The role of services in supply chain resilience and security

Yes, there is a lot of measurement going on around data center impact, also because there is a whole societal conversation around energy and data centers.

You know, it's probably worldwide at this point.

Wherever you build data centers, you kind of have a whole marketplace.

Impact on energy grid, impact on energy costs, impact on the climate is a slightly longer conversation ever since we've started building.

I think especially in Europe, ever since we've started building kind of data centers, they've been built with that criteria in mind.

So that's why we build them in the north of Europe where you have kind of natural cooling.

And, you know, it's kind of this concept of green data centers that are fairly self-sustainable.

So there is a big consideration.

I would say the climate and environment considerations have been slightly longer than the energy costs and impact on grids.

That is slightly a more recent conversation given the boom of, and water, water is the other impact, with the boom of investment in data centers.

My personal opinion is that we are going to see probably within a horizon of time, a lot of the companies that develop The data centers kind of become energy producers because of those pressures.

So we are going to kind of get there probably not as soon as the society demands it, but we will sooner rather than later get there.

We need to build data centers.

That's absolutely clear.

But how do we build them in a sustainable way and with a new maybe societal contract attached to it?

Just echoing what Sabina just said, I don't have the numbers from the top of my head, but I think there are various estimates out there that the energy consumption of data centers at any given year is as large as that of certain entire countries.

I think Finland was mentioned in some context.

So the energy demands and the water consumption is humongous.

And as an economist, for me, that just has externality written all over it.

And I would be keen and that's why i very much welcome your question in a discussion about supply chain resilience and security that the external effects as it were on the environment chiefly in terms of electricity consumption and water but potentially other aspects as well are at least taken into consideration right and it's not just solely focused on economic resilience and business continuity But I think we have to ask the question, at what price can we ensure business continuity at a given level of probability?

I mean, I just want to add maybe a different perspective as well, looking at developing economies.

And, you know, they're just really sort of on the back foot.

The conversations are around how do we even, you know, start building data centers? We don't have any.

And then, you know, of course, there's a very necessary sort of discussion that you have to start building correctly from the beginning.

How do we create climate smart data centers to begin with? You know, how do we address the huge energy crisis that we have in some countries that cannot even support these data sets? And so, of course, the water effects, the cooling effects.