Can the Planet Handle Our Data?

Thank you for having me.

Thank you for coming.

And I think let's just jump straight into the first question.

We share the word data center all the time, but most people have never seen one.

Could you explain what exactly is a data center and what happens inside?

Well, data centers are buildings, big warehouses without windows.

And inside these buildings there are a lot of servers, storage systems, routers, telecom equipment, which are used to store information or process information.

But also in data centers you have all kinds of backup systems like batteries, generators.

In case the power fails you automatically go on batteries and generators start kicking in.

And then of course when you have a PC or a laptop you feel the heat coming out of it.

We need also big cooling systems to cool down all the heat.

So these buildings exist everywhere.

Sometimes in office buildings.

Sometimes there's a server room.

But also as separate buildings like we have with LCL we have... you know a big building where we have many different customers in it but also for example if you're going on a cloud provider like you know google or facebook they have huge facilities with huge number of servers so they can offer you facebook or any of the services they offer so there are many types of data centers And the new ones are the AI data centers.

These are training with data.

And that's a new class of data centers which came up in the last years.

Okay, thank you very much.

And how has the scale and purpose of data centers evolved in the last two years? Is there a particular reason you mentioned AI, but how does it make the scale and purpose different?

Oh yes, when we started long ago, 20 years ago, even longer, data centers were very small and there was not yet so much data.

It all started with the internet and much data was created, emails, streaming, video.

All this new type of data has as a result that there are many more data centers everywhere in the world.

And there's more need for them because people are creating all the new information which can be stored on these servers.

And also businesses have become more complicated.

Long ago your bank account was in a paper ledger, but now it's all digital and you want to have instant access to it.