This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Bill Pfeifer and Dr. Ayotunde Coker, the CEO of Open Access Data Centres. Dr. Coker is addressing the data center deficit in Africa, accelerating the continent’s digital transformation. In this conversation, Dr. Coker discusses edge as a continuum, the opportunities in Africa and the impact of AI.
This episode of Over the Edge features an interview between Bill Pfeifer and Dr. Ayotunde Coker, the CEO of Open Access Data Centres. Dr. Coker joined the company in June 2022 and has moved rapidly, deploying over 35 data centers across South Africa and Nigeria to address the data center deficit in Africa, accelerating the continent’s digital transformation. In this conversation, Dr. Coker discusses edge as a continuum, the opportunities in Africa and the impact of AI.
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“What's the edge? The edge is a continuum.”
“The core essence of what we do is bringing this core, open, converged digital infrastructure together that actually is changing the narrative in Africa. It's bringing digital infrastructure penetration into the continent and transforming economies in the continent.”
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(01:20) How did Dr. Coker get started in technology?
(02:40) What brought Dr. Coker to Open Access Data Centres
(07:22) OADC’s edge data centers
(13:27) The edge as a continuum
(16:23) How OADC is investing in infrastructure in Africa
(19:48) The large market in Africa of the “young, content-rich demographic”
(21:17) What are OADC's customers doing at the edge?
(28:14) Overcoming lack of power
(32:06) How OADC thinks about sustainability
(37:42) How is AI impacting their work?
(46:28) What comes next for OADC?
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Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations, across your entire multi-cloud environment, we’re here to help you simplify your edge so you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting DellTechnologies.com/SimplifyYourEdge for more information or click on the link in the show notes.
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Follow Bill on LinkedIn
Connect with Dr. Coker on LinkedIn
Narrator 1: [00:00:00] Hello, and welcome to Over the Edge. This episode features an interview between Bill Pfeiffer and Dr. Ayotunde Coker, the CEO of Open Access Data Centers. Initiated to the company in June 2022, Dr. Coker has moved rapidly, deploying over 35 data centers across South Africa and Nigeria. Through this work, Open Access Data Centers is addressing the data center deficit in Africa and is accelerating the continent's economic recovery.
digital transformation as a result. But before we get into it, here's a brief word from our sponsors.
Narrator 2: Over the Edge is brought to you by Dell Technologies to unlock the potential of your infrastructure with Edge solutions. From hardware and software to data and operations across your entire multi cloud environment.
We're here to help you simplify your edge so that you can generate more value. Learn more by visiting delltechnologies. com slash simplify your edge. For more information or click on the [00:01:00] link in the show notes. And now please enjoy this interview between Bill Pfeiffer and Dr. Ayotunde Coker, CEO of Open Access Data Centers.
Bill Pfeifer: Dr. Coker, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm excited to have you. We've been looking forward to having this call for quite some time.
Dr. Coker: Yes, thanks very much. It's great to be here and likewise, I've really been looking forward to it.
Bill Pfeifer: It is always great to start with just a little bit of background information.
So one of the standard questions that we love to ask on this podcast is how did you get started in technology? What brought you here?
Dr. Coker: Oh, that goes back a long way. I actually studied mechanical engineering degree, and with that, you know, the mid 80s, technology's starting to come into engineering, and so it's natural to get into use of technology in business.
And I had a postgraduate sponsored by Ford of Europe. which was around manufacturing transformation. And of course, then you had [00:02:00] computer integrated manufacturing, manufacturing systems engineering, which I actually studied as a postgraduate. And there it was, I was very much around using technology to transform businesses.
And when I joined Ford of Europe, it was actually Ford of Europe IT, and working on the strategy, the technology strategy for building out the global new car, the Ford Mondeo, Ford's first global car. And went, also went to lead technology for product development, engineering, and that was that. I got into consulting technology, consulting with Capgemini, which is now one of the top global technology and business consulting companies.
And I've since charted my career in technology over the last, oh, top side of 35 years now.
Bill Pfeifer: So what brought you to open access data centers?
Dr. Coker: Okay. So I was born in Nigeria, Nigerian dad, British mom, and in my degree, I had [00:03:00] the choice of staying in the UK. So I spent close to 30 years of my career there. And typically, I had colleagues who would provide data center services in technology roles I held.
In BP, the global oil company, for instance, I was responsible for global application portfolio management for the corporate function. And other colleagues of mine were now... Pulling together about 450, 500 data centers across the entire world to outsourced mega data centers in three parts of the globe. So, that was outsourced data centers.
And I had a CTO role for criminal justice in the UK and typically would push for outsourced data centers. I was headhunted to be the Africa Group CIO for a bank called Access Bank in Nigeria. And I've been looking to get back to take a role in Africa, do my bit, transforming technology, transforming [00:04:00] growth.
