On the evening of 11th November in Mayfair, London, in partnership with Spectrum, Vault Partners curated a group of board-level leaders from across the European data centre supply chain for a peer group discussion over dinner, and the opportunity to network.
The two core topics explored on the night were:
Powering the data centre
The energy consumption of data centres is substantial, as power and cooling requirements are significant.
We explored the primary implications for the industry, including:
- Energy supply and cost as a factor in new data centre locations
- The role of batteries, and of alternative sources of energy (which can’t feed into the grid)
- The pros and cons of nuclear power as a solution
- Energy regulation
- The ageing electricity grid network
- The perception of data centres by politicians and the public, and the need for the industry to collectively present and justify its case
Deployment of capital
The data centre sector is attracting enormous investment. This segment of the discussion focused on:
- The difference between investing in infrastructure (7–8-year payback) and investing in neoclouds, and GPUs (2–3-year return)
- The expectation that the total addressable market for AI will expand
- The key question of time to adoption: How quickly are enterprises going to use AI at scale?
- And what are the use cases? i.e. where is the revenue coming from to sustain the investment in CAPEX?
- The circulation of funding i.e. the industry supporting each other with capital
- Data centre tenant renewal risk
- Credit risk
- Geopolitical risk
This event was co-hosted by Jeremy Sewell, Co-founder, Vault Partners and Daniel Osmer, Managing Partner, Spectrum Executive Search.
Our 19 guests were board-level representatives from: Kevlinx Data Centres, Macquarie Group, Polar Data Centres, Yuso, CloudHQ, Ingenium LA, JLL, Gulf Data Centre Association, Digital Gravity Infrastructure Partners, Ark Data Centres, Digital Bridge, Deutsche Bank, CoreWeave, H.I.G. Capital, HPE, and Stellanor Data Centres.
