Latest / Technology Now / Landfill gas to AI: building the next generation of UK sovereign data centres | Nick Hume
Transcript
- NICK HUME Landfill sites produce methane gas. We, obtain that methane gas. We send it into turbines and produce electrons. That's been a business for 15 plus years. SAM JARRELL Have we ever mentioned landfill as a gas power source on this podcast before? MICHAEL BIRD Great question, Sam. Yeah, I think we did. we did an interview last year, where we talked about that. and the thing about landfill is that they're pretty much everywhere. According to the UK government, we have over 500 in the country, landfill sites that is. So imagine what we could do if we harnessed all of the waste gas from all of them SAM JARRELL No kidding. One man's trash is another man's power, I guess. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, and, what a cool thing, like turning an asset that people once thought, "Oh, that's just rubbish," to something that is highly valuable and sought after SAM JARRELL No kidding MICHAEL BIRD Well, Sam, this week we're diving into a case study in sovereign AI, the big buzzword at the moment here in the UK, from the AI itself to the very power used to run it. I’m Michael Bird SAM JARRELL I'm Sam Jarrell MICHAEL BIRD And welcome to Technology Now from HPE. MICHAEL BIRD So Sam, we talk about AI infrastructure a lot on this show, and we often talk about just how much power they consume SAM JARRELL Right, because the power consumption for a large data center means it can't just be plugged into the grid. it can sometimes need its own infrastructure to keep it up and running MICHAEL BIRD 100%. And, the question where this power comes from can often be a little bit contentious. So, what about trying to use a waste product to power them? SAM JARRELL Hmmmm could this be the methane collected from a landfill? MICHAEL BIRD I like your thinking, Sam, And today we are going to be exploring that a little bit further to see how landfill gas is already being turned into power for the next generation of sovereign AI data centers here in the UK. Nick Hume is the CTO for a company called ERA 4 here in the UK, who are focusing on sovereign lower carbon infrastructure, which includes not just power from landfill gas, but also the use of modular data centers to bring the infrastructure to the power source. And the first thing I wanted to know from Nick was, why are ERA 4 focusing on this sort of infrastructure now? What has changed? NICK HUME modular data centers are a kind of a new, or reimagined, deployment of compute. back in the day, you used to go fast, you would put compute in there and it didn't look like this AI workloads and high density. It was, "We need to expand. We've got stranded power, stranded capacity, stranded cooling," or white space. you've got one of those three things. And so what we're able to do now with AI, is deploy these high dense, modular data centers quickly. So for Era Four, we've got land and power assets that allow us to go fast. These modular data centers allow us to continue that velocity and piggyback that speed and not be beholden to building four walls, a roof, permitting and all these different things. So we leverage these modular data centers and roll racks in quickly, to accelerate the time from essentially PO to token, accelerating our ability to execute, AI workloads for our customers that depend on AI sovereign and, low latency workloads in the UK. MICHAEL BIRD And, can you just explain who your company is and just very, very, very briefly what they do NICK HUME Yes, so ERA 4, we stand on the shoulders of a waste management business of all things, and so that waste management, produces, landfill sites across the country. And those landfill sites produce methane gas. We, obtain that methane gas. We send it into turbines and produce electrons. That's been a business for 15 plus years. so sending that back to the grid, highly profitable, highly valuable to the grid, providing those services. So we actually use that behind the meter power. Instead of us sending it to the grid now, we're gonna send it to these AI data centers we're building, and have built, to produce tokens. So essentially, producing electrons and then, enriching those electrons to tokens, and allowing that to be, democratized, for those customers. So really, just all the way from waste to high-value, tokens as a service. MICHAEL BIRD So, why are modular data centers something you're thinking about, you're talking about maybe rolling out? NICK HUME Yeah, and like I said before, it's that speed. So again, we've got that power, we've got that land. the modular data center allows us to do two things, both deploy quickly, but then pivot quickly as well. if we were, building those big data centers with four walls and a roof and trying to hand off data halls with, supporting infrastructure for cooling, et cetera, that facilitated a 150 kilowatt rack, a 250 kilowatt rack, a 400, we would be forever architecting a new design every single data hall. By the time those racks get built, delivered, and installed, it would look very like Frankenstein's monster at the end of it. Traditionally, those things were built and, these data centers, and the, the densities were quite modest, you know, sub 10 kilowatts. So the modular data center allows us to target an architecture , with our partners HPE and others to design for that