Join Raymond Hawkins, Chief Customer Officer at Compass Datacenters, as he hosts industry leaders David Liggitt, Founder & CEO of datacenterHawk, Barro Luitjes, Chief Strategy Officer at Kevlinx, and Martin Antunez, CEO of LATAM Entry, in an exclusive podcast recorded live at PTC in Hawaii. 🌴
From the serene shores of Honolulu, these experts dive into the trends and challenges shaping the future of data centers globally. Explore emerging technologies, innovations from across the world, and the shifting demands of our digital age. This is your go-to source for staying informed on what’s next for the industry in 2025.
The data center industry is evolving—are you ready for what’s next?
Read the full transcript below:
David Liggit: And we are now in the AI era. And what I would say is the strategies that grew the enterprise era and the cloud era cannot be applied to the AI, so something has to change.
Raymond Hawkins: Welcome to another edition of Not Your Father’s Data Center. We are here in lovely Honolulu, Hawaii at PTC 2025. I am super fortunate to be joined by three friends of mine, guys that I’ve met in the business and became friends, which is just awesome. We’ll start on the far end with what I’ve already announced is the smartest guy here. When Martin found out that he and I were going to be the same team, he quit pretty quickly, so clearly he knows what he’s doing. Martin is the founder and CEO of LATAM Entry, and resides in the great state of Nevada. Martin, give us a minute on LATAM Entry.
Martin Antunez: Yeah, absolutely. LATAM Entry is a company who’s focusing on servicing the data center ecosystem in Latin America. As clients, we’re consulting the subsea cable companies coming into Latin America on their edge strategy, land developers who want to enter the sector along with publicly traded REITs in Mexico who want to join the sector. Companies such as the fiber providers within countries that want to provide their roots for the data, for the hybrid skills that are coming into country, understanding their edge strategy. So really, a holistic view into the ecosystem and assessing where they have gaps to develop and implement their strategy. And really, the goal is to make sure that our industry grows fast in Latin America and just doing my part to assist.
Raymond Hawkins: Awesome, Martin. We’ll get into LATAM in much more detail. Next to Martin is David Liggit, another founder and CEO. You’ll recognize I’m the only non founder and CEO out here because I’m not as smart as these guys. David, as I think most of us know, the number one data center podcast in the world and their host, David Liggit, out of the great state of Texas. David, tell us a little bit about how you got datacenterHawk rolling and what you’re doing these days.
David Liggit: Yeah, you bet. Thanks Raymond. It’s great to be here with you guys. I’m David Liggit with datacenterHawk. We’re a global market intelligence platform for the data center industry, for data center operators, investors, users, vendors and consultants. And so, we go out and figure out what’s going on in the space, analyze it, put it on our platform so people can make better decisions. So I’ve been doing it now for 10 years. The datacenterHawk platform is 10 years old, which is a little hard to believe, but I now have the wrinkles and gray hair to prove it, and we’re loving being in the space…
Raymond Hawkins: 10 years.
David Liggit: 10 years, yeah.
Raymond Hawkins: Man.
Barro Luitjes: Boom. Yeah.
Raymond Hawkins: That’s a neat [inaudible 00:02:40].
David Liggit: Yeah, it does.
Martin Antunez: I don’t see any gray hair.
David Liggit: They’re coming. Yeah.
Martin Antunez: But how do you do it? I’m 10 years as well. Look at me, right? It’s the soap.
David Liggit: Yeah, that’s it.
Raymond Hawkins: So David’s going to talk about North America for us and then my good friend Barro, CEO, and founder of KevlinX, I do not say his last name, because I don’t speak Dutch and I always butcher it. Barro, tell us about Europe and tell us a little bit about you and Kevlinx.
Barro Luitjes: Yeah, well, two things for the sake of saying it, it’s very Dutch. I’m trying to learn, but it’s an education.
Raymond Hawkins: I’ll fly KLM more often.
Barro Luitjes: Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent, a hundred percent. And I stopped being a CEO because I found the perfect candidate for that. That’s Eric Boonstra. He’s an institutional candidate and I’m focusing on the strategy of the company. So I found that KevlinX 10 years now ago. I’m very rich, and I’m a banker, so sorry, don’t blame me. I worked for Lehman Brothers again, sorry, don’t blame me.
And we focus, from the very beginning, underserved regions as we call them back in the days. The strategy came up in 2014, so yeah, also 20 years. And we compared it to car parking. If you’re in the city centers at some point you can’t park your car anywhere because it’s the most expensive and you have to go to other areas where there’s space available, for let’s say reasonable rates.
