It's good to get a picture from you on The level of demand, even with these questions about credit quality and state races in the midterms, overall, how's the trajectory going to change, if at all, next year?

Hey, Carl.

Nice to see you again, albeit on a dreary day in the market.

Hope our story brings a little sunshine.

We just came off a record earnings call just last night.

We're seeing robust demand.

Those partners and customers you mentioned are supporting a massive backlog, record $2.5 billion, 40% growth.

Is the footprint size of data centers, is it adjusting to some of the pushback from voters and politicians? I just wonder, are they getting smaller and more local to avoid some of the big presence that appears to be unpopular in some areas?

Why, why do you think that the, that that's not landing with the audience?

I think unfortunately folks can take one anecdotal observation of one data center and see, wait a minute, that doesn't have, it has an evaporative cooling, meaning it lets the water go into the ether, and say, wait, all data centers are massive in size, all data centers are gonna be designed like that, all data centers are gonna be taking more water, and not then go to page two of the, the, the book and say, "Wait a minute, that's an ex- a far-out exception." And look at Digital Realty, a public company, and I just told you how, how little water we use.

If you take it to just a, a simple thing, wh- when we use significant amounts of water, it's in a closed water loop system.

Literally, you fill it up once, and it runs.

And so think about, like, one swimming pool's worth of water being utilized to operate the data center.

Uh, what criteria has to be met to, in order to say, "Right, that looks like a, a, a place that we could potentially have a new data center?"

So think about the data centers as like there's different form factors and locations for different use cases.

And, and I...

And how do you see developing outside or buying outside the United States today, Andy?

Andy?What's interesting is data centers has kind of been thrust into the mainstream media, but there's so many layers behind what a data center is, where it's located, and the use case it's really serving.

Everyone wants to talk about AI, but we've got this tremendous digital transformation happening for enterprises coming out of server closets, office buildings, closing down data centers, old telco facilities.

Cloud is this called half a trillion dollar business growing 30 plus percent.

I personally believe there's so much AI focus now that cloud growth is being restrained, i.e., it's not meeting what its full potential could be given these big hyperscale customers have to decide whether they're gonna grow their cloud business or call it service the, the, the cookie monsters of the AI labs who are just gobbling up capacity.

Um, in those two markets you just mentioned, uh, two things that are happening that are, are really recent and relevant.

Digital in Europe in particular has been called putting together this string of critical nodes across the Mediterranean.

Mm-hmm.

So how do you stand out against them? How do you compete against them? Because I'm sure there's a lot of price pressure out there.

So a few things, we've been as a business for over two decades, solely focused on building, owning, operating data centers in major metropolitan areas.

We pride ourself in our reputation.

under-promise, over-deliver, operational excellence.

And you're seeing, they call it the wheat being separated from the chaff here when times are getting tough and we're scaling this infrastructure so quickly.

But right now, the demand is well outpacing supply in our core markets.

So even our value-add, we're just seeing rates for our capacity rise quicker and quicker and be more sought after.

So electricity use, water use.

What's behind all that from your perspective?

So as I mentioned, I, I... my prior life before coming inside Digital in two thousand and fifteen was around the real estate REIT infrastructure and related industries.

And so I've s- I've been a student of it for many versions, good times for REITs, bad times for REITs, you name it.

Uh, I think that there's certainly thematic, uh, trends happening in outside of data center land, let's say maybe where, um, certain asset classes have gone through what used to be viewed as core and [chuckles] impenetrably moats for the businesses, like the office business or the even the shopping center business that cult, uh, got a little bit sideways with the pandemic.

Uh, there's ups and downs, and those fundamentals flow through to capital and access and cost of capital, and I think it's no hidden secret that a, a large portion of the public REITs today trade at discounts to their NAV, uh, so are, are seeing a backdrop where it's challenging to growth and I'm, I'm sure that's leading them to turn their eye to things like this.

I think that what we're doing here and that activity is just coincidence, not correlation.

And my view is historically and going forward, having levers or, or arrows in your quiver on capital access is critical to driving the best outcomes.

What did, what did they say to you when you reminded them of that?