 Hello and welcome to JSA TV and JSA podcast, the leading newsroom for telecoms and data center professionals. I'm Jean-Marc Leamon joining me today. I've got Guy Wilner, CEO of iAccelerate and one of your most prominent entrepreneurs in the data center space. Guy, thank you for talking to us. How are you doing with everything that's going on in the world of the last year? Oh gosh, I don't know. I'm sort of locked down in London and running businesses on virtual at the moment. That's good. I mean, but you're running them very well. I mean, you've just announced a huge data center expansion. You had built in SACS last year before as well, joining you. I mean, there's a lot happening for the viewers that don't know you yet. Can you just tell us a little bit about yourself, where you come from, how you go into the data center space, and then just give us an overview of iAccelerate. Yeah, sure. So I've been in the industry since 1998, building data center companies started off in Western Europe, building across UK, France, Germany, Switzerland, and then we floated that on London Stock Exchange 2006 and sold it for about half a billion to Equinix in 2007. Then I got involved in TerraCo in South Africa and joined the board and invested there and we exited to Permira in 2014. I'm still very much in touch with the team. And in 2010, I started, I was invited by the European Bank to do some work in Russia to start up a data center company there. So we got that going and that's been running since. And then more recently, we started a sort of hyperscale campus in Nairobi, which we're just starting to build. That's interesting. I mean, I think what you just said, it actually, it's interesting because he sort of explains your background as well because you're showing Africa and you're showing Russia on each side of the screen. Yeah, so I got my friendly mammoth for Russia and my friendly elephant for African elephant for Kenya. So that's, that's the reason why I have a slightly odd background today. No, I mean, I love it. Let's focus on the mammoth. I've been pun intended. Let's focus on Russia now. You just announced what you claim to be, what can you is going to be one of the largest status in the campus in Europe at 200 megawatts. Let's focus through the news. I mean, what is the investment like? What's the schedule for employment? Anchor tenant, if you want to share your names. Well, Russia is a very, very big market, but it's a very underserved market. So up until about a year or two ago, there was more data center in Luxembourg than there was in the Russian Federation. Which if you think Russia's got the biggest internet market in Europe with over 100 million internet users, then that's slightly, slightly odd. So we started developing in North Moscow on a campus and expanded, expanded, expanded as customers expanded with us, but we did need a second location and it took a long time to find something that was, you know, clean with proper records and environment and all that sort of stuff because it's more difficult when you're in a sort of more interesting market like Russia. So securing clean property title or all the environmental checks and etc. It took us a long time. It took us about three years to find a decent campus. And it just so happens that the campus that we found was the old brewery for FS beer in Russia and the brewery had only been built in something like 1996, 97. So it's quite a recent construction and it's a massive chunk of land. It's like a small village. So you're planning to bring the first phase online and I mean I guess you've already got anchor tenants as well to build such a big based into the data center figures. Yeah, I'm not. I've never been so much in the real estate side to get anchor tenants to my businesses so we have at least three customers who are going to roll in there that's clear. But we've got one already signed up so I guess for the first time I will actually have anchor tenants sort of coming in rolling in from from from the from the north campus. We're hoping to get something operational by this summer because on the campus we've got some massive buildings as one one building is 26,000 square meters of warehouse. We're going to roll the 38 ton trucks in there and build out our cool walls and and and all the technology from inside. So, getting moving very quickly for a first small phase and then we've got a number of years to build out the rest. Well definitely big numbers they're going to compete with NGD in Wales for sure. Now that sounds good but I mean you've already touched on Russia and the opportunity in Russia but what are the trends you see within the Russian ladies in the space and then even Europe as a whole. Well I mean it's just typical of any what you might call emerging market is the sense that these emerging markets or whatever they're already exactly the same mobile penetration as any other emerging market. I mean I don't think you could classify Russia as an emerging market because a GDP per capita is is ahead of many European countries. But it's certainly a new markets, it's a newly developing market, and the inevitability is there'll be exactly the same amount of data center power processing, whatever in those countries in the future as there is so we're just sort of going