And the first thing was, you know, we need to build a data center. Well, no, you outsource those things, right? You co locate. Well, you're a bank. You don't need to build data centers. However, getting back, I realized that, really, you couldn't find any quality data center. You put a bank's assets in, and you need to interconnect and grow the bank.
I'm cutting Nigeria, but across Africa, we built a data center. And actually, in that, we really got into set the standard as a tier three. Certified data center, it's as a global reference point, not because it's good to say, it gives you a reference point for the minimum level of quality. We didn't certify it, we're a bank, but that was sort of the beginning of that, people talking about tier three data centers in Africa, and we'd have other people come around and look at this data set, we built it to the right quality.
I didn't want to build one, didn't want to run one, but we had to. Also got me into the whole thing around how to [00:05:00] engineer high quality uptime data centers without having reliable utility. I remember thinking to myself once today, hey, you're a mechanical engineer, you've got to take charge of this stuff, the design and so on.
And come up with new models of high quality energy value chains to have high quality energy delivery. So that sort of started that. In leaving the bank, a company wanted to start a data center communication business, and I was a natural candidate. Sort of that quest of technology implementation, infrastructure implementation.
Taking things in Africa and demonstrating it can actually leapfrog the world and it can bring in world class technology and business solutions on the continent. I started as the Chief Executive Officer for RAC Center in Lagos. And over the last close to 10 years, I've been very much on the data center, you know, leadership in [00:06:00] Africa.
And that's the background of how I got into data centers. And with open access data centers. Building right across Africa, it was a natural progression for me to take on a role there in Pan Africa data center infrastructure build. And here I am. We've actually brought together a very unique proposition, and I think, uh, carrier neutrality is very, very important, but if we then bring a carrier neutral open access data center in conjunction with open access wholesale connectivity, you could really be creating a very, very strong, uh, narrative.
And here I am as the Africa CEO for open access datacenters.
Bill Pfeifer: That's awesome. So you went from the guy who didn't want to build datacenters to the guy who builds datacenters. Yes,
Dr. Coker: for co location, outsourced co location. Now typically, you would find companies would not want to build their own datacenter.
The education has been through that. You would think now we have high quality [00:07:00] collocations across countries, across the continent. It's natural to just look for the collocation provider and really not waste scarce capital and resources building on data centers that don't have scale. Very hard to get the right quality.
I don't really understand the business in the right way. So now you're
Bill Pfeifer: building open access data centers all across Africa, which is amazing. And you've got, I think I saw 30 of these already, of core data centers and edge locations.
Dr. Coker: Yes, yes, we will have over 30. In South Africa, we have what we call the core data center.
The core, a broad strategy, actually is the core to edge strategy. And it's a continuum between the core data centers, large, megawatt. Multiple megawatts down to smaller data centers. And across the country or across the continent, you have a continuum of right sizing data centers for the location you're at, either as a core or at the edge.
So in South Africa, we [00:08:00] have four core data centers, one in Durban, which is where we land 2Africa cable, Metas 2Africa on the East Coast. You have one in Joburg in Asendo as a core data center and two in Cape Town, Cape Town 1, Cape Town 2, Cape Town 1 is Rondebosch, Cape Town 2 is at Brackenville. Open Access Data Centers is part of WIOC Group.
WIOC has started as a connectivity business with connectivity right across Africa. We have long distance networks in South Africa and critical points of data intersection across the country we can actually put. Edge datacenters, right, of varying sizes. So we have over about 29 or so, close to 30 of those edge datacenters across South Africa.
So that's South Africa. So we leverage that open interconnectivity with open access datacenters. The reason actually we have two Africa landing in Darwin is [00:09:00] the WIOC as a connectivity company has tens of thousands of kilometers of fiber across the continent and also has capacity. On the undersea cables that serve the east coast and the west coast of Africa and is a consortium partner with Meta2Africa and also with Google, Google's Equiano.
So in Cape Town, for instance, at the Ronda Bosch site, we have the SLTE linked out into the, that, that's the, the systems that support the undersea cable landing. Connectivity rather. And in Lagos, which is a flagship in Lagos facility we have there, that has landed the Equinox cable as well. And that's this year 1.
3 megawatt facility. And we're very, very rapidly developing that into two implementations of 12 megawatts each of expansion very, very rapidly. [00:10:00] That will be ready for a service in the next 12 months. The facility in Lagos has been operating for about eight months now. And also in Democratic Republic of Congo, we have going live in the next couple of months, a core data center there, the very first high quality, uptime certified data center in Kinshasa.
That's a large opportunity. I mean, Kinshasa is 15 million people. Lagos is 22 million people. So these are very high population cities. And bringing carrier neutrality, a vibrant ecosystem, pairing ecosystem, IX location there, interconnectivity hub, open access into the area. I believe it will transform data center infrastructure and connectivity in the country.