So that’s what we did with our strategy of the company. So first project now being live in two months from now in Brussels, and have sites in different underserved regions in Europe. And happy to talk about it during the podcast.
Raymond Hawkins: Martin, tell us a little bit about your background, where you’re from, where you went to school, and how you got the cojones to start your own business.
Martin Antunez: Been servicing the Latin America region for over 10 years, the last six feet on the ground on the region. I’m from Mexico. I got all my bad habits in the U.S. where I was raised. However, I am a veteran of the U.S. Navy and also a veteran of a foreign war. That was the last war of the five fought in 1900s. And I was grateful to be part of that and be here.
Raymond Hawkins: Thank you for serving, Martin.
Martin Antunez: And thank you for being in the Marines. They say that as you get older, you have three, four different careers. And I’ve been fortunate enough that every career that I’ve touched and skill set that I’ve learned, I’m applying today.
As far as new markets speaking with the CEOs of fiber infrastructures, subsea cables, investors within the region, and leveraging all my expertise in the U.S., knowing the who’s who in the Americas, and then becoming the conduits or the dot connector between Latin America and the U.S.
And so I reside in the U.S. because I want to maintain my presence here and be close to the knowledge base. And then, so when I’m here, I’m an ambassador for Latin America and when I’m in Latin America, I’m an ambassador for the U.S. and I like to take advantage and leverage the best things of both regions and try to make something good for everyone.
Raymond Hawkins: Martin, thanks for giving us a little bit of your background. What year did you start LATAM Entry? What year was that?
Martin Antunez: May of last year, ’23, 2 months after leaving Ascenty, I had to go walk barefoot in the forests of Tahoe and find myself and see what I was going to do. Ladder mentoring was available, so I thought we’d go with that and it’s been nothing but fun.
Raymond Hawkins: Again, thank you for serving. David, tell us a little bit about your background and how did you decide to start a data center information software platform, not the thing you go study in school. Tell us how that happened.
David Liggit: That is true. Yeah, so you shared, but I’m from Texas. I went to school at Baylor University in Waco, Texas.
Raymond Hawkins: Sic ’em.
David Liggit: So that’s right. Sic ’em Bears. Out of college, I spent some time working at a sports camp and then started in the real estate business in data centers in 2007. So just had the opportunity to join a team that was focused on the brokerage side of the business. I did that for eight years, and basically worked with end users that were sourcing, that needed data center or space, so we’d go find that for them. So we did one cabinet deals, one megawatt deals, 10 megawatt deals, and then site selection. So there’s a wide spectrum.
Raymond Hawkins: Cabinet deals. We all remember those.
David Liggit: Oh yeah. I know it’s a hard thing to understand because they did exist.
Raymond Hawkins: Martin’s talking about 11 gigawatts in South America. We’re talking about cabinets, practice, talking about practice. You’re being too humble, that’s right?
Barro Luitjes: [inaudible 00:07:05] 0.5k. That’s awesome.
David Liggit: So we did that for eight years, had a great experience. But the problem that we found was that we never had great data to go do these projects and everybody in our space knows this, but it’s super capital intensive. And so what I found out was that we were doing highly capital intensive projects with typically less data than other projects that were out there.
So really felt the need that the opportunity was out there. So in 2014 I did my walk through the forest and decided to start datacenterHawk, and just have had a great experience ever since. The three things we try to focus on at datacenterHawk is basically having deal back data. We want to track things that make the deals go. There’s so much you can, so much information in our space, but when you boil it down, there’s several things that matter to make deals go.
That’s what we want to do. We want to do with the experienced team members. So we have people that have been in the space a long time that are looking at the data, analyzing the data, people that have done deals before. And that’s really important when you’re an investor trying to figure out where to go or what to do, having data that other people have been in the space look at it.
And then we want our updates to be as quick as possible. So we on a quarterly basis are talking about, Hey, how big is the market? How much absorption has been done? What’s pricing look like? And we try to do that quickly just to keep up with the market. As we all know, the market is changing so fast.
Raymond Hawkins: Rapidly.
David Liggit: And so I’ve just had such a great time doing datacenterHawk. And I would just say too, and I think people that are watching this that are in our industry right now, this is such a special time to be. What’s happening is, I don’t even think we can really get our arms around, and I don’t just mean the size, but I mean the significance of what’s happening in our space right now and the projects that are happening not just in the US but Latin America, Europe, APAC. I mean it’s a really special time to be in this space. And so I’ve loved doing it. It’s been a great time.
