Karl Havard, Era4 (00:08):
I'm not from the telco industry, so you might think, what the hell am I doing here? Well, Sean, the CEO of TelecomTV, invited me to say something about what he felt you may be interested in. So I guess after I've spoken, you'll be able to judge whether it was or not. But I'm from the cloud industry, which clearly doesn't dress as smartly as the telco industry. So I've spent a few years at AWS, a few years at Google, and actually now nearly four years in the neo-cloud industry, standing up AI infrastructure. It's quite scary how time flies because ChatGPT in November will be four years old. Now, as you probably know, being a telco industry sector, 20 years ago you missed the boat. And what I mean by that is you had all the infrastructure deployed across the globe in your various organisations.

Karl Havard, Era4 (01:05):
You could have provided cloud computing, but unfortunately the West Coast of the US - AWS with their retail, Google with their search, Microsoft with their software - said, "Hey, we've got spare capacity. Let's go rent it out." Now, fast forward 20 years, most organisations and enterprises have now got into the behaviour where it's default to the cloud, which is a scary place to be, especially when I think the previous speaker before the break was talking about sovereignty. Now, where we are today is data centres are having to be redesigned because AI infrastructure - the stuff that allows you to use your agents in your business, allows you to use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, et cetera - is very, very power hungry. And it also needs a lot of cooling, and hence it now needs liquid cooling to be able to serve customers and enterprises in the right way. So data centres have to be completely redesigned.

Karl Havard, Era4 (02:08):
So those cloud providers that set up 20 years ago and through the last 15 years have now had to redesign their own data centres. So there's a massive land grab happening across the globe on power and the ability to stand up data centres to host all this clever NVIDIA equipment.

Karl Havard, Era4 (02:32):
The challenge is, if that works, there's a bit of a problem. Data centres are not the flavour of the month or the flavour of the year at this moment in time. Two or three years ago, no one really considered what a data centre was. The cloud was up there and you'd load your photos up there, you'd do whatever you want on the cloud, and people would say okay, wouldn't even consider what a dirty data centre was. With AI now and the power-hungry need for the AI infrastructure, it's now become a thing. And the media are all over it globally - some for the very right reasons, such as sustainable needs for the planet, but also for the disruptive nature of building in someone's backyard. So there are three examples shown here on the BBC website. The lady there in Newport in South Wales has had her house for years and years and all of a sudden a big black box appears next to it.

Karl Havard, Era4 (03:33):
And unfortunately, there are some organisations that are doing data centres poorly by the community. On the right-hand side, quite rightly so, there are protesters from a sustainability point of view - and some of that is correct, but some of it is incorrect. The days of vast amounts of water being consumed by a data centre have gone. Liquid cooling now allows the data centre to operate as a refrigerator or a coolant mechanism in your car - it's closed loop. So the water usage is not so high, but the power usage is. And then the one in the middle, specific to the UK, is the cost of energy. So OpenAI recently said, "Well, we're not going to locate into the UK because the cost of energy is too high." Typically, from a grid point of view, it's about 22 or 23 pence per kilowatt hour, which when you compare it to the Nordics or renewable energy, that's three or four cents per kilowatt hour.

Karl Havard, Era4 (04:33):
So if you're a global organisation, where are you going to deploy? You're not typically going to deploy in the UK. So there are some problems to overcome. And if we don't, as an industry - neo-clouds and hyperscalers - approach it the right way, then the fierce demand for AI will always end up on the shores of the US or potentially within China, who are probably the only true sovereign-capable countries out there. So I'm from Era4, Chief Commercial Officer. So what do we do - can we help solve that problem? And this is where Sean thought this might be of interest. So across the UK, we already have what we call our mesh sites deployed - 44 of them across the UK - and we have three fairly large AI campuses as well. Now, what's interesting about these sites is they're not greenfield data centre sites. The red dots are waste management sites and the white dots are old industrial sites.

