 Welcome to JSATV Europe, together with the greener data movement for this quarter's live event focused on European Digital Infrastructure Sustainability. I'm Jean-Marc Lehmann. Joining me today is Ronald Philipp, Senior Director for Strategic Planning and Agility to Data Center Campuses. And Ronald, first, it's a pleasure speaking to you. Secondly, what you've announced last week is quite an amazing project and a very large scale rollout through some of the most exciting markets in the world right now. Thanks, Rafa Avimeon, and yes, indeed. It's taken a lot of time to build up to that big announcement last week where we rolled out a portfolio of data center campuses across the Middle East and Africa. These are both the regions that Agility is intimately familiar with. I run around eight countries in Africa, several markets, countries in the Middle East and Asia. So yeah, it's taken a lot of groundwork to build towards this announcement and this portfolio. It's very exciting. I can only imagine the amount of work that went into it. Try acquiring land in some of these African countries. There's some... No, I think I'll keep writing about it as opposed to... But Ronald, before we go into Agility and what you were doing on the ground, let's just paint the picture of the current state of the markets within Middle East and Africa because Middle East, there's billions of dollars going into it. Africa, there's a lot of capital going into it, but developing slightly at a slower pace than the Middle East. Equally, it's two markets that are very underserved for this day and age. So the demand is just tremendous. And what's gonna happen in the next 30, 40 years, even more so. Yeah, no, absolutely. So over the last couple of years, we've seen an explosion in demand and planned investment in data centers in the Middle East and Africa. Now, listen, I mean, Africa is obviously a continent with 54 countries and likewise in the Middle East, there are multiple countries here. But like you said, Joao, it's massively underserved in terms of data center capacity. In Africa, it's only been South Africa really that's had significant data center investment. The rest of the continent is massively underserved. I mean, South Africa is the third biggest economy in Africa. Egypt, which is second biggest economy, has one tenth of the data center capacity that South Africa has. So what we are seeing is, everyone was investing in South Africa. Now what we're seeing is investment in other tier one markets across Africa, Nairobi, Lagos, and then Casablanca and Cairo. It's not easy in some of these markets. It's gonna be challenging and we will come to that later. And similarly in the Middle East, we've seen some significant investment in the UAE, but now people are looking to invest massively in Saudi Arabia, in Qatar, in Bahrain, in Kuwait, and then the other economies. And Saudi Arabia, I mean, it's a large, large economy and very wealthy, massively underserved, Joao. So it's a really exciting time in the Middle Eastern Africa from the data center space, but it's not without its challenges and not without its risks. And that is why we believe we have a value proposition to help with what we're rolling out in terms of data center campuses. It's interesting as well, because a lot of what's happening in the Middle East, especially in the Middle East, but in some parts of Africa, is that countries are building entire new cities for millions of people. So not only what they already have, it's not, there's no supply of data center supply to those cities. They are building entire new cities that need everything to be built from ground up. I mean, I think it's the new Cairo capital, which is a $54 billion project. I think they need about $2 billion just on telecommunication towers alone, not even data centers. So there's gonna be another few billions to go into it. You look at Saudi Arabia, there's new cities being built everywhere, especially with neon and the line and all that. So it's a very interesting market, which is gonna be there for several decades to come in terms of data centers, investment and supply. But speaking of agility, agility is starting its own journey now to serve those markets. So talk us through the rollouts that you have planned for these two years. Sure. So just in terms of context, agility is a $7 billion conglomerate. It's the leading developer of industrial and logistics real estate across the Middle East and Africa. So we essentially buy or lease large chunks of land and we build warehouses and we lease them out to e-commerce companies, to logistics companies, to manufacturing companies. We do the same thing that a company like Prologist does in the US, Cegro or Panatoni does in the UK and Global Logistics Properties does in Asia. Now what's happened over the last year is that many data center operators came to us and said, hey, agility, we'd love to buy land from you. And we said, for what? And they said for data centers, because you have great land with power connectivity and you're right next to the cable landing station. So this was news to us. So we then looked at our strategy of how we wanna enter or how we wanna engage with the data center space. And last year we sold one of our businesses which was a logistics company to DSG of Denmark for four and a half billion dollars. So we said, we wanna deploy this capital in an attractive sector. And we looked at data centers and we had two choices really. One is to build a brand new data center operating team similar to what some of our other peers like GLP for example have done or we said, how can we do this as a