Raymond Hawkins: Awesome to hear your background. Thank you for that. You mentioned a little bit how capital intensive it is. It’s why we invited the banker to come along, the former banker, and that’s why they’re one of us on either side of it. If he says anything, guys, we’re a few stories up Barro. If he gets out of line, we’ll do what everybody wants to do with their bankers, we’ll shove him over. Barro, let us know a little bit about your background, where you grew up, why I can’t pronounce your last name, and how you started KevlinX.
Barro Luitjes: Yeah, yeah, I’m not sure. Absolutely. And first of all, thanks for having me. I started in my years in Amsterdam, born and raised over there. Amsterdam is, if you look at Europe, quite international or at least we think we are, aside of our names because that’s very complicated. But that’s something else.
So I started, I did a degree of engineering, but before that I tried to do law. My mom hate my guts because I was a terrible, terrible child. So she put me into the Navy, did for two years, served my country as well. And my drilling sergeant was the best I ever had. He was like my parent, my father, and he gave me the field… The obligation to what’s your goal, what’s your end game in your life?
So then I of course definitely decided I’m not going to do law anymore. I’m going to do something else. So I worked for [inaudible 00:10:07] for a couple of years as a principal on the real estate side. And then it was asked by Lehmann brothers. Yeah, I know, to be-
Raymond Hawkins: We’re not laughing at you.
Barro Luitjes: No, no, no, no, no. I’m more, let’s say afraid. Still the people are being furious, but that’s something else. But luckily they tend to forget. And we had a European real estate fund of approximately 10 billion euros, so quite an okay fund. In the end, I was a COO for that fund. And in our portfolio we had mainly offices, some housing, residential, and a bunch of small logistics. And why I’m touching on this is that we had a couple of assets in Amsterdam and one of them was the dealing room of ING bank. And at that time, I knew of course a trading loss, but they moved out and they had two other buildings and they said, yeah, this is a data center, so we’re all in the under the data center and a computing center.
And then parties came to us, said, we want to rent it. And we’re like, are you sure? IKEA is renting one of those spaces? Are you sure you want to do it? So let’s just do that. That’s fine. So they signed up for it and in the end, that company was called, was bought by Equinix in 2007. And Equinix came to us and asked, can you do an investment because we want to upgrade the data center. I said, sure, what do you need? 65 million? Now we’re talking about billions.
But at that time, 2007, that was a lot of money. I said, sure, but explain to me like a four-year-old, what are you going to do? Yeah, seven, old. Yeah, I know. So they explained to me, it was like, yeah, okay. I gave a call. I said, it’s fine, do that. It’s all good. But I wanted to know more about the data center space at that time. I said, what are you doing? Because for us it’s just real estate, and now we have cabinets, we have racks.
I said, what is a rack? No, it’s a server of a customer. I said, okay, that seems interesting. So I learned a lot from a guy called Kevin Norcott. He was the COO at that time at Equinix. And years later he reached out to me and said, I want to stop at Equinix. I want to create an own company. I said, yeah, sure, that’s fine. Let’s talk about it. Let’s talk about financing.
And then we started to look for other locations and he came up actually with the idea, focused on unserved regions. So Kevin Norcott is the guy who came up with this initial idea and I said, yeah, she’ll make that happen. And he passed away in March 2015. And I promised two things. One, I’ll take care of your wife and secondly, I’m going to execute this mission and make it a great success.
But we’re now building a first big data center campus in Brussels, and we have sites in Spain and Italy, in Austria. So we’re quite successful. We’re in a fortunate position that we have McCrory as our investor, good investor to work with. And yeah, we have a great team. We have a good leader now, with a lot of experience from the data center. I’m very, very, very excited about what we’re doing.
Raymond Hawkins: So Barro, thank you for telling the story about how you gave Kevlinx the name I was going to ask you if you didn’t do it. So thank you for doing it, one. Two, thank you for serving your country and we really appreciate hearing your background.
So guys, we’re going to get into all kinds of issues in the data center business, but start thinking now, we are going to ask you to predict the gigawatts of data center deals signed in your respective region in 2025. And it does make me cringe a little that we now say gigawatts, but I think that’s appropriate.
I will tell a funny story. I was meeting with one of the hyperscalers and we were talking about the incredible growth and I said, we doubled last year from three and a half gigawatts to seven and a half gigawatts. We can’t double. The numbers are too big, right? Law of big numbers, we can’t double every year. And he laughed and he said, oh Raymond, we’ll do seven and a half ourselves next year. So it’s a crazy time to be in our business.
