois, your final thoughts on the question. Yeah, and your question is around what new thinking I would answer actually what new context will position sustainability as strategic even more than it was before. I think the context is, I think Jason mentioned a little bit about it is like the acceleration of demand with the AI coming in. We're seeing every single day and announcement and we did ours this weekend of like billions of financing to build new data centers, gigawatts and super massive facilities. And the thing is data center used to be the super desired investments. So communities were doing all what they had to do to attract investment. I think now I'm seeing the reverse happening is like now data center needs to convince community to welcome this huge facility and there is an increasing challenge of acceptability of the data center like community accepting to actually host those data centers and how do they accept? They accept if you're sustainable. So my bottom line is like sustainability is periods like your license to operate if we want to continue to grow as an industry. We have no choice but actually to be sustainable. It's not just financial. We discussed about the financial aspect of it but it's a financial from an aspect of if you want to continue to grow and to serve your customers has to be sustainable. And not just like using renewable energy being energy efficient but also look at more dimension of sustainability like use of resources. Water is an increasing area of attention biodiversity land usage. In Europe land usage is a big deal. And so reusing existing building rather than building a greenfield for instance. And so all those things are by default strategic right? Then they're right there like a front and center of any decision. And so clearly for me the era is now you have no, it's a good thing, right? You have to have a sustainable potential very well established otherwise you're not just gonna be able to build. Cool stuff. Excellent, thank you very much Francois and a great, great answer is gentlemen. I'm gonna go ahead and move on to the next question. Sustainability risk management SRM is a growing field that aims to balance potential to balance the potential to address ESG risk against a business's profit objectives. How is your business working to address sustainability risk and what principles guide your mitigation strategies? I love this question. I'm sorry that I put you're asking it but Jason, let's go ahead and start with you. Sure, we just published our first ESG report this year or 2022 but have had a very significant impact a very strong ESG program for the last probably three or four years specifically. I run our customer advisory council as well so I get to engage with a lot of our big clients to understand where their heads are at in terms of climate and sustainability initiatives. And I will definitely say it's, it is top of mind. We're actually holding another workshop here in a month to understand changing requirements and changing needs that they have. As you may know, the SEC has a new climate reporting standard that is hitting public companies here in 2024 so making sure that they can at least report out their energy consumption and sort of clean energy capabilities is super important to them. We've been part of the science-based, SBTI science-based initiatives as well as IMAISEN's climate accord. It's really trying to set standards and understand standards. Francois mentioned PUE, it still seems like it's the lowest common denominator that most of us can get our heads around but it's got to go beyond that to being able to really provide almost a blockchain of electrons and where they're coming from and where they're going to to really track the usage and really being able to prove to our customers where power comes from. I've spent way more time and I'm a technology guy talking to power companies in the last couple of years than I thought I ever would and it's the whole supply chain of transmission and generation and where they're renewables and low emission or no emission capabilities are coming from and they've been sort of dealing with the supply chain issues just like anybody else which is why we have conditions in California and Virginia and others where it's just impossible to even get power from a traditional energy source. So lots of dynamics and really spending more and more time as a company and I would say as an industry understanding what those dynamics are and planning for the future and getting ahead of it. Very good. Thank you, Jason. Michael, your thoughts? Yeah, so we're approaching this from both the operator and the tenant perspective but on the operator side for site selection we're trying to get ahead of what our clients are looking for. They are looking for sustainable developments and platforms to grow. The scale has never been bigger so it's also probably the most challenging time to find those solutions but we're getting ahead. We're finding sites where we believe you could build a platform for one of the most sustainable data centers in the world in multiple markets but the timelines are often challenging for them. You have to work with the community. You have to work with municipalities, local governments. You have to find partnerships. I mean, you find that a lot with, especially trying to fit data centers into, for example, district energy systems, right? In North America, we don't have quite as robust a platform of district energy systems as maybe Europe but it's getting there. There's a lot of interest and quite frankly there's a lot of value in that waste heat and reusing