real estate play? We looked at Cegro in the UK which you're very familiar with and we looked at Slower States where they have 30 data centers where they've built powered shells for them. So we said, can we be a real estate partner for data centers across the Middle East and Africa? And that is our strategy. So we have logistics parks across the Middle East and Africa, five countries in Africa and four countries in the Middle East and we'll expand to 10 countries in Africa. So what we've done Zhao is we've worked with data center consultants as well as a Knight Franks Global Data Center team to identify which of our sites would be ideal for data centers. And so what we've done is in four of our parks Kuwait, Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, Cairo in Egypt and Tema in Ghana, we have master plan specific sites where we can host data centers and where we have huge amounts of power available today as well as fiber connectivity and land which essentially will save a data center operator anywhere from 18 to 24 months in just land acquisition, getting power and a massive amount of headache in any of these markets trying to do any of that. So that's our start where data center campuses we as agility are not building the data centers we're looking to partner with data center operators in providing them a powered shell or possibly even entering into a joint venture with them but we wanna help them go to market faster in these very challenging and risky markets. I think just after I was because I'm not gonna ask for names because I know you can't give any names but are you getting more interest from international players as in maybe American operators or European operators or are you getting more local investors and local guys wanting to get into the shells? So it's interesting it's a combination of in terms of interest, it's a combination it's a bunch of international and regional players. So in the Middle East we have international operators we have cloud customers directly approaching us and we have a bunch of regional players from the UAE and Saudi who've decided to become data center giants and step outside their markets and similarly in Africa's shell we're speaking to both international operators as well as African data center operators. Now our experience in terms of the business model the powered shell or entering into a joint venture what we've seen so far is that the international operators who have got powered shells already and see grow in slower state or other markets it's an easier conversation with them. So we'll have to educate the market I'd say about powered shells when it comes to some of the regional players but essentially I mean in all cases it saves them 18 to 24 months in schedule. Which for the stay in age it's a massive thing especially with the supply chain shortages getting the product deliver so quickly it's gonna make a huge difference not just to the business but to the people that are gonna use them and the businesses are gonna come out of it new startups and innovation that this allows into these new countries. I was gonna ask as well to bring the sustainability element into it so how are you building sustainability into this new facility and you'll get you from the ground up? Yeah, so sustainability is a very important part of agility's global strategy and for several years we have incorporated done several things on multiple fronts and sustainability. We are part of the World Economic Forum's first movers coalition. So we're committed to procuring adopting sustainable technologies across our multiple businesses. We are the first logistics real estate developer to have green buildings, green warehouses, net zero warehouses in the Middle East and North Africa. We're an investor in clean fuel trucks manufacturers called Helion and a solar PV technology company called SVP Solars, TVP Solar out of Switzerland. So we do some, a lot of things at the group and within our businesses. When it comes to the data center campuses now what we are looking at is sustainability across the spectrum in terms of the energy that the data center consumes. It's become very important. So we've spoken to a number of operators as well as the end customers and they have very strong commitments to net zero all of them and so the big part of the conversation is how can you get me clean energy, renewable energy? So what we're doing across our campuses is from day one we have renewable power available because remember that each of these data center campuses are located within very large warehouse parks. There's a picture of one behind me which is a Maputo Mozambique. So we have a huge amount of rooftop space where we will have solar. We've already done this in Dubai and on one warehouse roof we have 60 megawatts. So in the Middle East we're abundant solar power and that's something we would bring to play. In Africa in several of our sites particularly in Ghana there's a significant amount of hydroelectric power from the dams in country both in Ghana and in Egypt which we can leverage. So even right now on the power side we're in talks with solutions providers on an entire spectrum of solutions including solar to hydrogen, et cetera which we will have on our campuses. So that's on the energy side. Similarly on the water front we are looking at water reuse, water harvesting, wastewater treatment facilities on all of our campuses. So essentially we will be able to provide those solutions to data centers on our campuses. Very interesting. And I think another interesting aspect of your projects is actually the human capital and what you're doing on