Opening Remarks

[00:00:00] Todd R. Zabelle: Good morning, everybody. We’re about to have a big party. It might be a shit flyer, but we got to be careful. We don’t have a hangover.

[00:00:18] Todd R. Zabelle: We’re going to go from 13 trillion to 23.2 trillion in capex spend in the next several years. And here’s some staggering numbers. If you take a look, good news for the people in this room, right? But if we could find a way to do it better, there’s tremendous opportunity to deliver more value. I don’t know if people are interested in that or not.

[00:00:49] Todd R. Zabelle: But today I’d really like to talk to you about two and a half things. One is this idea of doing digital transformation while we do energy transition. This idea of moving from construction to manufacturing. And then the half will be a few of the things that we’re doing to PPI. And more importantly, what you’re going to hear about today from the people that are going to be up here on the stage.

[00:01:23] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay. So let’s talk about digital transformation while we do energy transition. All right. James Chu and I had the opportunity to. Lead a working group in Monaco a couple of years ago, and it was quite an interesting, there was, I think, 40 people approximately in this group. Mostly senior executives from companies involved in digital infrastructure, primarily data centers with some fiber network type stuff.

[00:01:51] Todd R. Zabelle: And we had written a paper for that, and I’m very proud of this paper because we had predicted some things that we thought were going to happen. All right. I’d like to delve into these a little bit. But increasing demand, all right, and this was pre AI now, okay? So increasing demand for digital infrastructure, cost of capital, at that particular time, we saw the Fed and all the associated Feds around the world, their equivalent, radically increase interest rates, nimbyism was come along, supply chain disruption, lack of skilled labor.

[00:02:33] Todd R. Zabelle: Access to reliable power. A guy called me up, a friend of mine and said, Hey, your data center, people having challenges with power. I said, Oh, that’s an interesting question. Why do you ask that? He said, and this is a good friend of mine who has the majority utilities in the world as customers. He said the utilities, those boys are cutting the power off.

[00:02:50] Todd R. Zabelle: So if you’re doing pot growing crypto or now data centers, these guys don’t really want the business or they’re full with dryers and ovens and stoves and irons, okay. This idea of net zero, so we need a lot more power we can’t get, but we’ve got to keep it with the net zero requirement. And then the one thing that we didn’t talk about, but it’s become quite interesting is water availability of water, right?

[00:03:19] Todd R. Zabelle: So what’s happened since then is quite remarkable and that is the explosion in demand for digital infrastructure driven by AI, right? Okay. And we’re pretty close with the folks at McKinsey and I’d call them a regular basis, friends over there and say, how much we talking guys? How? What? What? What’s the number?

[00:03:41] Todd R. Zabelle: And they’d come back once in a while and say, we don’t really know. We’re trying to figure that ourselves. And then they would send this out and say, Hey, here’s our latest thing. But we’re talking about things here that are at a whole nother level on the demand that’s going to be placed on. The need for compute and storage capacity and the ability to move the electrons around, if you will. And it’s quite interesting when you think about it, right? We talk with a lot of people in the digital infrastructure business.

[00:04:22] Todd R. Zabelle: We’ve talked with at least 30 executives outside of that conference. And it’s quite interesting to see how all this is playing out. And we’ll talk a little bit more as we get into this. But there’s unlimited amount of business for people that want to build data centers. You have private equity players that want to get in on that AAA credit rating of those major data center players, if you will, especially the big four, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and AWS.

[00:04:52] Todd R. Zabelle: But those guys don’t need any cash. All right. They don’t need money. They collect, we could buy all the PEs times a hundred probably. So how did the PEs get in? They finance what we might call data center development companies. So these are companies that are popping up on a regular basis now that are actually there to assist the big four guys and building the capacity they need.

[00:05:18] Todd R. Zabelle: And so what does that mean? That means if you’re one of the big hyperscalers or maybe AI players now, You’re going to build some stuff in house and you’re going to contract out, if you will, through leases, other people to build your stuff, the people that are running those data center development operations are quite interesting in themselves.

[00:05:38] Todd R. Zabelle: A lot of them come from the real estate side. And we’ve had the opportunity to look under the hood of many of these companies when they call us or we’re introduced to them, wherever the case may be. And it can be quite startling when you see what isn’t there, right? We’ll talk a little bit about that.