it for other uses but it does take time to put those partnerships together so we're trying to get ahead and put those programs in place for our clients ahead of time and that ties back into what I was saying and RFIs and RFPs for our end user tenants as well. I mean, they see this as a risk. The data center is, it's been a lofty industry and there's been a lot of growth but at the same time, like there are groups that have been left in the wayside there's been some bankruptcies over the last few years so like our tenants were educating our clients of the financial health of the operators that are providing their services as well as the sustainability metrics that are being reported on because these are seen as long-term risks if you wait for the regulations to kick in and all of a sudden big capital costs are required to stay competitive or stay within a regulation what does that mean for the operator? Does that mean it goes into a separate fund and it's gonna get sold? Like these are all questions that end users and tenants are looking at when assessing sites and again, it goes beyond the initial term of the service agreement or the lease. They're looking, they're trying to look 10, 15 years and beyond what's gonna happen. So really getting ahead of these trends I think is how we're trying to help our clients mitigate these risks. Excellent, thank you very much, Michael. Pete, how is your organization working to address sustainability risk and what principles guide your mitigation strategies? Well, I mean, I think the important thing about this is it's about making sure that you've got strong governance in place and that organization, I mean, it's always kind of been there for organizations over time and it will really kind of drive them forward and make them a more agile business as they move forward. So I think getting as much information as you can and really kind of thinking about your landscape is really important. So I think the organizations really need to kind of think about that and they need to really think about how they're positioning themselves and also positioning themselves against their customers' needs and kind of reduce some volatility to their customers as well. So we've seen that with the energy prices that we've had in Europe recently where prices have been very high and I think that from a business point of view, both from a risk and an alignment to the customer's needs is crucial. So organizations can make sure that they are aligned to give their customers less volatility around that and also allow them to have the relevant kind of security of supply as well. So all of those risks are really nicely aligned to meeting what the customers are looking for in the future and I think that aligns to also the customers kind of net zero aspirations as well. Very good. Thank you, Pete. Francois, your thoughts? Yeah, so on how is it a risk management or an opportunity management? I mean, we can debate for a long time, but we take it more from a positive side that with the way we've organized is we call the data for good program where we have zero stream with the environment side of thing. It's a fairly standard CSR program with like also the social responsibility and the committee. But more recently, what we added is definitely more detail stream on governance and reinforcing the governance and measurement and the reporting. We talked about some public disclosure that I think Jason mentioned in the US that is coming also in Europe with what we call the CSR directive coming into play where people will have to report anyway publicly. And so we also part of the Climate Natural Data Center fact in Europe. We are certified, we have certified our carbon trajectory with SBTI as well. So there's definitely a huge stream on this part of, I would say, not governance from a human perspective but from a data and from a measurement perspective and frankly, some days I feel I'm just doing reporting between our customers, our investors and the public authority. We are reporting a lot of data on that. So, but we see this reporting as an opportunity also to drive and to be more efficient in the day to day business. So it's not just to report, it's to improve. So that's how we do it and we will continue to do this but clearly this is this principle. And we also added a stream on very recently more like local territories and how we contribute to the community. I think that's important back to my first comment on the new contacts about getting the permit to grow actually. And if you don't address the local communities you're not gonna get that permit. So doing specific outreach to local communities to explain what is the digital economy I mean, pretty basic, like kids in college they don't always understand that when they play TikTok there is actually physical infrastructure and a server somewhere, right? It's not in the cloud. It's actually in a very hard existing facility just around the corner. So when you start like, okay, and that's kind of, I think it's also important to build that knowledge and that understanding. Thank you Francois and Raymond your final thoughts on the question. Yeah, so lots of good answers. Francois is leading me up for a few different things there. So I appreciate that. I do believe and agree with you that the risks are opportunities. At EchoSense we've released recently our compliance package for ESG. So obviously being based in Europe we have a different response and a different preparedness for this for these directives that are coming online that have teeth and that are financially risk obviously for the company. So those