architecture, deploy it quickly, and be able to then utilize that as fast as possible and then work on the next one. So when the next one rolls out, the next architecture comes, we've got partners that we've worked with, we can deploy these things and target those architectures and ensure that the cooling loops are sufficient, the, CFD modeling is sound. So it's really... speed, it's agility, and it's bespoke and custom designed for those particular workloads. MICHAEL BIRD And can you give me a sense of sort of scale or numbers of how many, modular data centers you've rolled out and sort of locations and maybe some of the reasons behind those locations? NICK HUME Yeah, so the landfill energy, business we're building on top of, we've got 40 to 50-odd sites that we can deploy across. we're targeting one, of one at the moment. it's a five megawatt site that's deploying in Q3, this year. So in, we'll be serving tokens end end of quarter. and so we've got five of those one megawatt, modular data centers, Over time, we've got single, double and triple digit megawatt capacities across our portfolio. So some of those will be behind the meter, production through landfill, through other means, and through grid connected. So we'll have a blended, power story over time, allowing us to, bring lower cost tokens, and actually de-risk the business in some way as well. So, providing that AI sovereign story to UK enterprise, UK government, because we produce our own power on our own land, So we can actually facilitate, a de-risked, AI solution for those, for those customers looking for local low latency, high performance compute. MICHAEL BIRD I guess that's an element of it. you can deploy a data center quickly in, a location as long as there's power, which you can maybe provide. and that means that a sovereignty can be part of that conversation. you can be close to that environment. NICK HUME Some of these UK enterprises we're talking to, they've got their data in US hyperscalers. They've got their data in places that they've had to go to because that's been the only option they've had. are they happy with it? Possibly. Are they happy paying those prices? possibly not. And so we can actually solve for both those problems, by repatriating that data back in within the country, the jurisdictions of that locale, and the lower latency. Like the crown jewels of these businesses, like you got to think about it from a CEO and a CIO's point of view, if your data is in a place you, don't have necessarily the ability to control, There's a lot of trust that you need in those partners and how it's being done. and so if you can de-risk some of those things and like AI is an emerging technology, how we prevent those hallucinations and how we, smooth the edges of what this is doing over time. but you can do that in a piecemealed way, and some of that is by bringing that data back, de-risking it from that point of view, keeping it within the bounds of a jurisdiction, and Also benefiting it from a lower cost, benefiting from a lower latency, and knowing that, you've de-risked a lot of your business and that sprawl of data, which is your crown jewels. All that IP you wanna keep that close to home, close within the bounds of control. MICHAEL BIRD and these modular data centers, are they temporary solutions you know, the idea is you sort of deploy it and then, build a proper bricks and mortar data center? Or are these permanent solutions? NICK HUME Good question. So it can be both. we've got, , single, double, and triple digit megawatt capacity across the country. So at one of the sites, we've got 100 meg. Doesn't make a lot of sense having 100 of these laid out. So it will be part of that story. It won't be the complete story. But these can be permanent, where, you put them on concrete slabs. They're as permanent as they need to be. They can be temporary on, we don't use it for this purpose, but certainly HPE can sell these to, modular and ruggedized workloads and have them in simulations on battlefields for, Departments of Defense, et cetera. MICHAEL BIRD And so, power is an interesting, question, particularly when it comes to, modular data centers. So you're in a unique position where you're providing power, but I guess a thought has to go into where they're deployed. NICK HUME where we produce our own power is obviously ideal. where we've got grid connectivity, and we know what that looks like. we've got, local government buy-in. AI growth zones is a big part of the UK, government story, and how we leverage that, and how that's leveraged on the other side, too. We're in good discussions with the UK government both parties like it to go faster, obviously. the networking side is important, so some of the 50-odd locations we have, some don't have an ability to easily connect dark fiber managed services into those locations. So we have to work out, there's a cost benefit analysis about how we, get that network there. We have to do high speed. You can't just run a 5G solution there. it's not stable enough. We have to get fixed line for the large workloads. we have to be deliberate about site selection and what is meaningfully important for, both our customers and where they are. But equally, it has to pencil out on a spreadsheet. It's part of the equation of does this make sense for us? MICHAEL BIRD And your job is…. NICK HUME I'm CTO Era 4, so I've been with the business