I think the core essence of what we do is bringing together this core, open, and converged digital infrastructure together that actually is changing [00:11:00] the narrative in Africa, is bringing digital infrastructure penetration into the continent, and transforming economies in the continent. So, for instance, the International Telecoms Union with the World Bank has noted that 10% of broadband penetration can result in about 2, 2.
5% growth in GDP. Now bring that converge with connectivity and hey, the economic impact can be huge. So now, those, those are the countries we're present in right now. Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, South Africa. And we're very rapidly also looking at our expansions in, in West Africa, through Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire, and also in, in other locations across mid southern Africa to complement the networks that we have in place and also key points where digital infrastructure is required.
So this is [00:12:00] kind of a
Bill Pfeifer: fascinating Almost the departure from what we usually cover on this podcast, which is ed computing, right? But that's moving compute out of clouds and data centers. But when you don't have clouds and data centers accessible, that causes an interesting challenge. And you're making, I mean, you're landing undersea cables to connect everyone to the internet.
You're building core data centers. You're bringing the clouds to Africa. And you're building the edge. You're doing this kind of all at once, which is fascinating, right? So you're just all of a sudden overlaying the whole ecosystem and we're mostly focused on, but it's moving out toward the edge for real time, but quote unquote real time, right?
Like. Where did your data go before you had all these data centers? What was your
Dr. Coker: compute? Yes, and it's, this actually develops over time. And as soon as you get the broadband penetration, you're talking about the, you know, the endpoint compute, right? [00:13:00] Endpoint computers, the network is the computer right now.
Your endpoint can be as thin and lean as it is. And the more you get high quality connectivity going through, the more there's demand for content, the more you take content through to the point of eyeballs, the more latency becomes very, very important. And consumers are discerning, very, very discerning at the endpoint, okay?
And they'll switch very, very quickly from content providers of sorts. Right? And it's now the way to do that is, you know, the edge, what's the edge? The edge is a continuum, actually. And what I mean by that is this. A 40 megawatt data center in London, a 12 megawatt data center, 100 megawatt even data center in Europe would be a 10 megawatt data center in Africa, large, but one location in Africa.
But it's the edge to something else elsewhere that brings the connectivity [00:14:00] round through and takes the latency out of having to get content from those larger edge data centers elsewhere. Now, within the continent, that edge to the world is also actually a core to the continent. And you have edge data centers around that, where you have cloud services being brought closer to the point of use on the continent.
And then being delivered to endpoints, edge locations, where you have ISPs needing to, we aggregate ISPs at our edge locations, you don't have to think about power, you don't have to think about getting your connectivity there, we've got open connectivity. What you need to do is, we aggregate ISPs at those points, you get your computer out there and you have access to your eyeballs.
And, of course, the eyeballs connect through the endpoint, and that's how the entire value chain works.
Bill Pfeifer: Yeah, it's an interesting conversation about kind of the tiering of edges, right? When your compute isn't available, you don't [00:15:00] have good data centers, you don't have good power. We could see Africa as the edge.
And then you put in a core and then you start to distribute, well, I want my edge closer than that. So now you put some regional data centers, well, now I want my edge closer than that. And it kind of exposes the edge is such a squishy topic. It's just really about getting closer, getting closer, getting closer, whatever that
Dr. Coker: means.
And, you know, you unlock a volume of consumption. of data, but increasingly, I mean, Africa is now becoming a world leader on creational content. So you now have this two way traffic of consumption of content, creation of content, and it goes round back the other way. And with proliferation of internet exchanges now on the continent, more data is being, most actually, the vast majority of data has been localized on the continent, bringing significant efficiencies and economic growth.
Bill Pfeifer: That's fantastic. Now, I [00:16:00] also saw that OADC, your company, won the Best Data Center award at the Global Carrier Awards last year. And they specifically said you had a unique and innovative edge offering that's underpinning Africa's digital transformation. So your company is credited with actually driving digital transformation for a continent.
That's amazing. How does that feel? I mean, what comes next on top of that?
Dr. Coker: Yes. It's great. I mean, Africa is a vast continent. I mean, it feels great that we're able to impact significantly. We're investing, as we said, a couple of years ago, over the five year timescale, about 500 million. dollars in infrastructure and looking at how that could even grow.
Africa is a vast continent, so we're doing a lot of work and a lot in parallel. And, you know, it's, it's not been done before. We have [00:17:00] data center companies across the continent. We have connectivity companies across the continent. But it's the first time we've had open hyperscale connectivity, wholesale, interconnecting and supporting a data center infrastructure and it's with a PANAC support structure for that across Africa with the command centers that run the data centers, the network operating centers that do all the monitoring and all of that stuff.