compliance and reporting we don't want guys like Francois spending all day making reports, right? We wanna be able to streamline that process for him so that he can get back to doing what he does best. So I think compliance and reporting are what we are leaning into to support. Obviously the company itself is founded on getting to net zero. So we're very in alignment, very much in alignment with this. I look at it financially. Obviously there would be penalties. We wanna future proof the Americas with what's going on in Europe and prepare us over in the States to be ready when we do have teeth. But when anything, if something can't get through our Congress and it has teeth, we're gonna need to be ready for it. And so ultimately I think that's a big risk. The other risks I think are coming from a branding perspective as well as a perspective of, how conscious are you and how where are you of the community impact, right? So Francois as mentioned earlier, what is the community impact and how vested are you in the local community? So if you're not branding yourself with being forward thinking about the planet and our resources, right? We've talked about the utility grid and what type of power you're getting, how clean is this power, how sustainable is this power source. So all these things are a bit overlap a little bit, but they're all risks to our way of life and our professional ways of life, right? So I think it's important to save the money. It's important to be aligned properly with the community and with the future where we wanna go. But ultimately I think the greatest risk is to the fact that we only have one planet, one home that provides us all of the blessings that we have. So ultimately the biggest risk is we're not gonna hand over a sustainable, healthy planet to our next generation. I think aligning with that as your tent pole that holds up your tent is very, very positive way to address this and mitigate your risk. And I think financially is the easiest way is to be compliant, gather the data, make sure that you're in compliance. And that'll be the best way to mitigate it short-term. Excellent Raymond, thank you very much. Any other thoughts on this question before we move on? All right, then I am going to move on. Next question, how do you see risk analysis from a sustainability perspective playing out in your conversations with your clients? Let me go ahead and read that one more time. How do you see risk analysis from a sustainability perspective playing out in your conversations with your clients? Pete, let's go ahead and start with you. Yeah, I think the whole kind of risk analysis, sustainability discussion is a different discussion that's probably been had before across once again, multiple industries. Historically it can be very transactional and just very much a deal-by-deal basis. And I think there is both the risk side of things and an opportunity also. By having this dialogue with organizations and your customers just clearly shows where you are as an organization. And I think it's been discussed already that sustainability will become a ticket to the game rather than just a new selling point. But also the risk management of what you're doing and the huge requirement of energy, the right type of energy coming into data centers, how it's sourced and what you're doing. And also looking at various other elements, price volatility as we talk about security of supply. Yeah, there's a lot of work that's being done and requests that we see around adaptation. So actually managing climate changing, living with climate change as well. So having those discussions with your customers and saying what you're actually doing and what your forward plans are, are hugely beneficial. And so that's taking those risks and showing that you're actually concentrating on those and then turning it into an opportunity because organizations and especially some of the bigger organizations that are taking data and long-term contracts from data centers will want to know that they're within an established business that's got a plan in place. So I think by having those discussions and highlighting the risk and how you're managing them could turn into a longer-term opportunity. Amazing answer there. Francois, your thoughts? Yeah, I think, I mean, I'd like to add a slightly different approach to this, which is risk analysis and time to market actually. In the ideal world, if there was no time to market, you would go to the best site with the best grid connection, 100% renewable energy, you would spend a lot of time in designing and et cetera, et cetera. But then you would deliver capacity in 2035. And today, I think what we're seeing the demand, most of the selection is driven by availability more than actually the perfection of the sustainable site. It's a bit of a, I would prefer not to, but that's the real life. And there is a race for data center capacity right now. We're seeing that there is a more demand than real supply given, we talked about AI and everything. And so it's a bit of a, it will normalize obviously and over the course of three to five years, it will be a bit more, I would say, yeah, I try to really optimize the sustainability part. But for today, I think I see our client just taking capacity where they can actually. And it's a bit of a pity, but that's a reality. And up to us also as operator to catch up real quick on the next generation of data centers and be able to propose this on real quick. And I think we are serving like a large corporate and hyper-skellers. They all have pretty ambitious sustainability goals. So the risk, I mean, for