I N D U S T R Y I N T E L L I G E N C E

What does your role as CEO of Deep Green entail and what does your day-to-day look like ?

We are 12 weeks in to having raised a substantial amount of money from an infrastructure fund from Octopus , so most of the day job is getting the engine going and working all the different facets of the business , trying to get those in motion with a very capable team around me . A lot of that team are people I ’ ve worked with for many years , in many cases , decades , so we all know each other well and we know our strengths and weaknesses – which helps at this stage in the business .

The business itself has been going for eight years and it took a while to get things going , but the truth is that we held it back as we built the first prototypes many years ago with British Gas . Soon came the energy crisis , the world changed and AI came along , so we felt it was the right time to launch . Some people in some startups turn them from an R & D phase into an operational phase , and I guess we ’ re moving into that latter phase .

What technologies do you think are going to come out on top this year , and what do you think won ’ t do so well ?

The reality is that 90 % of our briefs that we ’ re seeing , even the last 12 weeks , have probably been direct-to-chip , and that wouldn ’ t have been the case even three years ago . When it comes to our heartland , it ’ s high heat workloads . We can do 152kW a rack , but most data centres can ’ t for all the obvious reasons – and we love that high-heat workload . For us , we think high heat , direct-to-chip and air cooling will dominate .

The pace of our growth means that , even two years ago , we might have said maybe 50 / 50 bare metal / colocation , and now we are almost exclusively just providing colocation now because there ’ s so much demand for high-heat workloads . Even the NVIDIA kit that came out a couple of weeks ago , that ’ s 150kW a rack – it ’ s direct-to-chip .

What I don ’ t think will go well is anybody who ’ s built a colocation data centre with a normal grid connection . You ’ re going to be hammered on energy costs because there ’ s a huge misallocation of capital going on in the data centre industry . There are a ton of folk who have built data centres how they ’ ve currently always been built , and they are building stranded assets – it ’ s madness . If you ’ re not going to be able to arbitrage on battery , trade energy and blow solar around your site , in five years ’ time , you ’ re not going to have a competitive asset .

If you ’ re buying PPAs and you ’ re anchored at the lowest cost of renewable energy , that ’ s one thing , but renewables are deflationary . You ’ ve got to get behind the metre to create competitive advantage , in our view .

Deep Green ’ s presence has likely had a substantial impact and effects on the lives of individuals frequent in the repurposed heated swimming facilities . Have you engaged in conversations with members of the community or businesses to explore the extent of how transformative it ’ s been ?

Not directly . We ’ ve talked to the pool , and we talked to a lot of people as we were researching and deploying – we certainly are going to begin much more of that in the future . We ’ re very focused on making sure that the social good we ’ re doing is visible , and by that we mean making sure that that the mission we ’ re on , in terms using this free heat for social good is , is really clearly part of what we ’ re doing . The world ’ s not quite used to this idea yet , so it ’ s going to take a while to catch on .

The community element of bringing something back for the social good is absolutely the core principle , because in some ways , we ’ ve been a bit

disingenuous talking about this because we framed it as free heat . Aren ’ t we so magnanimous ? We ’ ve given away this away for free . The truth is , our computers are cooled for free . We ’ re actually richer by plugging into a district heating system , or a swimming pool , or a distillery , or whoever it is . Obviously , a lot of the OPEX of running a data centre is keeping the keeping the computers cool , so this is a reciprocal approach , but we think it ’ s a really powerful idea and it ’ s a big differentiator , and those that have spoken to use recently have done so because the differentiator for us is the environmental and social good .

What ’ s a controversial opinion that you hold about the data centre industry currently ?

We ’ re not against anyone , we ’ re for the benefit and we recognise that the data centre industry is absolutely critical – for all of our lives – and we just want to make sure we move it along . All of the compute

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