There are lots of downstream problems that get caused by that. But Martin, talk about the growth in Latin America. What do you think are the big trends coming down there and what are some of the big hurdles we ought worry about as we try to enter into that market down there?
Martin Antunez: Yeah, certainly. Well, Latin America, first and foremost, it’s a very big region comprised of like 30 different countries. The top six countries comprised of 93% of the population. So from a U.S. standpoint, there’s 340 million, Brazil, 220, Mexico, 120. Just Mexico and Brazil alone make up the U.S. population.
And then the rest you’ve got Colombia, Argentina, and Chile. So we’re kind of focused on that. But the primary countries to really look at is Brazil. Marcos, CEO for Scala, was just at an AI summit. There’s a bill right now that’s about to be passed by the other part of the House. It’s pretty much done. Prior to that build, it was projected that Brazil would have up to three megawatts by 2030. Right now they have 800 megawatts. The projection is that-
Raymond Hawkins: So three gigawatts, right?
Martin Antunez: Three gigawatts to 2030.
Raymond Hawkins: I Just want to make sure he said gigawatts. Yeah, I just want to make sure.
Martin Antunez: Thank you. And then I was thinking in Spanish, so I got a little bit confused. But according to Marcos, the passing of this bill, it’s really for the use in implementation of A.I. throughout the country. He projects that that’s going to be 11 gigawatts by 2030. So really three times, just by the government putting emphasis on the law.
Colombia’s a sleeping giant, all the major players have purchased, they have land banks. There was a big push to enter Colombia. And then, really, I think the people became a little bit dissatisfied with the investors and the current government. There’s about a year and a half left of that government. A lot of infrastructure investments being done in Colombia. Subsea cables are coming in to Colombia. It’s now become the third-largest subsea cable company and country and the Americas. Mexico is poised, right? Mexico came to the challenge that all the markets around the world have, and that’s energy.
Everyone goes into the market and the local region is caught flat-footed on their energy strategy. So now there’s momentum on that. Just this week alone, Amazon opened up their cloud region. They announced it a year ago, three billion investments for the next 15 years. It’s only like 300k a year, but still, right? And so the new president of Mexico was present in that announcement. She’s very, very much green energy. Everyone in the energy sector is very optimistic that the president is going to up that, now that she has focus on the data center industry, we’re very hopeful there.
Raymond Hawkins: Martin, great job telling us about Latin America.
David, give us your insights in North America. What do you think the North American market’s going to look like? We can talk about ’25, we can talk about big picture, but you alluded to it in your intro that there’s big things happening. So talk a little bit about North America.
David Liggit: Yeah, I mean when I think about our space to, we talk about cabinet. It’s like we’ve gone from cabinet campuses, millions to billions, CPUs, GPUs and megawatts to gigawatts. I mean that is the transformation that’s happening in our… And I think we’re seeing that right now play out in the largest way in North America for a number of reasons.
I’m not sure that will always be the case, but right now, that is where these very large projects are going. When I step back and think about the why is it happening, it’s really the bet that these companies have made on A.I., and what they believe it will be three years from now, five years from now and 10 years from now.
And you mentioned the absorption numbers and I think you’re right on four gigawatts in 2023, seven gigawatts, six and a half, seven gigawatts in 2024. What that number gets to, to be honest, in 2025 I think will certainly be higher. The question mark will be how much pre-leasing can be done and how comfortable customers are signing a lease with whatever that timeline is to get the power. And the longer that timeline stretches, the less signings there are, because they want to be able to get that power as quickly as possible.
So we’re very bullish. The markets that have seen the growth in the U.S. are your typical ones. Northern Virginia, Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix. Atlanta is seeing a lot of growth.
And then we’re also seeing continual growth to tertiary markets. And that’s really the question mark is, how secondary will the secondary markets become? And we probably see that in other regions too.
Raymond Hawkins: You can. So we’re past tier two, right? Are we to tier four? I mean that’s one of the things I wanted to hear from you. We all know tier ones, you just rattled them off. We all know tier twos. How far are we going?
David Liggit: We’re certainly in the tier three category, and there’s good reasons for it. I mean, obviously power, availability, and in a path to not just power, but a lot of power is Certainly a key driver to take these development projects to other regions. The question mark a lot of times with these movements to these other territories is you solve the power challenge, but do you create other challenges when you go to these areas? Like some of these areas that don’t have contractors and workforce? How do you build three gigawatts in a city, historically, that has never seen data center development?
