Michael Ryder's a referee as well Michael's the chairman of the underage clubs in County Galway do you feel that too Michael I mean when you're that level maybe at times of isolation when you're reffing matches

Well, thank you, Andrew, for calling me.

I think that when you take control of a game, it's up to the referee, and every referee does this.

He lays down the rules to the two captains in advance of the match, and he tells them what he expects.

Now, in Galway, at the beginning of the year, in February, March, we do bring in the managers and the chairpersons and secretaries of each club, and we lay down the law with them, what we expect of their teams throughout the year.

because we do say to them, we don't want to see you in front of the CCC, because we will not defend you.

So it's up to yourself to behave on the sideline, coach the players in a proper manner, because it is not easy on the ref, because I wrecked a match last night in Clifton, so I left Toome at about quarter past four to go out for a match at seven o'clock.

There is respect for referees.

And I suppose the reason we're raising this issue today on the programme, as you pointed out that particular instance, but I suppose we want to know, have parents been asked to pay extra fees or extra charges for children? to participate in sports in schools across the country if you want to join us today 087 1400 106 is the whatsapp number the email to is lunchtime live at newstalk.com michael rider who's the chairman of the underage clubs in county galway is with us here on the line today michael how common is this or are you aware of of this having happened elsewhere across the country

Well, I'm only familiar with our own county in Galway here.

The procedure that we have in place in our county is that we manage the coaches that goes into the schools here in conjunction with the local clubs that would have schools in their parish.

And the wages of the staff is managed by our office here in Pear Stadium.

So we would have coaches who would go into our national schools in conjunction with the club.

So each club would recommend or would request a coach during the year and our county board officer coaching officers would put coaches in conjunction with the club into certain schools maybe one day a week doing Gaelic football or hurling and the wages of that staff would be managed by our county board.

be before, Michael? Is it for bus transport? Is it accommodation? Is it just the competition entry?

It would just be a competition entry, yeah.

Mm-hmm

... we talked about during the last discussion, it's critical to position the data center portfolio to be strong and resilient for future demand, both from a hardware perspective and importantly as well from a location perspective.

We didn't talk about that before, but I think being closer to the customer, and I'll get to that in one second, really does drive optionality in how you use the data center in the future.

Secondly, I'd focus on the customer base.

Ideally, a diversified portfolio of investment-grade customers.

Ideally, those customers have been in the data center for a while, so you can see resiliency and, and duration in their relationship, that the data center is an important location for them in their business, and that they have long-term contracts in place.

I think the biggest challenge that some of these very large hyperscale developments face, where the hyperscale development's being funded by third-party capital, is what happens at the end of the initial contract.

Michael, how do you feel? What are your thoughts on what's to come?

Given how quickly the tech stack behind data centers is evolving, how are you thinking about long-term conviction when what you are investing in is evolving in real time?

Yeah, Todd, first thing I would say and remind you of is that we are infrastructure investors, so we honestly try to stay as far away as we can from too many technology risks.

So like you have heard from Jackson and from Blair, we start by trying to pick the sub-sectors and the areas to invest that keep us away from the, the fastest moving changes in technology.

So our focus tends to be on, on acquiring data center assets where we are primarily the owner of obviously the shell, cooling services, and some of the other services that you provide to, uh, our clients or our, our companies, our portfolio companies provide to their clients to operate their own compute services and their own chips that they basically bring to our facilities.

We prefer that over being the owner of the chips because they seem to turn over and upgrade every couple of years.

All that said, obviously infrastructure technology in the data center space is advancing quickly, perhaps not quite as quickly as changes in the tip tech itself, but, um, we've seen rack densification increase from less than 10 kilowatts per rack historically to 25 to 50 kilowatts today and, and heading north of 100 kilowatts a rack in some of these really large, efficient large language model training centers in the future.

And so thatLevel of density requires some changes to the design of data centers and, and obviously requires a lot more cooling as higher density chips tend to create a lot more heat.

Where do power and grid constraints show up first when evaluating a data center asset? And what are sponsors from a pure-play tech background most likely to miss in diligence? Michael, why don't you kick us off?