us, we have to use 100% renewable energy, be efficient on the energy, et cetera, et cetera. So that is not even a risk analysis, it's just you're in the game or you're not, right? So from their perspective. And, but then with the mitigation of availability, right, and time to market. I'm seeing a lot of shaking, I'm nodding of the other panelists. Jason, that includes you. What are your thoughts? Yeah, I mean, it is a little bit of an interesting time right now, just if you have capacity somewhere, somebody will take it. And it probably doesn't matter, which I think is a bubble of it. Latency is AI killer at the end of the day. So ultimately stringing out capacity across different regions and states and countries, limits some of the use cases that you can do there. So I think it will eventually come back together. But what I'm seeing with our customers that really started maybe with COVID, which was an interesting time of just disruption kind of in our industry and in the world, right? So thinking about risk and having more conversations about it. And then talking about ESG and DEI kind of during that time because it was a very sensitive time in terms of just people worrying about their families and their health. And then sort of shifting a couple of years forward and talking about sustainability and environmental goals. We're gonna kind of roll into a recession and we're really worried about optimization and we spent a lot of extra money during COVID. So how do we make sure we're balanced the cost to our sustainability and ESG goals? And then I would say now it's very much the conversation is, okay, ESG, your goals prove it to me that you put your money where your mouth is. And I think that's, we're seeing that more and more with our customer conversations, which is why we've really focused on our reporting, but also things like our green bonds that we did two years ago, I think was the largest data center asset back security deal focused using green bond, which ultimately requires us to make sure we're conforming to those requirements. So I think customers wanna make sure that you're able to prove it essentially today, which I think is different from three or four years ago in the conversations. Very good, Jason, thank you. Raymond, your thoughts? Yeah, you know, I think what's interesting, I'll take a slightly different tack because those are all great answers and kind of covered it is, I think from the perspective of working with your customer to mitigate risk, you need to be willing to have the uncomfortable conversation, you also need to be willing to help hold their hand through the process of understanding how do you become more sustainable and how does that measure up with your financials and your vision and your plan for your business? I mean, this is throwing a monkey wrench into a lot of people's goals and ambitions, right? To race out, as they said, find capacity and build and build. If they have to take a step back and look at their business holistically and figure out what do I wanna measure? How am I gonna report it? And what am I going after when it comes to a sustainability perspective? Most clients are uneducated, frankly, at this point. They're used to day to day doing what they have to do to get the job done. They're not spending all their days becoming experts on sustainability. So our job is to obviously hold their hand through this process and be able to ask the tough questions but also have solutions ready, right? If I uncover the pain and I put them in a state of disrepair and they're a little concerned, I need to have some solutions for them as well that will help them to address this. But I think that is to me where the rubber meets the road is having uncomfortable conversations. Get comfortable being uncomfortable and helping them to have the tough calls. Like I wanna build, I have capacity and I want to spend this X amount of dollars in this perspective. But if I don't tackle and I don't put money towards reporting and I don't put this process together, maybe that ends up impacting me in a way that I really can't handle in the next couple of few quarters, et cetera. So I just think that is important, right? Making sure that you are able to work through these things hand in hand with your customer and that's really gonna, I think, build and strengthen your relationship in the long run. And at the end of the day, hopefully get a sustainable metrics and installed and integrated. Thank you, Raymond and Michael. Yeah, number one, completely agree with both Jason and Franco's point on this here. Vacancy rates are certainly a challenge, especially when we're representing tenants. Like when your options are limited by what's available on the market, you can weight sustainability all you want and all of those metrics. But if it comes down to two options, there's not too much that you're ranking. And that has led to a rush to market for operators as well, focusing on what's available now, what can they get to market as quick as possible. And like some of those sites are being selected in less than sustainable grits. But you know what? I mean, there's unprecedented demand right now and those sites will perform well. Hopefully there's as many other strategies as they can to increase the efficiency and reduce the overall impact. I mean, that's really a challenge that we're seeing right now. And I would just add on to the tenant perspective in speaking with our clients and really trying to understand like what's driving these decisions to focus on sustainability. One thing that has come up over and over again is it's not just them and