We pull together, but we in a scalable way. Both in terms of the depth of scalability and the breadth of scalability across the continent. So it's a significant challenge. I think in Europe, one similar company that's been doing that has been Atlas Edge, with their data centers, and they do some work with Xeo, the connectivity provider.
You have EdgeConnects in the U. S., for instance. So it's unique on the continent. And it sort of underpins that belief that I have, that the continent can continue and start to do and continue to do. [00:18:00] Innovations that leapfrog the great thing about operating on the continent actually is the opportunity to innovate across challenges that you have in some of some ways in terms of some things that haven't been done before elsewhere.
And then it makes it really quite motivating and satisfying to see the kind of outcome one can create. I mean, sometimes you get challenges and, you know, you just lick your wounds and move on. It's the way it happens. You take your lessons learned and you make sure that you, you build out bigger, better, stronger going into the future.
And that's what is really quite also in its own way exciting, but with its own challenges as well.
Bill Pfeifer: I love the idea of using that as an opportunity to leapfrog. Kind of like, you know, web one, web two, web three. Web one was, you just take your form and put it online. Web two is you find a better way to do the same things you were doing, and then web three, you're doing different things.
Yes. And if you were farther behind, and now you all of a sudden [00:19:00] just bring the web straight to people, they weren't doing a lot of that stuff, or they can just jump forward to, you What new things can we do based on all of this availability? And we have cores and we have edges and we have local, and this is just amazing.
I can't wait to see where this goes next.
Dr. Coker: Yeah, I think some pointers to where it goes next is if you look at the demography of, it's a very young population, it's the median age is in some places 18, in some places 20. And so generally across the continent, I mean, it's around about 1920 and, you know, not that much more, even in some more industrialized parts of the
Bill Pfeifer: continent.
But as everything else is graying, demographically speaking, that's a pretty incredible advantage and difference.
Dr. Coker: Exactly. So you have, you know, the, the young, you know, savvy, content rich population as, um, a huge [00:20:00] marketplace. So you have 1. 3 billion people and 54 countries in Africa are the same as they're different.
Lots of different ways of culture, North, South, East and West, even within countries. significant diversity in culture and so on. But nevertheless, it presents a significant opportunity to, to raise the impact that you have with what is a really young, typically young population. I think something around about 70% or so, uh, less than, uh, 40, and even younger.
So the impact and the opportunity and addressable market is significant indeed. So,
Bill Pfeifer: regarding the edge, what are you seeing your customers doing at the edge, doing at the core, right? Now that you're building, I mean, over the last couple of years, you've built 30 plus edge data centers, let alone the core data centers.
So that's a huge amount of net new [00:21:00] capacity. And I assume it's not sitting there idle waiting for someone to do something, right? People will jump in because they couldn't use that capacity before they had to build their own. Now they can jump in and start innovating. So you, you're probably seeing this burst of innovation of new companies, of new ways of thinking, ways of doing things.
I don't know how much of that you see from the perspective of running the data center. Do you have a sense of what your customers are doing with all of that net new capacity and capability?
Dr. Coker: That's a great question. First of all, we have to make sure that the awareness is there of what we offer and we continue to fine tune that and innovate it.
We don't have a previous reference point to say it was done like this before. Now let's pick it up and know where we're innovating and offers of delivering digital infrastructure out to the edge. But what it does is this, you don't have to build your own network connectivity, you can write an open access network.
You don't [00:22:00] have to build a data center like you said, where we also have issues with load shedding on power and so on. Previously, you could actually have ISPs go down because there's been a power issue or they have to upgrade their relatively small data centers. But what we have... Now is, you know, an ISP able to leverage the infrastructure we give with the connectivity we provide, and they can focus on the end point to their own customers.
Also for smaller companies that need that combination of connecting to the internet, some of their own smaller footprint. of hosting that they require and a mix to what they use in the cloud. They don't have to depend on going to a core data center that's a hundred, hundreds of miles away. I mean, of course, you have possibilities of using hands, remote hands and eyes, you know, stuff like that.
But right down the road, you could have the possibility of closer to where you operate, [00:23:00] having access to lightweight co location. Now, with respect to what people are doing, actually, in terms of what they consume at the end, we don't get insight into that, but what we do, is to provide the facility for those who take that content to the edge to know that there's trusted partner, understands how to operate on the continent, and is able to give the underpinning infrastructure for the drive, for driving that content out to the edge.
And it could be, you know, lots of different types of latency sensitive applications like gaming, for instance. And you start to have other usage scenarios that people want in content consumption and you're starting to get significantly more with respect to support of e health, e education, e government services, you know, so on.
There's a whole range. of usage scenarios of content at the edge that we support [00:24:00] by being able to take the latency out and drive the delivery of services at the edge. Let me just say it's closer to the eyeballs.
