Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:06):
So we're in London. We're at the Nokia Tech Day 2026. I'm here with Karl Harvard. He's the chief commercial officer at Era4. Karl, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us on telecom TV.

Karl Harvard, Era4 (00:18):
My pleasure to be here.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (00:19):
So can you tell us about Era4 and what you are doing here in the UK?

Karl Harvard, Era4 (00:25):
So Era4 is a UK company, so everything we do is in the UK. There's two sides to our business. I think the most interesting side of our business is we generate our own energy through waste management. So we have 44 sites across the UK where we currently sell energy back to the grid. So our sites generate about five megawatts each in some areas, some slightly smaller, put it all together as about 50 megawatts there across the whole site complex. And instead of selling it back to the grid for the rate that we do, which is around about 5.6 pence per kilowatt, which is a lot cheaper than you'll get from buying from the grid, we've decided to actually take a number of these sites to stand up AI infrastructure. So create MDCs, mini data centre complexes, standing up NVIDIA GPUs, other silicon as well. So we can actually change the dynamic in the UK where energy is deemed to be very expensive, but actually because we're generating it ourselves, we can stand it up in a much more cost-effective way.

(01:34):
So that's one side of the business. The other side is we are regenerating other areas of the UK through the acquisition of brownfield sites like steelworks in South Wales. And we're converting those into places that hold data centres as well with pathways up to a hundred megawatts, but also to regenerate the community. So technical colleges, community centres, sports facilities around the areas that we're building.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (02:00):
Okay. So where are you in the process of actually getting up and running and having facilities available? What stage is the company at?

Karl Harvard, Era4 (02:11):
So yeah, good question. So very early stage. So we're in our evolutionary. So our first AI cluster goes live in Q4 this year, already sold, which is great news, but that's the industry we operate in. We're probably around about just under 12 months old, but our development is now at pace. So we'll start to have in the next 12 months probably another up to 50,000 GPUs coming live, which currently only funded by a high net worth individual who stands behind the company, British fella. We're now in the process of opening up an equity round to attract overseas or maybe other UK investment into the mix as well to accelerate our expansions.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:00):
And would you describe Era4 as a neocloud? Because that's a great term to attract investors.

Karl Harvard, Era4 (03:05):
Yeah. I'd like to avoid that. I mean, it's a nice compartmentalized term, which everybody relates to, but unlike a lot of the neoclouds that have come from crypto, we've come from a completely different area about renewable energy, but we're all about regenerating the communities in the UK as well. So standing up our infrastructure, yes, that's great. But we also want to use that to benefit the communities where we locate the infrastructure as well.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (03:33):
Okay, excellent. So obviously we're here at the Nokia Tech Day. So what is Era4's relationship with Nokia?

Karl Harvard, Era4 (03:41):
So again, because we're early stage, it's an early relationship, but already we're starting to partner on the great networking capability that they have around intra data centre communications. So high speed, high security. Where we want to expand that relationship is really interesting because I mentioned the mesh earlier having several data centres across the UK. Our intent is to build the connective mesh across all of them. So as we move into inference and tokenization, then we can share workloads around the infrastructure rather than in a single dedicated data centre, which is a real opportunity for us and Nokia to partner together on. So yeah.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:25):
Okay. So is it Nokia's sort of heritage and experience in optical transport and data transport that's the real key for the relationship?

Karl Harvard, Era4 (04:34):
Absolutely. As we know, so AI capabilities has to work at high density and at high speed. And as we move into tokenization, as it's called, speed is absolutely of the essence. And that's where Nokia sort of comes into their own as well. I've previously worked with Nokia too, so we've got good reputation, good credibility together. So I see it as a natural fit for us going forward.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (04:59):
Okay, excellent. And obviously as we can see, there's a lot of people here checking out demos, chatting to each other. How important are these kind of events to fostering relationships, finding out what others are doing? Are these key to helping you with your strategic thinking?

Karl Harvard, Era4 (05:17):
I think, yeah, because it's obviously telco focus, then telco naturally lends itself to sovereign capability because the infrastructure's there. So there's a natural synergy of the people who are here and the neoclouds if you want to put us into that bracket. And therefore there's always solid conversations that happen at events like this. I was here last year as well. 12 months on from that last event, all sorts of business relationships have struck up, been able to help customers deliver their own AI solutions. So these type of events are invaluable.

Ray Le Maistre, TelecomTV (05:51):
Okay, fantastic. Well, Karl, thanks very much for taking time out of your agenda here. And we'll let you go to enjoy the demos and the networking to be had here. So thanks very much for your time. Great to talk to you.