And so it’s certainly solvable. It’s just a different path than having three campuses in Northern Virginia and rotating your contractor building by building.
Raymond Hawkins: Give me your top two, wow, I didn’t think there’d be a gigawatt data center there, market.
David Liggit: Mississippi.
Raymond Hawkins: Okay, we’ll give you that one.
David Liggit: That’s certainly one. There’s been, there’s just been I think like a $10 billion investment in Louisiana.
That’s another state that’s seen growth. And I think in the U.S. Real estate market for 15 years, as long as I’ve been in it, has always operated in a very similar manner from a geography perspective. And three, four years ago, it totally shifted. There’s still massive investment taking place in those markets, but there’s also significant billions and billions and billions of dollars going to places we’ve never seen it go before.
And so, I still think that the major data center markets will continue to see a lot of growth. There’s a lot of reasons why, but if you want to solve the AI, if you want to be a player in AI, five, 10, 15 years from now, you’ve got to go other places, because that type of power doesn’t exist on the timeline needed to solve the end user needs.
So anyway, very bullish about North America. We think we’ll see more growth next year than we’ve ever seen before. And it’ll be fun to watch.
Raymond Hawkins: On to watch for sure. All right, Barro, so we’ve heard about Latin, we’ve heard about North America. Give us your take on where the growth is going to happen. From my lens or my chair, David alluded to it, there’s a lot going on in North America. We don’t see the scale happening yet in Europe, but we’d love to hear, A, when you think that scale’s coming and what is tier two and tier three in Europe and is that happening?
Barro Luitjes: Yeah, a good point. Also, a question for you, but that’s later maybe. What we’re dealing with in Europe is that we have 27 countries and the UK of course, clearly.
The UK recently said, let’s go for data centers, be open again because why? AI workforce, all that stuff. So they’re, okay, but not in London. I think what we have to accept, the fact is that Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and even Dublin, they’re anti-data centers, it’s gone regulation, all this stuff you have to deal with.
So what you see a shift in markets where people do the large deployments. And you see two clusters, two kinds of clusters, the northern cluster and the southern European cluster. And so you see big developments in Italy, in Spain, and some interesting development as well in Greece now.
For instance, Greece, the power, the grid owner is still very welcome, basically, to welcome other parties and coming in and use that grid owner. Whereas if you compare it with Spain, initially we were like in Madrid, come over, come over. But now you have to pay 40k per megawatt to even reserve the power. We have a site in Barcelona, I’ll give you a few challenges that we’re having over there.
If you want to have a conversation with the grid owner, in this case with operators Endesa, you say, listen, can we talk about availability on substation level first, do the application. And you’re like, but I need to have some sort of degree of comfort that I actually can do something with that. We can’t do the application and you’ll see the outcome. Whereas what happened in third areas, in fourth regions, the government of Zaragoza said, guys, you want to self-perform, come over 300, 400 megawatts. We want you to come over.
So this is also, I think we can link it to things like, yeah, the data centers will go where the subsea cables land, latency is less important. Access to power, speed to power, it’s so instrumental in Europe and a couple of countries in Europe are still, welcome. We want to welcome you. Whereas in Amsterdam, for instance, we have a ban on data centers. We have a ban on the critical economy, economic factor, the third economic factor of our nation.
It’s bizarre. Therefore, I think if you look at the Americas right now, it’s growing fast. APEC, [inaudible 00:23:07], EMEA, Europe, it’s very challenging.
David Liggit: And actually I was going to say on the regulation side in the U.S., that’s something that, I’m glad you mentioned that. It’ll be really interesting to watch because, to your point, community will take the growth, take the growth, take the growth, and then there’s a moment where they go, it’s too much.
Barro Luitjes: Yeah, true.
David Liggit: And now the project size is, you can do one project that’s too much. And so I think the tone, you probably have a really good opinion on this too, is the tone in the U.S. in some places is shifting, where people aren’t as interested in data centers, not just from a power perspective, but from a community perspective.
Barro Luitjes: True
David Liggit: So there’s a lot of education on, probably all of our parts in the industry, to help people understand why these investments make sense. But there are some places I think that you’ll see in the next five to three to five years, certainly in the U.S., that will really put a pause on data centers.
Barro Luitjes: And we also have this whole convincing thing in Europe, where you have to convince not only, let’s say the prime minister, but also the local municipalities where you have to still explain what a data center does. Okay, that’s fine. 80% of people doesn’t know what we are doing, and that’s fantastic because we can make a fortune. But what we see is that if you explain to them this is a data center, we store racks, customers are coming in, they’re like, okay, what’s your employment rate? And you say, well, you have direct employment, we have the contractors, the Brussels project and our 200 people working on the site. But they say to you, no, but that’s friable. You know, that doesn’t count because it’s for a year, and then they’re gone.