Bill Pfeifer: Sure. And again, in the United States, in Europe, we're thinking about the edge as moving technology out of clouds and data centers.
But when you're just building the data centers in the clouds and you're just building the edges. Do you have customers that necessarily care so much about edge versus core data center versus cloud? Or are they just looking for available compute and a certain latency footprint and they don't necessarily care where it runs?
I've been in conversations about, you know, within a couple of years, the term edge will go away. The term cloud will go away. No one will care. There'll just be compute. And it seems like you've just dropped in compute. Right, kind of all over the place, end to end. And I wonder if that's pushing Africa forward, farther in that conversation.
Dr. Coker: It's interesting. You're right, actually, that maturity of, it's a global maturity [00:25:00] process that we are talking about. People will just stop talking about, do I have my own servers to For my computes, they then think about going into the cloud, they're going into the cloud, they're thinking about what's on the edge.
Just as you say, in not too long, people will just say, I just have access to efficient compute. And that's delivered by whoever is delivering it in the value chain to the quality, to the speed, to the availability I'm expecting. And it's just part of a global digital infrastructure fabric. That is one, not a differentiation between a core and the edge.
It's just a single continuum of delivering valuable compute of sorts. Because, you know, we talk about eyeballs, and as you get machine to machine, the next eyeball could be a machine. So it's just compute.
Bill Pfeifer: So I guess part of the question behind the question there would be, do you even offer differentiated services very [00:26:00] much between core and edge, between your edge data centers and your core data centers, or do you just have available
Dr. Coker: compute?
If you look at things like being certified to things like the Uptime Institute, Tier 3, you know, so on, the edge, the cores have the scale that justify that. So at least your anchor point for distribution to the edge has a certain level of certification across a whole range of international standards and uptime specifications and so on.
And then the edge, you naturally want to make sure that you have a minimum level of availability with the backups you have and, you know, the multiple end swap plus more infrastructure that makes it reliable to meet what you require at the edge. But it's not where you would put some of the details in the heavy lifting certifications.
But nevertheless, you still [00:27:00] have minimum expected levels of service and availability that you deliver at the edge. So it's just really one continuum. That feeds off the different sort of stages of what you do from the core through the network to the next point of compute. And you have to deliver the service as required or reliability out to the point of use.
Bill Pfeifer: So jumping back a little bit, you had mentioned that when you were first building data centers in Africa, power was a problem. And it sounds like it still probably is. I doubt that's something that you'd just quickly fix. It's kind of a major infrastructure thing. You're building core data centers.
They're big and have massive power supplies. They're in one place. That's, that actually is a relatively easier problem to address, I think, because you can justify much more cost in terms of, you know, build a backup generator and have multiple power feeds. But as you get out to the edge, it becomes more of a challenge to fiscally responsibly address [00:28:00] that and technologically address that.
What sorts of other challenges and how did you solve the power challenge out at the edge? What other challenges are you seeing as you get farther away from those cores than the major...
Dr. Coker: Okay, so just doing the power thing first. The power is a global leveler right now. Availability of power is a big issue, uh, across data centers, whether you're operating where it's abundant.
There's less abundant power even in places like US and Europe and so on than there used to be. Also, the practicality of it is that as demand for powerful compute goes up, you couldn't go to a utility and say, I'd like 10 megawatts in six months time, please, because I'm building a 10 megawatt data center.
They'll need to do a lot more work on that. And it's the same thing in the core sort of cities that we're in. We need to think in detail. What we have to do to deliver the level of power that we [00:29:00] require, the growth trajectories, you know, so on. Do you get help from a utility? Do you get some, say, gas pipe team, for instance, and you build your own independent power plant to meet your requirements?
So, it's sort of a general, broad, global leveler, right? And the key thing also we take into account very, very seriously is how do we do what we do sustainably? So the sustainability question is also something that's very, very much part of the many of these sort of things that we look at in how we build, how we run, how we deliver power, how we do everything.
That's a very, very important piece. So that power issue and the power question is a, is a great leveler. What we also realize is that the nature of the power challenge is different depending on where you are. So you have to engineer for the realities of the location you pick. Okay, so you have the engineering templates you use and stuff like that, but nevertheless, you have to engineer your power for the location you're in, given the [00:30:00] practicalities, as sustainably as you possibly can.
As you go out to the edge, you then engineer for the circumstances around the edge. And, of course, you need to understand how you deliver the power. The other challenge here is how do you, therefore, support the edge? Okay? You're out there. Now, one of the things we saw as a great opportunity Is that when you have fiber networks out there, you know, you've got to provide support for these fiber networks.
Is you have an operating support, operating model to support that. So what we do is we leverage the synergies between both and make sure we have a unified support structure that upskills our network support teams or data center support teams, vice versa. to be able to be multi scaled to provide the support as required.
