aWordWithWard: Season 2 Episode #3 Diarmid Massey скачать в хорошем качестве

aWordWithWard: Season 2 Episode #3 Diarmid Massey

Ward Hampton sits down with Diarmid Massey, CEO of ESR's data center business, for a wide-ranging conversation about his unconventional journey from the northeast of England to leading data center development across Asia-Pacific. Diarmid shares his remarkable path - from being an unremarkable math student who saved up to work on a sheep farm in New Zealand (as far from England as possible), to stumbling into technology on his first job when he walked into a room full of computers running "Electronic Mail" over dial-up modems in the early days of the internet. His career took him across Asia through the 90s and 2000s, living in Singapore, Hong Kong, Sydney, and Japan, working on primitive leased-line networks that bypassed telephone systems, surviving the dotcom era, running Cable and Wireless's global wholesale business, and eventually falling in love with data centers as they became central to the internet. Now leading ESR's data center expansion, Diarmid explains how the Asia-Pacific-focused real asset manager leveraged its expertise in logistics real estate, land acquisition, and construction across the region to enter the data center market in 2021-2022. He reveals their aggressive buildout in Japan - from their first Osaka project in 2022 (now a 100MW+ campus joint-ventured with Cloud HQ) to 350MW across four Osaka sites, plus strategic Tokyo locations including 70MW in the downtown core. Diarmid offers unique insights into why Japan remains challenging yet rewarding (they still use fax machines, but ESR's Japanese-led approach and local relationships give them an edge foreign companies lack), and contrasts the APAC market with US/Europe He discusses ESR's plans to double down on core markets (Japan, Korea, Australia, and India) where they have construction advantages, while acknowledging Asia-Pacific's cloud adoption lags behind other regions but offers massive runway given population and GDP metrics. The conversation tackles critical industry blind spots: gender imbalance and ESG commitments that need more focus, the need for better community engagement to combat data center pushback, exploring shared investment models between data centers and power generation companies to accelerate grid development, and most provocatively - questioning whether anyone truly understands AI's evolution and whether the rush for ever-increasing power and rack densities will continue or fundamentally shift. Essential viewing for anyone trying to understand how the Asia-Pacific data center market differs from the West and where opportunities lie in the coming decade. -- GET IN TOUCH -- ▹Visit our Website:- https://thewayofward.com/ ▹LinkedIn:-   / ward-hampton-b15a4a28