00:00In African countries, I think edge data centers, smaller sites like we operate in Durban,
00:04those are starting to proliferate.
00:06It makes a lot of sense because you want the content to be as close to the end user.
00:10So they have an amazing experience.
00:12You want to be able to access content, video, and get it straight away and consume it.
00:17I think from a cloud perspective, though, that becomes a bit more challenged in the rest of Africa
00:21just by way of economies of scale.
00:24It's large-scale infrastructure, and I think that that's going to develop in hubs.
00:27So at the moment, the major hub is South Africa, and then the two other hubs that are starting to
00:31emerge is Nigeria and Kenya.
00:34Which is interesting because there are, as we see with data centers elsewhere,
00:39power is a big debate and water is a big debate.
00:41Why is that not happening as these hubs are forming?
00:44Yeah, two important debates, and actually becoming even more topical
00:48as everyone becomes more aware of sustainability.
00:52Actually, there's a lot of myths as well.
00:54So maybe the easy one to address is water because, you know, water use comes up quite often.
00:59Actually, we use technology.
01:01So firstly, we operate in a water-scarce environment, South Africa's water-scarce.
01:05We have large facilities in Cape Town where, you know, come close to a day zero.
01:09So we incorporate technology.
01:11It's called a mixture of free air cooling and a closed-loop system.
01:17So we actually don't use water in the ongoing process.
01:19So actually, if you take all our sites and aggregate our water use, we use probably one-twentieth of the
01:26average golf course in America over the course of a year.
01:29So a bit of a myth with regards to water use.
01:32Renewable energy, that's probably more challenged.
01:35And there, we're a little bit in the hands of our national utility.
01:39You know, they've done really well.
01:40So we now moved into a power surplus position.
01:43But we've got a renewable energy target.
01:45We want to get to 100% renewable energy by 2035.
01:49How do you get there?
01:50So, again, we're in the hands of a little bit of Eskim.
01:52They obviously, we're an emerging market, 80% fossil fuel.
01:57They have a path to improve that.
01:59But we want to accelerate that.
02:00So we've invested $125 million in our own utility-scale solar plant.
02:05It's 120 megawatts.
02:07It's located about 100 kilometers outside of Johannesburg.
02:11And we'll be wheeling that power across Eskim's grid to our sites in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
02:15Is that – do you see that being the models that we need to see in some of these other
02:21hubs, as you call it?
02:22I mean, is it a combination of private and public coordination?
02:26Yeah, I see that happening more and more.
02:28I mean, if you take Terrico, we don't just connect ourselves onto the network.
02:34We're actually investing in the grid as well.
02:35So we're building substations, whether it's for the municipality or for Eskim.
02:40We'll end up building, you know, the substations as well as, you know, the connections to our sites.
02:46So we're investing in the grid, you know, alongside them.
02:49And, yeah, to the extent that they aren't able to provide us with an accelerated renewal path, we'll do it
02:54ourselves.
02:54Where does AI and higher computes come into the conversation?
02:58Because we've also been talking to quite a lot of people about AI data centers and more and more of
03:03them that are being rolled out.
03:06Is that something that Terrico is thinking about?
03:08And do you think maybe the African continent is a bit early in that development?
03:15So I think I'd differentiate AI adoption to AI data centers.
03:20I don't think the two need to necessarily go hand in hand, and I'll come back to that.
03:24But these large AI data centers that you're reading about, it's almost like weekly coming up in the news.
03:30Large sites, hundreds of megawatts or gigawatts being built in the U.S., in the Middle East, you know, and
03:35in China.
03:38Their cost of electricity is obviously a huge factor.
03:40So the cost of electricity is like between six to eight U.S. cents.
03:43I don't see these big sites being developed in South Africa or actually on the African continent.
03:49I think it becomes a little bit more challenged to do that.
03:51What I do see and what we'd like to see coming into our facilities is the inference model.
03:56So those big gigawatt sites is the training models, the learning models.
04:02Once that's been refined into an inference model, let's call it the production model, that needs to be, again, like
04:07content, close to the end user.
04:09Because you're throwing a whole lot of information at this model, and then you want to get an answer as
04:13quickly as possible and then act on it.
04:14It could be a prompt.
04:16It could be interactive with a bot.
04:19You want to get an answer super quickly.
04:20So we'd want to get those models into our sites.
04:23And if you add that up and aggregate, potentially, you know, it could be sizable demand.
04:28Why not AI data centers, though?
04:30So our data centers are AI-enabled.
04:32I do see AI coming.
04:33I just don't see these huge gigawatt factories coming to us.
04:37The demand or the supply?
04:40I just see, from a power perspective, it will be challenging to do a gigawatt site on the African continent
04:47at this point in time.
04:48So then what is needed to enable some of these to get to where you see as maximum operation?
04:55So a function of two things.
04:57Power infrastructure, you know, gigawatts, a lot of power.
05:01And the second one is the price around it.
05:03So, again, you're competing against these markets.
05:06We're the Middle East, very low cost of electricity.
05:08Some of the U.S. markets, six to eight U.S. cents.
05:12You'll have to get the cost of electricity down to that price.
Comments