We have an office of 5,000 square meters, we lease it to third parties. So in the end, the customers are in that office. So you create indirect, direct employment of over hundreds of jobs. So it’s a lot of repeating explanation, what you got to do in Europe to basically be successful.
And again, if you look at Italy for instance, a country, they’re not a high voltage grid owner is very, very proactive in creating new substations, basically make sure that you get your power, compasses there as well. Very good choice. Whereas as I said, Madrid is now like, yeah, we don’t have power. Sort it out yourself, good luck. And you see that therefore that Madrid I think is lacking in take up. Whereas Zaragoza, as I said, is booming now. So it’s a very interesting time.
Raymond Hawkins: Martin, will you tell us a little bit about how this power question that both David and Barro have raised is getting handled in LATAM? There’s generation, there’s transmission, there’s distribution, all challenges in the two big economies. I’d love to hear how it’s going down in LATAM.
Martin Antunez: Maybe we should focus on the positive things of the energy side. And kind of like in Europe, every country is a different government and it’s a different challenge.
And certainly in Brazil it’s really the leader of green energy across the Americas with almost 97 percents, which is really a big factor for AI growth, especially with this new bill. Some of the challenges, just the tariffs of sending equipment down there if you’re coming in from the U.S. and trying to establish it. But if you’re a Brazilian company, your goal [inaudible 00:26:09] on the tariff piece.
Energy side in Mexico, it’s not private, it’s a public, right? It’s owned by the federal government. And it’s just not one good, there’s many different grids that make up the network. And so in Mexico, I think everyone started concentrating in Querétaro, which is right outside of Mexico, three hours Mexico City, earthquake area.
And so everyone jumped in there, next Virginia of the Americas. But there are now regions saturated. And so now everyone’s looking for new states, new regions within Mexico, even though it’s a federal grid, every state has their own power generation and transmission.
Just in September alone, the data center dynamics Cancun, and they announced a 250 megawatt project for A.I. And so that’s a positive thing.
You’ve got the government itself, they’re promoting a couple of gigawatt solar plants in northern Mexico and Sonora, which according to stats, it’s got the highest solar index in the Americas. So we think there’s a big, big plus coming from that. The challenge now is the government opening up their aperture, I wouldn’t say lost, but give the data center a break from a standpoint of being able to generate their own energy.
Once again, it was so great to see the new president be part of the Microsoft announcements, because she was in Querétaro, at the heart of the things. And we believe typically the way it works in Mexico is, well typically, it’s a six year, one term. And so the first two years for the president is really to kind of carry the agenda of the previous presidency, if it’s the same party, in this case it is.
And then after that, they pay respect to the previous president and they go off and do, they do their agenda. And we’re very optimistic that she’s going to open up to floodgates on self=generation for consumption.
Raymond Hawkins: Awesome. All right guys. So power. As an industry, we’re an awfully big customer of the power. And all of us have alluded to at some point, hey, it’s one of the constraining factors. How do we generate enough? How do we serve enough? I think that as our industry continues to consume so much power that we’ve got to be viewed as a partner to the power providers, and a partner to the networks.
I think we’ve got to figure out how do we work together and serve with instead of serve me. And we’d love to hear, in your regions, how you guys think about how we partner with the power providers, how we partner with transmission, and how we partner with distribution, and maybe even a brief minute about renewables.
So Martin, tell us a little bit about a way to think about consuming power in LATAM.
Martin Antunez: Yeah, well, once again, every country is different, but I’ll give you an example. In Mexico, when we first came in as a data center industry, at the end of the day, there’s probably 10 different companies right now that are there. We were all independently going to the country or to the region for power. We all realized that we had issues, or difficulty, when communicating our needs.
We ended up going to the government saying, we’re one voice, we’re one, we’re servicing three clients at the end of the day. And what’s the country’s strategy? This is, well, we don’t have one yet, but we’re working on it. And it says, great, why don’t we go ahead and, where’d you go ahead and talk to everyone and find what the problem is and do a strategy, or I’ll bring everyone to the table and we’ll talk about the strategy.
And so now there’s a secretary of energy for the state of Querétaro, the first one in the country. So it’s been really, really helpful in helping develop and implement the strategy as to how we’re going to grow the energy sector within the region.