So it gives us a very efficient support network at the edge. And you also [00:31:00] have to have, I think, a certain level of remote monitoring, remote sensing, for you to efficiently support your data centers. But increasingly, I think, to overcome those challenges, and we look at how we might do this, is to have almost like lights out support, infrastructure support, response models within the edge.
But that challenge of providing supportive structure at the edge is something that we've been innovating around by making sure we optimize between our core network support structure and our data center support structure. And you
Bill Pfeifer: mentioned sustainability there, which is an interesting topic, particularly when you're talking about edge, right?
Because. Core's clouds, you can very, very tightly control where your power comes from and you can justify building solar fields nearby and things like that, but you can also measure and centralize all of your planning there. When you get out to the edge, it becomes a little more challenging as with so many other things with the [00:32:00] edge.
How do you see sustainability different as you move out toward the edge? And you get smaller and smaller in your datacenter table.
Dr. Coker: Well, first of all, make sure that, you know, what we get with our source power is as sustainable and as efficient as possible. Make sure also that within the confines of where we deliver the edge, we make it as efficient as possible in terms of.
Let's say power utilization. The scale of it is less because the size isn't that large, but your, your ability to hit some sort of fantastic PU is reduced and efficiently and cost efficiently, make sure you optimize the power usage at the edge point. I've always generally said we've got to look at net impact of the industry on sustainability is very, very important.
Because the digital infrastructure industry has actually brought about a significant part of efficiency. We're having this discussion, for instance, I [00:33:00] didn't have to travel 5, 000 miles just to sit down and have this discussion and get back again. It's now accepted that we, it's perfectly okay for us to use digital to cut that out.
We still, we're still finding out that nice equilibrium or the effectiveness of face to face versus digital and so on and so forth. But by and large, a lot of efficiency has been enabled through digital. So you look and, and of course, sustainability. So I always assert you look at the net impact. However, when you have a net impact positive, does not necessarily mean you shouldn't continue to focus on having even more and more greener sustainability back end core infrastructure to increase that gap.
We have net impact on environment because it's a challenge we all face and the key thing is to optimize it continuously. Now, even at the edge, we have to look at how we support our clients with power [00:34:00] sustainability that is based much, very much more on battery availability. You know, so on. And rather than having just one generator around there, we can look at patterns of usage and downtimes and so on, where you might have a response of guessing an emergency, small generator, you plug it in, you get, make sure everything is okay, while you're still meeting high levels of uptime.
But there's a significant thing also. Is that by having those data centers at the edge, you're actually encouraging, reducing the need for a lot of transportation away from locales, where otherwise they would have done that, but now have services being delivered very much more closer to the point of use.
more efficiently than would have been done before. So we take a total net view of what we're doing. I think to that end, we have a very senior individual who drives all of our, is the director of ESG, drives all of our ESG innovations so that You see, it's also [00:35:00] quite a holistic, it's a holistic thing, you know, sustainability.
We have an eight pillar framework that we use to shape structure and design and deliver ESG objectives. It goes around, you know, the strategy, people and execution, technology, innovation. The supply chain, for instance, you know, making sure that we've got a scope one, scope two frameworks in place in terms of how we target that, you know, advocacy and industrial awareness in what we do, for instance, and also the certifications that we have to make sure that we're very, very clear about what green certifications we have.
So for instance, flagship core data center, we are getting it done to the IFC edge standards to get it Design validated to the IFC Edge standards. And the thing about these standards is they drive a minimum level of technology. It's a recognized framework for you to know [00:36:00] you're targeting a minimum level of seller requirements.
You're certified to it by independent viewpoint. And you have to therefore sustain it going in time. So we use this framework to make sure that we really, really holistically think through, deliver, and sustain all of our ESG goals. I
Bill Pfeifer: love that you're talking about the depth of it and the complexity, and it does kind of all tie together.
Right? Moving the data is expensive and keeping it closer to users can provide. More efficiency sometimes, but not necessarily. So it's, it's an interesting sort of balancing act and just being aware of all of that, it helps you move more intelligently toward a good sustainability story.
Dr. Coker: Yes, and we always have to innovate and modify and optimize in what we do.
Making a move in one direction right now gives you data, gives you a view of what you're doing, and if it's not optimized, we'll back [00:37:00] off it, and we'll take that lesson learned and move elsewhere. As I said, we don't have an old reference point that's been done before. We're actually innovating into the future, and not 100% of the moves we make will be absolutely right first time.
So jumping
Bill Pfeifer: tracks a little bit, over to AI. It's the topic that everyone wants to talk about right now. So it constantly, well, constantly, it's been amusing me for a while now that six months ago, a career in AI meant you were a data scientist or a data engineer. And today, a career in AI means you know how to use chat GPT and some other stuff.