your client that you should be focused on, it's your clients' clients and your clients' clients' clients. They all have these goals. They all have these metrics that they're pursuing. When they're pitching on business, they're including ESG and how their organization pairs up with their competitors, right? So again, it goes beyond just the pure financials of the projects and the deals that we're currently working on and goes into, I mean, really the overall operation of their company. Sometimes it has to do with their financing. Sometimes it has to do with winning new business, right? But I mean, the more you look at it, there's a significant network effect to these requirements. When one company implements these sustainability goals, it can drive many other companies to adopt those same strategies. Excellent, Michael, thank you very much. And gentlemen, I'll bet you didn't know that we've already talked for 42 minutes. So we're gonna move through the next two questions a little quicker, but I definitely wanna get two rows. Excuse me, and we may end up going a little bit over, and that's okay. So next question, when it comes to business case development, how can operators link it back to overall customer need, net zero ambitions, and carbon reporting? I'm gonna start with Pete on this one. Yeah, I'll try to be as brief as possible, but it's a good question nonetheless. I think it's really about knowing your customer and really understanding what they really require. We've worked with a data center provider who's really trying to link up with their larger customers who are for a long-term sustainable sourcing of renewable energy, for example. So it's looking into that. I think there's a lot of talk about scope one, scope two, and scope three, and everybody is scope three of somebody at some stage. And so it's making sure you are aligned to your customers, and ultimately that's how that then filters into the business case. But ultimately, if you get your business case right, and you can show there's a customer demand for it, and a customer requirement for it, and you can identify that and show that, then that should be able to create a really good, solid structure to any business case because there's a need, and I think it's aligning to those needs, but understanding and identifying those needs and being able to articulate that. Awesome, thank you, Pete. Raymond? Yeah, I'm thinking, my mind immediately jumped to, when you said operations, acceptance of new technology, new directives and new goals, and training of those folks on the ground level is something I've been focusing on a lot more lately as I find the higher ups and the business may make decisions on how to embrace sustainability and ESG, but then getting it to water down to the local level and actually getting those gentlemen to embrace it and to see the value and to do it on a day-to-day basis, I think is actually an important conversation to have. So not exactly answering your question, but I think from an operational level on the local level, at the bottom level, we need to spend time educating and empowering those guys because they're the ones that actually have to make the changes in their day-to-day routines and lives to impact and to integrate these sustainability metrics. So whether that's running new reports or doing new activities or new methods of procedure, et cetera. So I think that's important to get the low level, I wouldn't say low level, but the boots on the ground bought into this and trained up. Very good, Raymond. Thank you to Francois. Yeah, I mean, when you look at the data center operators and the way they sell to the customer on a large basis, it's rental plus energy, right? The rental market, the rental piece, it's fairly, I would say, consolidated and mature. The energy piece is more interesting because it's always a pass-through back-to-back to the customers and with what happened in the energy market, especially here in Europe where conventional energy has gone up to 100 and 100 of euro per megawatt hours, it has created an interesting dynamic on the energy side because you make the business case for specific solution for onsite energy or renewable energy, a lot more interesting to customer actually. And so where it didn't use to be such a differentiator, it is starting to be, and it will be more and more, especially now that also with a grid infrastructure being a bit constrained, you seeing site with no guarantee of supply 100% of the time. So what do you do then? And then you can start having interesting solution on the energy side. So I could spend hours on that, but really I see the future where you can work a lot on the energy part of the equation. I feel like we probably should spend hours on that at some point, but unfortunately we're gonna move along. Michael, your thoughts? Yeah, so I mean for the business cases, sustainability can't stress enough how important it is. Right now, I think there's a little bit more weight that's put on financial decisions because of what's going on in the overall economy. There are challenges there, but at the same time, when operators are implementing business cases now, you're not talking about the next six months, the next 12 months, you're talking about the next five years. If you wait for us to get through the current economic turmoil, quite frankly, it will be too late to start implementing those strategies. These things take time. There's a lot of capital involved. So I mean, those that will succeed here and really start creating some competitive advantages are already working on it and they've been working on it for