And then, the public attention for data centers is just not for us, it’s really for society. The governments have two options: they either develop their own data centers to provide a digital infrastructure for the countries, or they allow our industry to come in and do that. Now, a data center, it may consume power, but every day we’re benefiting from that. AI, autonomous medical, your bank, it’s all about infrastructure.
Raymond Hawkins: So Martin, my kids ask this question, I tell them, look, everything that’s on your phone is in a data center. Everything you’re doing on your phone happens in a data center, is I think an easy way to explain.
Martin Antunez: And yeah, when you take a plane, it’s required for traveling and transport of goods. You can’t have any goods without transportation, but you don’t see it so integrated within your life. And so I like to think of it as a, yes, we’re consuming power, but we’re distributing benefits to society as a whole, not just a, I’m going to take a plane once a year, kind of thing. And so I think that’s really where our benefit is as an industry.
And I’ll be glad to educate markets On bringing in this infrastructure and educating them on what’s the best way to partner up on energy. Because the ultimate goal for our data industry is to serve.
Raymond Hawkins: So Martin, we use the phrase in North America that there’s a technology gap, access to technology. I think this speaks right to it. You have to have the digital infrastructure for there to be internet everywhere in all the applications. So David, talk to us a little bit. How do you guys, I know you’re not in the service provider business, but you’re near us and near all of our customers. How do you think about our industry’s story around power?
David Liggit: Yeah. When I, got into the data search in ’07, and I would call that the enterprise era, this is banks, insurance companies, technology companies, maturing their infrastructure footprint, figuring it out. In about 2014, ’15, we entered the cloud era and that was you started availability zones and cloud growth. And we are now in the AI era.
And what I would say is, the strategies that grew the enterprise era and the cloud era cannot be applied to the AI. So something has to change. And that’s really a global, maybe happens for all of us, but what I think has to change in the U.S. is it’s not a deal by deal thing anywhere. It’s not, what site can give me 36 megawatts, great, let’s just go get and go. You’ve got to take a more like a top-down approach.
You’ve got to think about relationship with the government, you’ve got to think about relationship with the community. You’ve got to think about relationship with the power provider. And it’s more of a holistic decision-making process that will allow the portfolio growth needed to match the demand. And that’s what’s going to have to change.
And I think it is changing. I think we’re starting to see that people are thinking much more, larger. And with those large decisions, there’s just a lot more to evaluate. So I think that that will be the shift in the U.S. to make this happen. But the U.S. market’s about 38 gigawatts of power. When you think about leasing and companies that own and operate their data centers, we’re tracking over a hundred gigawatts of planned projects.
So that growth is only going to be allowed if we have the supply to meet it. And that’s going to be the big question mark. And also too, how AI is monetized? Do the business models really support the growth expectations that we see? So I think those are the things that will have to shift.
Raymond Hawkins: All right, Barro, 27 countries, you guys have a little bit more of a challenge over there to get everybody to row the same direction. Tell me how the data center industry partnering with those different countries and all the different governing bodies over there to get enough power to lay the digital infrastructure foundation.
Barro Luitjes: Like I say, it’s challenging. When I started the company in 2014, or the idea, basically, I’m from a special background, so I have this social holistic view on when running a company, starting a company that’s not all about EBITDA. Investors will not like it, but you have to do something back for the society creating something. So you have to share and make clear to them, what are you doing? What does this mean for society?
So I said a couple of things. When talking to the Brussels local municipality, yes, we’re going to do a data center. Of course the question, what is a data center? I said, we’re going to create employment, we’re going to align with schools, we’re going to educate them. What this is, we’re going to create, let’s say blue colored jobs for people, let’s say that don’t have the highest chance of succeeding in working lives.
And also, we’re going to align with the parties in our area to see how we can source and find the solutions for the excess heat that we produce. So they ask me, what does that mean? I said, well, district heating, district heating is something very European that you can do in Eastern Europe in mid-Europe, more or less, because densities of cities. But it’s a good thing.
And at least then you can find the solution on reusing that heat and to certain take the power. I do believe, however, that Europe is a very, very dense area, and getting hundreds and hundreds of megawatts somewhere at some point is just difficult. And therefore there will be a shift, and the capacity will travel to where the power is. That’s the northern cluster and the Southern European cluster.
For now, as I said, it will have an impact on the tier one markets, as we call them, [inaudible 00:35:41]. And we’ll move more to capacity to those areas. And this goes, I hear, what I now observed in this last 10 years when I started the company, what I’ve learned and had, is in 2014 I heard to earth people talk about hyperscale, hyperscale, cloud, cloud, cloud. It was like, but they’re still enterprise, right?