And it's gone from a career path to a tool set. And it's such a rapid gift. How is AI impacting what you're seeing, what you're doing? Are you using it, are your customers driving it? Again, you know, the leapfrog concept of you're not going through that linear, uh, Here's how we used to do it. Here's how we evolved it.
You're [00:38:00] jumping straight into here's the state of the art. Let's go there. And I wonder how the continent of Africa is looking at AI differently than the rest of the world because they're just jumping straight in.
Dr. Coker: Yes, you know, and this is, you know, getting the infrastructure that gets you straight ahead to leapfrog.
Do you know, just a couple of things to go back. I'm the chair of the African Data Center Association, and we do a PUE check generally every year to see how it is. And what we find is that the data center, the average PUE in Africa is about 1. 6 or something like that, lower than the global average PUE.
Why? Because the data centers tend to be newer and use newer technology and therefore even in the hot What I call, in many places in Africa, the 90 90 challenge, 90% humidity, 90 degrees Fahrenheit. You still achieve a lower P with our standard. That's an example of leapfrogging, because the technologies in the data centers [00:39:00] are new, okay?
And for the AI, I actually do believe that the core to edge strategy that we have right now with hyperscale open connectivity, That enables carriers and carriers of carriers to move towards the point of consumption absolutely is just key for AI. You see, AI in itself is not just AI. It's part of creating the solution to something.
You have to do something with it. It's embedded in the solution. You have to do something with it. And also it depends, it needs more intelligent compute, much denser compute. And that's why you're not finding companies that do that being very, very highly valued because, you know, the special chips that make that compute.
So what that means, therefore, is you need significantly more. The hyperscale demand is going to go up significantly more. And we're already seeing that across the world, increasing demand. [00:40:00] And with technology too, I'm a firm believer that. As much as we can get the technologies that make a much, much denser compute more efficient, else we'll be plastering the entire planet with data centers.
And the more efficient we can be, the more we can get the balance right between growth and data center demand and so on. So stuff like new technology that I've been talking about, like graphene and so on, it's very, very key for us to meet the increasing demand. So AI is driving increasing demand, and we're already seeing that.
in what's being highlighted across the globe in growth, in demand, or you're now having um, AI to hyperscale the data centers. That trickles down into what we're doing in Africa. That's why I think our strategy of a call to the edge with open connectivity is a key one to underpin AI. I'll give you an example.
You've got an AI engine in the back end of something that's interactive with the customer. And you have latency. [00:41:00] Imagine how destructive that would be in trying to interact with something. So you need to get it out to the edge and make it as real time, millisecond, milliseconds of milliseconds in efficiency and in gaming and so on.
So AI is going to be very, very pervasive as a part of the usage scenarios and use cases of how we deliver things. And I believe our core to edge strategy, we really support that. But putting AI in perspective, I mentioned I had a role before and not far from me was a strategy team working on expert systems.
Experts, this was about 35 years ago now.
Bill Pfeifer: I was going to say, probably like the 90s because that's when expert systems were in vogue.
Dr. Coker: Exactly, late 80s into early 90s, really early 90s, talking about expert systems, we were looking at heuristics, we were looking at how to bring intelligence into operating paint shops, that used to be an art [00:42:00] of experts right down into being able to control that with closed loop technologies.
Cars, engine management systems, for instance, you know, and so on, has had different elements of AI, but AI has come to a level of maturity that is really quite, I wouldn't say scarily competent. It just puts different levels of functionality for us to be able to use to build. and make our lives better, more efficient, greener, so on, right?
That net effect of green, as I talked about. You know, so I think AI is going to become much more pervasive. I think it's going to be much more embedded in a lot of what we do. It's going to demand significantly more infrastructure to support it because of the compute, the sheer level of computing need for storage.
AI is not AI without underlying data on which you then build on, it's just the underlying data is now global because we have web 3, we have interconnectivity, we have undersea cables all [00:43:00] over the place to drive this content around the place, and that data is what's being used. Overlaid with what we call AI, right?
With technology that allows you to do it much quicker, more efficiently, and drive it out to the edge. And that's what we're seeing right now. So, the demand for that volume of data to be used is increasing significantly, exponentially, in a very, very short period of time. The compute that we need to overlay on that data in real time and real time delivery is increasing significantly.
So you now have a lot of the hyperscalers rethinking their engineering per rack, their engineering per device, which are taking different shapes of size and compute per meter squared footprint. increasing significantly. And so you're going to start to see the cycles of refresh, technology refresh, increasing because we now have lots of new use cases coming out because of AI.
You see, AI, [00:44:00] just like a lot of technology, inputs into the, in my view, unassailable human heuristic capability. So I thought to myself, if I was a... I had a priest about to do a sermon on the Sunday of X Sunday in normal time, and I asked AI to do me a sermon. What sermon would it give? I mean, it's really quite surprising how relevant it is.