years. So it's not so much, it's not a want, it's a need. It's a question of how quickly are you going to lean into sustainability as an argument for your business case? Very good. And Jason, to put a button on this question. No, I think ultimately, not having these capabilities as part of the business case really just as a non-starter, right? So it's got to be there. Otherwise, the opportunity cost, you're not going to have any customers left, right? Because ultimately, I think it will be a requirement. But I think to Michael's point as well, it's the power capabilities and just the demand cycle is in this weird state where right now if you can go work with the local or state government that has good power capacity and has a good roadmap, it's just easier to get things done and easier to move faster. And we're starting to see a lot of shifting workloads out of traditional tier one locations in the US to these tertiary secondary markets that continue to be some of the fastest growing markets in the world now. So things are definitely changing, but the focus has to be on these or you just can't, you won't be able to compete in the market. Excellent, Jason. Thank you very much for that. All right, guys. We're going to jump to the speed-dating round of the round table today. I'll give you each 30 seconds to answer this question. Let's have some fun here. What will sustainability's role be in the competitive landscape? And so by talking about sustainability as a key differentiator, what will sustainability's role be in the competitive landscape? And Jason, we'll just kick it back over to you. I mean, you're already seeing it. What's the magic quadrant now of your sustainability capabilities as a data center operator? So it's already starting to happen and the transparency is rising for sure, which I think is a great thing to help the competitive dynamics and making sure that we can continue to stay relevant, but also the competitive dynamics help to make sure that we continue to innovate and stay relevant with our customers base. Awesome, Jason. Thank you, Raymond. Yeah, I mean, I think Jason nailed it on the head here. You can't be competitive if you're not already, frankly, and I think Michael hit it on the head. If you haven't been working on this and you're already not actively doing projects and taking steps, you're going to lose our market share pretty quick. So obviously I think at this stage of the game, you need to be promoting your plans and your visions for how sustainability is going to be integrated and you need to be very transparent about the challenges. And then I think at the end of the day, it's a lot easier conversation when you're promoting where you want to go being transparent about the challenges and then you can have more of a collaborative connection with your customers, hopefully aligning with all the larger logos out there that are our clients clients and what they want. Excellent. Thank you, Raymond. Michael. Yeah, I mean, I reiterate a couple of points I made earlier. The vacancy rate is already higher in older facilities that are less efficient. That will continue to be the case. I mean, if we see energy costs continue to increase like they have, the benefits of locating it in a more sustainable site will only become more pronounced. So I know this is a trend, it's going to continue and it's really a need for operators to stay relevant and competitive. Thank you very much, François. Yeah, I'll repeat myself from the beginning. I think sustainability is a license to operate and is a license to grow. I mean, you won't be able to, and I'm repeating what you a lot have just said is you're not going to be able to expand your business without sustainability and the bar will be rising. The legislation and the jurisdiction and the customer expectation and the citizen expectation will always continue to rise. Look at the latest, the German law where you need E3Us, BU, et cetera, just to start. It will get stricter and stricter and so you better start early and be the first mover of the year. Very good. And Pete, final word. Yeah, I think it's been said it's a ticket to the game if it's done right and well, in the future, it will be definitely a ticket to the game. If it's done right now, it might give you some advantage but ultimately, if you're not on top of it and you're not doing it right and you, the word greenwashing has not been used too much but it should be used a lot. If you cut a corner here and there, you will be found out because your competitors are going to be doing a better job than you and then to the point that François said, regulation will come and get you because you get tighter and tighter as the years go on. So you better be doing it right and it will, because ultimately it will be a norm over time. Very good, Pete, thank you very much and thank you to all of our speakers for your insights on this very important topic. To those tuning in, if you enjoyed today's round table, please keep an eye out for greener data volume two, one day 2024 and in the meantime, visit greenerdata.net for sustainability content and resources for our next round table on December 7th at 1 p.m. Eastern. We will be joined by telecom ramblings editor, Rob Powell. We love Rob over here to moderate a panel on the topic, New Year Predictions for Infrastructure and Sustainability. And that, my friends, is a wrap. A look out for the playback of today's round table coming soon to JSA TV and JSA Podcast on YouTube, iTunes, iHeart, Spotify and more. In the meantime, please join the panelists and I back in the networking lounge and happy networking.