00:00Ali, let me turn to you now, because you follow investment flows very closely, and I'm wondering whether you're seeing any signals that would suggest a bubble or something else.
00:11I don't think we're in a data center bubble at all, Tom. The reality is that we're building infrastructure for industries of the future. And in a lot of cases, industries we haven't even seen yet. That's the reality, right?
00:21And, you know, infrastructure expansion always precedes economic expansion, always precedes industrial expansion. I mean, as Roger was just saying, you know, we're building a lot of very beautiful cars, but they need roads to drive on, right?
00:36And this is much the same. And, you know, the reference, it's not the first time I've heard the reference or comparison to the dot-com bubble, but the dot-com bubble was much about software and applications.
00:47And even then, you know, we saw the likes of, I mean, some of the examples that Roger shared, but, you know, Mark Andreessen, one of the most famous investors these days, who's undoubtedly funded so many industries and incredible ventures, came up with Netscape back then.
01:00I mean, he's just one example of so many incredible innovations that were born in that era, right? But when we are trying to make a reference to the dot-com boom, which a lot of people do, I think one of the things we have to be very conscious of is that applications are very different to infrastructure, right?
01:14And we're building infrastructure that is core to industries of the future now, much like rail was to many resources 100, 150 years ago.
01:23I mean, this is something we cannot look past. And actually, you know, just a few short years ago, 2021, the Ministry of Investment in Saudi Arabia had estimates that our requirement for capacity by 2030 would be around 1 gigawatt.
01:36And now, even the lowest conservative estimates, estimating around 3 gigawatts of capacity, anywhere up to 8 gigawatts on the more aggressive estimates.
01:47And this is, you know, not just a case of building as much as possible, build it and they will come.
01:53I think this is, you know, this sort of capacity is a reflection of what we need right now when we consider all of the incredible socioeconomic transformation that's taking place.
02:02And once the new industries are born around this spine, you know, what will become, I think, the spine of the industry, we can only imagine what the capacity requirement will be.
02:13So my view is, no, I think we have a long road ahead of us and much more to build.
Be the first to comment