But then you have to add the personal touch. All it does is give you a very sophisticated cue to what you do, and you overlay it on, and you personalize it, and you enrich it. You know, and so on. In a way, a machine can't really do, but it's a significantly better starting point than it would be. And it's probably going to be the same with legal.
You know, you've got legal scenarios to work through. At the end of the day, it's not what AI has just printed out. It's a starting point for you to then add a different level of expertise. And you'll see [00:45:00] this virtual cycle driven by functionality that's given by AI. And what does that mean? We need more and more technology because lots of people will be using the AI to crunch stuff to give them the starting point.
So you see exponential growth, and that's why I was said, like I said in the start, that the core to edge strategy we're developing and the fundamentals of things we're looking at as well with, you know, the sustainability, the core mega data centers. This the smaller edge data center, the interconnectivity, open interconnectivity, the IXs and so on, is a kind of infrastructure architecture that I think will enable us to deliver ai.
I tend to
Bill Pfeifer: think of AI as. It does things faster and it helps us do things faster, but it also forces us to do things faster because our competitors are and because it's growing so much now we have to keep up with it and all of this. So you have to know what you're doing. You have to have a goal and a way to get there, but it can help you [00:46:00] do that faster as long as you can keep up.
Dr. Coker: Exactly, as long as you can keep up, but also it also creates for humanity a lot, maybe ultimately better work life balance. So
Bill Pfeifer: looking forward, what are you most hoping comes next that helps you leapfrog again into the next space? What
Dr. Coker: comes next? I actually do think that there's a lot of possibility for us to use technology that's available now to transform what's happening with health, transform what's happening with education, transform what's happening in legal, transform what's happening in a lot of other areas.
So much so that you then have this global, we will talk about the global village anyway, that's been enabled by technology, right? However, what does it mean for [00:47:00] Africa? Therefore means that a lot can be delivered directly to the point of use. You do not have to leave to get a level of education and so on.
That can be delivered much more. Efficiently, much quicker, much more intelligently to the point of use, and that raises, you know, the quality of life. So broadband penetration and accessibility and digital accessibility is so important, just as much as having water, just as much as having other aspects or, you know, it's an enabling phenomenon for want to be better, right?
It also means, therefore, and we're starting to see this with content creation, where you now see African content being very, very pervasive across the world. It also means that that expertise can be created and delivered more efficiently across the world. But there's one thing we're also seeing, the global resource pool of people, right?
You have, we would hire the best [00:48:00] people from across the world for what we need to do. And we create a whole talent pool. I talked about the demographics. Okay. So access to a bunch of very, very brilliant people to build capacity capability in time. All right. And you get this growing into world class individuals from a technology point of view or engineering point of view.
And they then get hired off to Canada. Fine. It's a global talent pool. You just make sure that you have the feedstock. And you continue to have the feedstock. This happens because of technology enabled in both directions, access to many, many, many things. So it's the same thing with legal minds being able to give legal points of view of a localized world in pockets, right?
Same thing with medicine, being able to undertake very, very complex medical operations with expertise from anywhere around the world, but [00:49:00] in different ways delivered. You know, you could even, you'll have the medical edge because at the end of the day, you have a physician working on it, but the information they're working on, the virtual reality that they might be working with, in, in that kind of scenarios has to be at the human edge and the computing edge, right?
And as you said earlier on, it's compute. It's compute that enables many, many things at the edge. You couldn't suddenly have a path failure or a latency delayed something in a very, very critical situation. So, of course, you'll engineer for that. That's what I think is what we'll see happen. What next? And the what next is very, very exciting, indeed.
It means, therefore, that we have to have much more, much higher quality, much higher scale, a much lower cost per unit digital infrastructure right there at the point of use. This is
Bill Pfeifer: just an amazing conversation. I love it. You've gone... From building a datacenter to building [00:50:00] so many datacenters and landing undersea cables and building edge datacenters and bringing all of this technology in to really jump continent of Africa forward by a generation or more of technology.
And I can't wait to see what comes next. I really appreciate your time today. Thank you so much for joining us. How can people find you online and find out more of what you're doing? How can they keep up with all of this momentum that you're generating?
Dr. Coker: On LinkedIn, I'm on LinkedIn. My colleagues here also get engaged in my colleagues and my open access data centers in communications and so on, get engaged on what we're doing.
So getting, getting it out there, updates, you know, so on. But also I, I respond, I do respond to things and questions that come up, you know, so on in what we do.
Bill Pfeifer: This is fantastic. All right. Well, thank you so much and have a great day. You
Dr. Coker: too. Thanks, Bill. It's been [00:51:00] a pleasure. Have a great day. That does it for this episode of Over the Edge.
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