the ground to help people as opposed to just being business driven. So talk us through your ESG programs that you're running specifically in Africa. Sure. So we are an emerging market specialist. And we've operated across a spectrum of emerging markets from Africa to the Middle East to Asia and beyond. We have agility as invested in training over 500,000 that's half a million young people in these markets on skills training in Ghana for example which where we're gonna have one of our data center campuses we have run training programs for the last seven years in partnership with local NGOs, two themes. One is we have done a program called Girls Who Code. So we teach girls coding in this Ghana facility and we also invest in another program for vocational training where we train Ghana and men and women from our neighborhood in skills in bricklaying and being secretaries and being in admin staff, et cetera. So we already do this. And I was president of one of the graduation ceremonies for one of these programs with young girls from the area and it was just wonderful because we're creating opportunity for them. So what we're looking to do is similarly find partners in the data center training space so that we can train data center technicians in market and locally because you'll understand that it's an underserved market but from a skills perspective also it's massively undersupplied because nobody has these skills in market. So we are very keen to as part of our data center campus rollout also be partners and invest in training local talent to supply not just the data centers on our campus but the entire industry. Very interesting, I mean, I was taking notes because right off my back, I think we can help you getting in touch with a few people. There's three people straight away that come into my mind for this. Excellent, we're looking right now for partners on that front. Okay, we'll help you that out. And then so, but just to quickly kind of come into a closing circle. So you've announced this rollout. What is the dream for the long, long term? Cause now we know the initial side of agility that is in the campuses but what's next? What do we not know yet? Sure, you can tell us. Yeah, so we plan to have a network across the Middle East and Africa. So we are in, we've rolled out two sites right now Cairo and Ghana. We have plans for a few more. Most probably Cote d'Ivoire and our existing park Morocco, Nairobi, same in the Middle East. We've rolled out Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. We already have requests for a couple of other markets that we're present in. So we are planning to expand to multiple countries across Africa. What's already happened with our announcement is that a couple of country governments that have been inviting us to come in and invest in logistics parks, they've made the same offer for data center campuses. So they've said, listen, can you do the same thing? Because if you can make it easier for global data center operators to come into our country, we'd love to have you as the data center, operator data center campus in our capital city. So the plan very much is hopefully that these go well, that we build deep trust with the global data center operators and the cloud. And then we become their partner of choice for a de-risk and a rapid rollout across multiple countries in the Middle East and Africa beyond the four that we've, that's our initial rollout. Very interesting. I feel like this is going to be a very fast journey over the next two years, in terms of expansion. Well, listen, I mean, I mean, I've been running around Africa for a very long time. I was born in a, I was born in a copper mining township in Zambia. I don't know about fast, but we are patient and long-term. So land acquisition is, yeah, it takes time in Africa. We want to move fast so that we can help the operators move quickly. But yeah, Africa moves at its own pace. And I say that with all the love and respect as someone who grew up in Africa. It's always good to also take culture to account. So, I mean, that's part of the journey. You absolutely have to, you absolutely have to. And that is, I think what we've learned well by being in these markets for a very long time. We know how to, you know, engage with local communities, be a trusted partner to governments. And we've won that respect, which helps us, you know, big time across these markets. Absolutely. I was going to ask if people want to learn more about agility or get in touch to maybe discuss new composites, what's the best way for them to do so? Sure, so they can go on our website and get in touch. There's a contact form. Or they can get in touch directly with me either on LinkedIn or my email ID is rophillipatagility.com. That's rophillipatagility.com. Where we'd love to, you know, hear from anyone interested in partnering with us or if we can help them with their rollout across countries, even where we're not present right now, we'd like to help provide a solution. Okay. Well, Ronald, thank you so much for joining. I can't wait to see the story further developed in the existing and new markets that are up and coming. I'll be here watching to put pins on the map with precision. Jaap, we have you come and visit us in Ghana. Oh, yeah. And yeah, we need to show you around. I'll do an agility tour through all the nice touristic places where you have a data center. Yes, absolutely. Jokes aside, well, thank you so much, Ronald. And as to our viewers, thank you for tuning in to JSA TV Live. Don't forget to check our social channels for more content. Until next time, happy networking. Thank you.