since, August of last year. this is a good call to action for folks that were wanting to join an exciting UK business that's doing a lot of cool stuff. we're growing quickly. We've got some emerging, deployments happening next quarter, and beyond. MICHAEL BIRD and so your job is to roll out these data centers. So you're thinking location, data, power, everything else. that's what's keeping you awake NICK HUME so really simply, co-founder Mark Dauber, chief energy officer, he's doing outside the data center, so he's producing the power. he's an existing, member of the energy business that we're, leveraging. So he worries about the things outside the data center. I worry about the things inside. So he's gray space, I'm white space, of deployment and build. and then my colleague to my right, Michal Gabrielcik, He's COO. He does all of the operations and SLAs and managing customers and how we're doing that. So my job is inside the data center, so the tin or the networking, interconnecting these data centers both on site and to our, backbone network and building of the backbone network, as well the software solutions we're running on top. So, we work quite well together with the three of us. but it's a circular, continuous improvement, process between the three, so design, deploy, operate. MICHAEL BIRD So why are you building multiple data centers in, the UK? Why don't you just build one absolutely ginormous data center? everything's centralized. Presumably you get, economies of scale and, one connection or multiple connections to the power grid, maybe multiple data connections. But it's all aggregated in one place. Is there an advantage of, rolling out modular data centers in this history of NICK HUME it depends on the customer. So, some of the, the people we're talking to want to do large offtake. They wanna do 20, 40-plus megawatts of capacity. So, these are hyperscale customers who want 6, 8, 10,000 GB300s next year. And so we're actively talking to them, which is a great problem to have. and we've got sites that can support that. The beauty of our business is we can actually do both. So we can incrementally build an AI cloud for smaller sites, so five to seven meg, and we can do smaller, we can do a little bit larger, and that can be a decentralized, distributed inference, workload. But equally, that's still some significant amount of compute to do fine-tuning and some training on. So the answer is, it depends on the workload. It depends on the customer. we have the opportunity to serve most. And just to MICHAEL BIRD Just to unpick the lingo. So when you say 100 meg, you don't mean, you know, what, what- 100 megawatts ... yeah, I was gonna say, yeah. Yes. So so I'm used to 100 meg being, you know, speed, but- Yes ... we're now talking power. NICK HUME so that's a significant amount of compute. So, back of napkin math, some of these mod pods we've deployed, so We have the larger size, which is a DC 16. It can do 16, racks inside, I think 12 of them liquid-cooled, four air-cooled. That can host roughly 512 GPUs. So one meg is roughly 512. So extrapolate that out, you're talking hundreds of thousands of GPUs, , and beyond. MICHAEL BIRD And that's a site that's already been earmarked in the UK. Did you say Newport? NICK HUME Yes, Newport. So that is an old steelworks. it's an old industrial site we're rejuvenating, to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which is part of our title, ERA 4. And so it's a really good opportunity for us to, serve those tokens and, those customers that are looking for that larger workload. it's in the AI growth zone down there. And, it's a great site and a great opportunity for us to, be working at scale MICHAEL BIRD So looking into your crystal ball, do you see small modular reactors being used to power modular data centers? in the future? NICK HUME Absolutely. I mean, smaller modular data centers, as well larger ones. these things, can produce quite a lot of power. the bang for buck is quite extraordinary. there's obviously a stigma around nuclear somewhat rightly somewhat, unfairly there's been a lot of progress made on safety, on improvements to those processes. and some countries are leaning right into that. there's an obvious situation where those things are deployed more, at scale but you've got to start somewhere. So I don't know what those first few trickle effects, through to get those deployed. but it's cleaner, it's faster, and it's really the obvious solution other than data centers in space. so yeah. MICHAEL BIRD Nick, thank you so much for your time. It's been a real pleasure having you on Technology Now. NICK HUME appreciate the time. Thank you. SAM JARRELL I really love it every time we talk about this particular topic around powering data centers, mainly because it is such a, I mean, quite frankly, controversial and contentious topic right now. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, it can be, can't it? SAM JARRELL yeah. But I appreciate when we talk about it 'cause I feel like I learn so much more about all of the different things that are being done behind the scenes to make it less, costly, less strenuous on the environment, and better for governments and people around the world. So I really enjoy this conversation and it really does just go back to AI infrastructure starts with energy. we've talked in previous episodes about GPUs, networks, cooling data centers, but none of it really does matter without the power. and the idea of from waste to tokens, is so fascinating to me and I love the idea of being able to do that and just make everything a little bit more, sustainable for everybody. MICHAEL BIRD you talked about AI starts with the power, and you're right. We describe AI data centers not by the number of GPUs or whatever. they're often described by the power usage. They often say it's like a 10-gigawatt AI data center. and as we said at the top of the show, like this is one of those things that you just wouldn't have thought about. It's just going into landfill. It's just being wasted. So actually, if you can do something with that waste, and you can power data centers with it, that's fantastic. and I love the sovereign element of it. I think that's really clever as well because again, Sovereignty can mean many different things to many people. so it, could be where your data's held. But actually, to some extent, power at the moment is quite a volatile thing. the prices, of various, different fuels around the world are going up and down. So actually, if you can have a secure way of generating power that doesn't rely on anything being imported from outside of the country then that's very, very much sovereign power, isn't it? SAM JARRELL Yeah. This is truly full stack. It's the land, the power, the infrastructure, the location, you've got all of the pieces under control, and it makes sense. I was very curious when you were talking to him about okay, well, Why not build like a giant data center somewhere and that's just got all of it? But it really is like a control thing, and where does it make the most sense depending on what kind of business or organization you are? MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, and it was a slightly tongue-in-cheek question because we've talked about sort of disaster recovery or, planning for disasters. So actually having your data even spread across a country, is a good idea to do that. So actually, if you can have these data centers dotted around the country in different places, then, it sort of makes sense from that perspective. SAM JARRELL this whole discussion around everything from like the landfills brings me back to this idea that innovation is not necessarily always doing something brand new starting from scratch. It's often looking at resources that already exist and then figuring out how we creatively repurpose them, and give them a second life even. And so like an old industrial site can now help power the fourth industrial revolution. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah, exactly. a lot of this industrial infrastructure in the UK is being phased out, being shut down. So actually if that could be turned into something that generates jobs, generates something for the local economy, it's like repurposing something that was already there and doing something slightly different with it. SAM JARRELL Again, and that goes back to the entire discussion around what AI data centers are able to do for the people around them. I know that's another thing too is the jobs portion for a lot of this stuff is, okay, there's gonna be one that pops up in a local town, is it actually going to be employing people or is it just going to be taking up space? And so the idea that could also then help revitalize the local area, it sounds like a general good to me. MICHAEL BIRD Yeah. Now, Sam, given the emphasis many governments are putting on sovereignty at the moment, the, the final thing I thought I wanted to ask Nick was, if we met up in a year's time to have this conversation, what would have changed? NICK HUME I think we would be serving, UK customers in the UK, enriching those tokens, which is pretty fantastic. We'll be working on a couple of other sites. we'd be talking Rubin, at, currently Blackwell, it'll be Rubin next year, and we'd be looking at Faymann behind that, which is the next architecture. So from a technology point of view, we'll have two of three sites operational with the third one being, in construction, which is very exciting. ... We're just on the hockey curve, upward trajectory of that journey. So it's an exciting 12 months for us as a business. we'll have a lot more employees and people working on the project. We're quite lean, so I'd love to talk to people about that. SAM JARRELL Okay that brings us to the end of Technology Now for this week. Thank you to our guest, Nick Hume, And of course, to our listeners. Thank you so much for joining us. MICHAEL BIRD If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please do let us know – rate and review us wherever you listen to episodes and if you want to get in contact with us, send us an email to technology now AT hpe.com and don’t forget to subscribe so you can listen first every week. Technology Now is hosted by Sam Jarrell and myself, Michael Bird This episode was produced by Harry Lampert and Eva Higginbotham with production support from Alysha Kempson-Taylor, Nik Damarell Beckie Bird, Alissa Mitry, and Jenessa Ayache. Our theme music was composed by Greg Hooper. SAM JARRELL Our social editorial team is Rebecca Wissinger, Judy-Anne Goldman and Jacqueline Green and our social media designers are Alejandra Garcia, and Ambar Maldonado. MICHAEL BIRD Technology Now is a Fresh Air Production for Hewlett Packard Enterprise. (and) we’ll see you next week. Cheers! SAM JARRELL Bye y’all