[00:05:55] Todd R. Zabelle: So you have this incredible demand. It’s unlimited demand. Any of us can start a data center. I’m just calling a development company, probably march on to one of those guys and be somewhat successful in getting some work. The challenge we have is we just can’t get any generators, chillers. We can’t get labor.

[00:06:17] Todd R. Zabelle: We may not be able to build somewhere. Even if we could get all that, we might not be able to get power. But what I see. Just me as there’s a lot of money to be made if you just set something up and you try to find someone to buy it. And we’re going to talk a little bit about one situation with a guy that, that had it covered.

[00:06:39] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay. So one of the things that’s going on here are people that are deeply rooted in software.

[00:06:49] Todd R. Zabelle: I know the story, but we don’t really need to get in have decided that they’re now going to put their software in the cloud. That’s a good idea. But what they did is they took a low capital intensive business I made it highly capital intensive. All right. I think that thing said that people are getting close to a hundred billion in CapEx.

[00:07:16] Todd R. Zabelle: That’s two times what a Ramco spends. I think when the big super major oil and gas guys were a peak there at maybe a 40 billion people thought Chevron was crazy at 38 billion. So we’ve taken companies that used to burn dis for lack of a better word, we’ve put in the cloud and they’ve made their companies capital intensive.

[00:07:38] Todd R. Zabelle: They rely on everybody in this room. All right. They rely on everybody in this room and they rely on a bunch of people that are getting in between the people in this room and them that I’m calling the data center developers. And they’re learning new things like, Hey, we can’t just go build a power plant because there’s bees.

[00:07:57] Todd R. Zabelle: We’re all very familiar with what needs to be done when we go into a local jurisdiction, right? We were talking with one guy and he forgot to work the local community in advance. And so through our energy customers, we know, and it’s very common and, All the major players here, all the major guys in the energy business are in the room right now or retired from one of those companies.

[00:08:24] Todd R. Zabelle: Look, you go on five or six years in advance and start building those relationships, right? With that community, because when you go for the city council to make the vote, that’s a foregone conclusion. They like the new school and the new gym and whatever else you’ve done. So it’s getting to the point where people that don’t really have the experience in this world are getting stuck.

[00:08:44] Todd R. Zabelle: All right, this supply chain disruption thing. Is a real serious issue. Okay. We talked about this in Monaco. It was interesting. I was in the room getting dressed. The guy from ABB came on CNBC Europe and he was talking about the, it’s incredible what our backlog is record profits. It’s amazing. Share price is up.

[00:09:09] Todd R. Zabelle: We go in the room, here’s these guys trying to build data centers saying we can’t get anything right. And of course, ABB is one of the guys. So you have this situation. Where it’s very difficult to get stuff and yet the OEMs don’t want to build capacity because they may think it’s a false economy. And so a lot of people say we don’t, we’re not in the data center business.

[00:09:31] Todd R. Zabelle: At the end of the day, if you look at the OEM supply base, it’s all the same across pretty much all industries. All right. Schneider, ABB, so on and so forth. You’re working with them. If you’re building a house, you probably got something from one of those guys, whether you know it or not. All right. So it’s a shared supply base that we all, in this industry, which we’re going to call engineering construction, including the oil and gas part, have to share.

[00:09:57] Todd R. Zabelle: So what happens? And we saw this start to occur, which was interesting. Lead times are going way out. Now, there’s a professor at NYU. That talks about a new approach to marketing, right? And basically the idea is you’re going to constrain the goods, create demand, right? And then you’ll adjust based on how you want to deal with your cashflow and your revenue.

[00:10:26] Todd R. Zabelle: And people in the fashion good business, especially companies like Hermes are the masters at this. They run up the price of a purse to 15, 000. Let’s say, Hey, we need some cashflow or some revenue. Let’s just make some more and release them out. They go. Okay. Okay. I don’t know if the OEMs are doing this or not, but I know in the world of investing and a reoccurring revenue is very important to your value, your valuation.

[00:10:52] Todd R. Zabelle: So is that what we have going on here? There’s definitely something going on where these guys don’t want to build more capacity. They’re happy to have the lead time go out. And so lead time for things such as generators are longer than it takes to deliver a project. So what do we have now? We have panic buying and hoarding.