Karl Havard, Era4 (05:40):
So our whole reason for standing up AI in the UK - being a UK sovereign company, and that's a separate discussion to go through every layer of the stack - but our aim is to be able to offer the ability to stand up AI infrastructure in the most sustainable, most cost-efficient way, without disrupting the communities where they're deployed. So we're co-locating next to existing waste management sites. We're converting old steelworks and old manufacturing plants within the confines of the previous planning permission that was offered. So we like to think that's a different way of doing things. To give you some stats - I mentioned the cost of energy. So on the waste management side, Era4 has inherited all the assets that turn landfill methane gas into electricity. It's quite fascinating - I didn't know anything about landfill until six months ago - but across all those sites, what happens is it's a byproduct of consumerism.

Karl Havard, Era4 (06:44):
You pay your council tax, or in Europe your collection charges, for your waste to be taken to a tip. The tip then sorts it out, it goes in bigger lorries and ends up in a waste management site. They'll always be there. The traditional model has been to convert that into electricity by bagging it up in a massive - call it a sleeping bag - which is airtight. And once it's sealed and the pipework is in place - hot days are better than cold days for generating energy - methane is then generated. It's then pulled out of the landfill and put into turbines, which then convert it into electricity. So it's creating energy from consumer waste, ultimately. And in the UK, the landfill business that Era4 emerged from is and still is selling to the national grid at 5.3 pence per kilowatt hour. So across 44 sites, 50 megawatts - if you do the maths, it's not a bad business. But then it's also not a bad business being the national grid, because that's sold to the national grid and they then sell it back for almost four times that amount.

Karl Havard, Era4 (07:59):
Question that. So what we thought was, well, rather than doing that, why not use the energy that we generate to stand up the AI infrastructure? And that's exactly what we're doing across the various sites. So what does that look like? Well, we call it trash to tokens - why not? If you look at the site here, this is one in Chesterfield. If you're not from the UK, you probably won't know where Chesterfield is - but I'm going to say south of Sheffield, north of Nottingham, which probably won't give you any clues either. But it's in the middle of England, and there's a waste management site that's been there for 30 years or so and is still taking waste from the local community. And you'll see, just to the right-hand side on the right-hand diagram, the turbines that take the methane and turn it into electricity.

Karl Havard, Era4 (08:55):
A bit of a closer look - this is what it looked like about six or seven months ago. On the left you'll see the five-megawatt engines - each one represents one megawatt. Methane goes in, electricity comes out. And on the right-hand side was the hard standing that Era4 had built in order to locate what we call the MDCs - modular data centres - to stand up the AI infrastructure.

Karl Havard, Era4 (09:27):
So another view of it, again about six or seven months ago, where you can see things starting to be developed. Now, we thought we'd be a little bit more clever here and rather than just say, "Hey, let's throw this up and see where it goes," we actually applied some of our own technology at a site we already have in Manchester in Pilsworth, to use NVIDIA GPUs to create a digital twin of what we could develop using the Omniverse. Now, fingers crossed - this video usually crashes my laptop - but fingers crossed, let's see how we got on with it.

Voiceover (10:06):
Step inside the Era4 modular data centre - a high-density environment built for high-performance AI at scale. Enterprise-grade HPE infrastructure provides the foundation for secure, resilient, and continuous operation. NVIDIA accelerated computing powers demanding workloads across inference, simulation and optimisation. The liquid cooling system becomes part of the performance model. Design, thermal performance and energy efficiency are optimised with Cadence CFD, measured, simulated, and continuously refined to improve efficiency and reduce water consumption. With NVIDIA Omniverse, Era4 creates a real-time digital twin of the data centre, connecting infrastructure, simulation, and live operations within one intelligent environment. Thousands of telemetry points stream data from across the facility. Operators see the entire AI factory as one connected system.

Karl Havard, Era4 (11:03):
You can tell that voice was AI as well. But that's the template we are now using across all the sites that we develop. Just to show you - because it's all about deployment this session - here are some pictures from throughout the journey. The actual racks arriving at site and being deployed. If you've ever been in a data centre, you'll get a feel for how confined it can be, and the hum and the noise, et cetera. But on the right-hand side, all the cabling is now put in place and this goes live in the next two weeks. And for those of you using certain finance platforms in the UK or other applications that you'll be probably using most days, you may well have that being served to you from the waste management site in Chesterfield. And our aim is to use this as a template - once we've built it out in the UK, we'd love to partner with other waste management sites in order to start to deliver data centres in the right way and to serve AI infrastructure in the right way.

Karl Havard, Era4 (12:05):
I'll stop there. Thank you.