Sustainable Byte Low Impact AI Infrastructure

Thank you very much. It's great to be back with all of you this morning. But now we'll shift the conversation towards one of the most pressing questions shaping our sector and something that we've heard quite a lot particularly yesterday during the fintech sessions. how AI and digital demand are transforming the infrastructure we need for the new economy. Joining me here on stage um is Patrick Patz, founder and managing partner of Transition Equity Partner, a firm that is behind the largest AI data center campus in the world.

Welcome.

Thank you, Mercedes. It's great to be here. I appreciate Abu Dhabi finance week having transition equity partners part of it and uh I'm a big fan of Mercedes and everything the global climate finance center is doing and it's uh great to be part of that as well.

Thank you very much Pat. Um let's go directly into it. We only have 10 minutes. How is the Nexus data center balancing sustainability and innovation minimizing Nexus environmental impact while at the same time delivering the massive compute needed here in the digital age?

Yeah, thank you Mercedes. So when we looked at this challenge of the world needing massive compute, we are short compute around the world. You need to start with and I split it into three categories. power on the input, fiber on the output and in the middle is water.

Uhu.

So on the power side, we wanted to go for all the hyperscalers that are now coming to the campus and taking leases, 20, 30-year leases with us. We wanted the most firm power. Now this is in the US. I'm blown away by what Taka is doing here in the UAE with the massive solar and battery best system that they're putting in place. In the United States, we're not as blessed with as much solar, but we have solar power on the project as well, but you go to where the energy input is the cheapest and the Peran basin has a lot of waste called natural gas.

So that is where you can get the cheapest electricity in the United States. So the input side is gas fired power and I'll come back to that in a second of why that's so important for circularity in building these large data centers. On the output side is fiber. This campus sits in the middle of four of the metropolitan areas in Texas. There's massive fiber that crisscrosses our property.

It's a very large property and we can tap into 24 carriers. Nine of them are dark. We have 11,600 strands.

That is in excess of what Dallas Infamart has. Equinex has a large IXP and DFW, Dallas Fort Worth. Uh we're larger than one of the largest internet exchanges in the United States presently. And in the middle of all that is water. Water is required for power generation.

It's required to cool the data center. And if you recall on gas fire generation throws off a lot of heat.

Yep.

That is waste heat. If you can capture that waste heat, we have another company that's actually here in the UAE. Ramdas Reo may be in the crowd somewhere. He's head of international for AirJuel technologies. AirJuel pulls and uses the waste heat from the power generation.

the circularity of that we can tap into the largest reservoir which is the atmosphere and we can grab distilled water from the air and use that for power generation and cooling the data center. So there's an enormous circularity that makes this a positive water campus. We're also tapping into the city of where the small town where this massive data center is located. We'll be circulating the town's water using it at the data center and given the size of the footprint we're able to collect a lot of the rainfall as well. So this is a positive water campus despite its size.

So that's how we have approached this opportunity.

That's key. Thank you Pat. And also very important as you know the the uh UAE will be hosting the UN water conference next year. So on that what lessons from renewable energy grid transformation water supply can we apply to say developing and financing of AI data centers in today's constraints power and and water scare markets and again taking into account that the UA will be hosting the UN water conference. What will be your key um uh takeaways?

the the key the key takeaway is uh you you we this whole challenge is power again fiber output and water in the middle um airel technologies recently won an award uh that was uh it's called the net zero data center sponsored by Google Amazon data for in uh Denmark they are building a net zero both carbon and water 2 megawatt facility that AirJuel was one of 70 companies that entered. It was the only US company. It was the only water company to win one of the three awards. We will be uh delivering an airju unit that will show the world that you can actually have a net zero data center on a smaller scale that then we can scale from there both carbon and water.

Great. And finally, one last question. Three minutes left. Abu Dhabi's start gate UAE project is one of the world's uh largest AI compute clusters. Pat, what are the necessary enablers for Abu Dhabi to become the global benchmark for sustainable AI infrastructure?

Um you're already doing it. You're already doing it. The

we all already doing it.

Yeah. You everybody in the audience, I am um very humbled to be here uh to be part of this community. We brought one previous large project in the United States. It was called Next Decade, a large LNG export facility. When I was at Black Rockck Mubat as an investor, a partner in the project, Adnock, XRG, our offtakers and investors in the project as well.

That was about a $33 billion build in the southern portion of Texas. No surprise coming back here with Nexus and the opportunity to bring AI compute at massive scale that's only starting in the United States. We have ambitions with Nexus to call it Nexus uh global link. We want to create more massive AI data centers around the world. We have other countries that we are advancing our thought process and everybody I've met.

I could rattle everybody off but they would all be familiar names to you. Unbelievable what the UAE is doing. And I um you know earlier this morning I was with Taka. Obviously, they're building a massive uh 1 gawatt solar with enormous battery backup to bring that type of electricity carbon-f free to data centers and scale it. And I I I don't even want to mention everybody because it's everybody here.

So, we would like to allow investment opportunity just like we did with next decade. But as importantly, Mercedes, we're working closely with the chip manufacturers. There are very unique challenges from a power electronic standpoint running these AI data centers that we have to solve and existing data centers don't have the power electronics to ch to handle what we call load drop mitigation micropulsing and harmonic frequency. They can destroy all the power electronics and prohibit those data centers from operating. So that's intellectual property that we've created with the chip manufacturers, Nvidia, AMD, etc.

And so we're as excited to help uh investment opportunity as we are excited to share uh that thought leadership in massive AI data centers that the world needs.

Perfect. Thank you very much uh Pat. your insight go to the heart of it and we at GCFC are delighted to be working uh with transition equity partners to help shape these models that can scale these new generation of digital infrastructure. Thank you very much for your insight and thank you everyone for being here with us today. Thank you.

Thank you. Humbled to be part of it.