through an equalizing situation now and that's the same for you know many many other countries so if you look more recently at Russia ozone. It's a big sort of eBay Amazon type company. So the ozone went on the NASDAQ in the US floated on NASDAQ their market cap something like $13 billion now, and they're one of, you know, quite a lot more than a dozen tech verticals in the internet in Russia. So, you know, Russia's got some very very big internet companies already it's got a massive obviously retail market. So the Yandex being one of the biggest as well. Yeah you got Yandex you got Mel Dot Ru, you know there's a whole bunch of bunch of these companies which are not very well known outside Russia but they do tend to have you know 100 million customers. Yeah, tend to have 100 million customers as you do. Just 100 million. I mean another interesting trends. I mean I don't know if you can call it trend but we haven't really seen it that much in the data center space and then special for week. We saw the creation of two so I'm talking about this packs the special purpose acquisition company. What's your thoughts behind that I mean you're someone that's very involved in the backstage of the industry across the entire continent so. What would you think about it. What would you think I mean everybody's being approached at the moment for these vehicles and it's, it's, it was a fairly quiet processing in the US up until about 2019. And then many companies realize this is a sort of a quicker route to getting on to an exchange, maybe a quicker route to get companies that hadn't thought about being listed to get on to the market. It's not an enormous amount of money so far so few assume there's. There were about 250 SPACs until December there's probably another hundred since then, but the 250 SPACs the total money raised is less than the market cap of equinix. So the it's not it's not a phenomenal amount of money thrown at the these shelf companies yet but they're they're all sort of one shot companies it's like a it's a trolley service to get companies on to Nasdaq so it's an interesting phenomenon and it's developing now. You know you've got Mike Tobin ex telecity, who's set up a SPAC, but this time based on the Amsterdam exchange, the UK stock exchange London stock exchange is thinking of changing the rules and allowing this as well. So, I think it's an interesting moment in the history of tech, there's many many many companies that have private equity investors at the moment which would like to have a bit more freedom perhaps and and and get out onto the market so I think the time is good but we'll see you know it might well overheat. Yeah, well definitely behind that one for the for the remainder of the year and then even next year, but speaking of the rest of the end into next year I mean they're still, we're still dealing with a lot of pandemic at the moment, but why are you going to be working on over the next 1224 months beyond the expansion you just announced. Well, we've got a lot you know it's a big beast, the Moscow business, as you can see behind me. And, you know, it's, it's, we're only doing Moscow so we've got a few more buckets that we can put capital in. That could be a little bit moving out west, but maybe moving out regionally East in Russia, you know country with 11 time zones this is plenty to cover that there's 12 cities with more than a million population which is more cities than in the US. With over a million populations that's partly because it's a very urbanized population. So there's plenty, plenty to do there in Russia to grow that business further, and maybe a little bit of M&A as well. And then obviously I've got, you know, I'm going to be busy with Kenya because we're just, you know, we're negotiating with with a whole bunch of hyper clouders at the moment. So we've made our announcement and brought in Frank Hasit from Equinix who's helping us coordinate the build. It's getting very busy. I can tell and I mean Africa is a whole different conversation because it's a very exciting market. I think we're going to have to leave that one for another time but just very quickly, when can we expect to accelerate data center in Eastern do you have any state in mind or Oh, I'd love to do that. I mean it's often the problem with the data center industry is we're so so down busy, satisfying the customer expansion needs that we never really get the time to sit back and get a bit more of a helicopter view and start doing the strategic stuff. So my dream is this year we actually analyze maybe five cities across East from Moscow, from between Moscow and Vladivostok. And, you know, by the end of the year we've selected three and then we start building next year. I guess that's a sensible thing to do. I mean Ross telecoms already announced a three megawatt data center in a catering space. You know, this, this needs to happen not just by accelerate but in any sophisticated country they really need to start building our data center capacity. Yeah, no it sounds very interesting and I can't wait to see the expansion happening. But I thank you so much for joining us and thank you our viewers well for tuning in into JSA TV and JSA broadcasts. Don't forget to also check our social media channels. Until next time. Happy networking.