Raymond Hawkins: Sure.
Barro Luitjes: And now it’s AI. And don’t get me wrong, I think it’s serious, but we have to think of this mixture, holistic solution, on finding that for the parts your customers as you want to serve. And this also will have an implication on the power. And what I think what will happen ultimately in Europe, is just find your land close to the grid. Do it like that.
Raymond Hawkins: Awesome. Well guys, thank you so much for hanging out with me at PTC. Not a bad place to have to do a conference every year. At Compass, we like to say data center is done differently. So give me one snippet on what’s different, what’s unique. When folks want to go to LATAM and they want to talk to somebody. Martin, something unique about LATAM Entry.
Martin Antunez: Well, first of all, if you’re thinking about going to Latin America, if you want to get a big picture perspective, listen to datacenterHawk. I know Portland, Mesa, [inaudible 00:36:47] is doing a phenomenal-
Raymond Hawkins: cross promotion. It’s good, it’s good.
Martin Antuñez: No, no. You got to get credit where it’s due. Yeah, absolutely. And so the things that I do that LATAM does differently is that, when you talk to me about a region, I am looking at it from A, what subsea cables are coming in, what fiber infrastructure is there? What’s the strategy of, new strategy or new fiber routes?
And so as you speak to me about data centers, if you’re a subsea guy, I’m thinking edge strategy, kind like a Myrtle Beach, what’s going on in Europe? Why are you doing it, just a half a megawatt edge? You got to think of five, 10 convincing them on that.
And then I’m already thinking of fiber routes or if we’re looking at investors that want to go that are in commercial real estate or residential, they want to enter our space, educating them on what the data center is and who’s who, what’s what.
And so whatever industry, part of the infrastructure you’re coming in for the ecosystem, I’m able to give you what the gaps are, but connect it to the people that are going to help you execute. So let’s meet the guys that are in the US that are doing the same thing. Go get ideas from them. Maybe they got from us, wants to partner up with you. And so, really our key services, bringing in the resources that you need to help fill the gaps that you have for you to complete your strategy, but most importantly, help you implement.
Raymond Hawkins: If you want to enter South America. Doing it differently with LATAM Entry. All right. David, datacenterHawk, the digital infrastructure information super highway, the man behind the screen. Tell us what’s done differently there at datacenterHawk?
David Liggit: Yeah, really three things. I mean, the deal back data, our experience team, and then just the fast updates that we make. I mean that’s really what we feel like makes our company different and we really work hard every single day to make those things happen. So all the data on our platform looked at by people in the industry that have been doing it for a long time, and that helps people make better decisions.
Raymond Hawkins: Awesome. All right. Barro, KevlinX’s done differently. Data centers in Amsterdam. Give us a snippet on what’s different about KevlinX.
Barro Luitjes: Yeah, well we don’t focus on tier one markets. So from the very beginning we said focus on the underserved regions. That’s also in line with our investor. It’s one of the reasons why they stepped in. And of course is with all respect, it’s the biggest infrastructure fund in the world. So they’re doing quite some things going well.
As I said earlier is I love to educate people about the business, because why I learned it also in my doing banking life. And if you only can make sure that 1% of the people population in the country itself, especially the underserved markets, that they are aware of what you’re doing, then you’re not their enemy anymore. You’re like, no, we’re serving you. We want to find sustainable solution. We use a part of your power, but there’s plenty left. Let’s do this together.
And that’s my view for the coming years, is basically to educate people to help them, let’s say understand what we’re doing. I don’t care how many schools come over, facilities, where the old people are, come in, I’ll show you what a bloody rack is. This is a rack. This is what helps you doing, going on the simple internet or when you want to text on that WhatsApp with your niece or something like that. That’s what I love to do.
Raymond Hawkins: So Barro, you said where the old people are, you weren’t referring to me, right? I just want to make sure.
Barro Luitjes: No, talking about myself.
Raymond Hawkins: I got you. Okay, good, good, good, good, good, good. All right. I just want to make sure.
Well guys, PTC’s an awesome time to get together. I’ve been in the business 10 years. I would just tell each one of you, Barro, thank you for hanging out with us. David, thank you for coming. Martin, thank you for coming.
Not only do I get to be friends with really amazing guys that are super smart and doing really cool things for our planet, but guys that are just great fellows to be around. So I’m so grateful that you guys joined us and we look forward to spending some time here trying to help the world build out digital infrastructure. Thank you guys.