[00:11:12] Todd R. Zabelle: All right. Now, one of the things, hopefully Phil Kaminsky, we’ll talk about later is the impact of those kinds of behaviors on supply chains. If you start freaking out and buying a bunch of shit you may or may not need, and you can’t figure out where it is, has happened to a lot of these guys. Some are just trying to figure out where’s all my stuff.

[00:11:30] Todd R. Zabelle: Others are saying, you know what, I’m going to buy this stuff so no one else can get it. So supply chains become a strategic weapon. When we were in Monaco the proposal that was made by someone in the room was why don’t we work together to track lead times and the rest, because we need to unwind this as a group.

[00:11:49] Todd R. Zabelle: And one guy put his hand up and said, Oh no, that’s our competitive advantage. And of course he was probably the smallest guy in the room, but he thought that he was going to have some secret weapon on how he was going to get equipment that Other people weren’t. It was quite interesting to see that kind of behavior, right?

[00:12:03] Todd R. Zabelle: So supply chain is actually becoming a competitive advantage. And again, the lead times are exceeding how long it takes to deliver a project, right? Many of you are probably feeling this, right? Okay. This labor thing’s a real deal, right? It’s a real deal. Now, I don’t know how many of you guys are feeling that, but it’s starting to come into play.

[00:12:28] Todd R. Zabelle: There’s some stuff I’ll show you here really quick that you can just look at visually, but we’re going to be short about 500, 000 workers and companies are struggling to get people that are skilled. New word developed by the dirty jobs guy. If you know him, there’s not only a skilled worker problem.

[00:12:53] Todd R. Zabelle: Now we have a willed worker problem, right? So getting the qualified workers on both the technical knowledge side and the craft side is becoming increasingly difficult. All right. So the AGC had done some survey. This presentation will be available, and it’s quite clear that the majority of companies are struggling with hiring the knowledge workers and craft workers they need, right?

[00:13:21] Todd R. Zabelle: And part of the problem is we for some reason have devalued people that weld things or electricians or whatever the case may be. I get a lot of people ask me, hey What should my kids go do? I said, not get involved in computer programming because that’ll be handled by the AI and the people that create the AI, but maybe they ought to consider going to engineering school halfway through that or during that, or before or after that, go in the trade for three years, become a pipe fitter a a welder, an electrician, spent about five years getting the packs together, and then just go make unlimited amounts of money because we know the demand’s going to be there.

[00:14:03] Todd R. Zabelle: And who’s going to do the work, right? So one of the things that we got to be thinking about is how do we get back into vocational type experience for people, right? And get them to want to do that kind of work. Because at the end of the day, who’s more valuable, a private equity guy, an attorney, or someone’s actually welding some pipes together that are going to enable all this stuff.

[00:14:33] Todd R. Zabelle: My argument would be the welders more important than if you read built to fail, you’d probably know that. I feel that way. Okay.

[00:14:44] Todd R. Zabelle: Power is supposedly the most important thing in this digital transformation, but there’s undercurrents of water being part of it. And when you think about this, power needs water and water needs power, right? And there is no digital transformation without power. So we go full circle on this whole thing and we find ourselves all working collectively on the same thing.

[00:15:08] Todd R. Zabelle: Now, if you’re building buildings, that’s probably a little bit different, but I think the majority of people that we spend time with are involved in either digital. Infrastructure or in energy related things and some civil infrastructure. Just as a side note, how crazy is it getting out there? We got a call on a project the other day.

[00:15:27] Todd R. Zabelle: I’ll just say it’s in the UK, the budget’s 6 billion, I think, or five and a half billion pounds, but they’ve gone in or the estimated cost to complete is that they’ve gone in at a budget of 13 billion. They have a hundred percent contingency on the project because they’re so afraid of the cost overruns.

[00:15:45] Todd R. Zabelle: At what point do we put more just in case than actually doing the damn job? It’s amazing what’s going on out there. And they cite these things that we’re talking about around supply chain labor and so on and so forth. But coming back to the, this is the power situation, right? So the world is very hungry for power, right?

[00:16:07] Todd R. Zabelle: We just don’t have enough power. And to address that, the digital infrastructure guys are saying, Hey, we’re just going to go build some nuclear power plants. That’ll be cool. We wrote some code, made a couple of devices. Now we’re going to go nuclear. I think everybody in this room probably understands what that means.

[00:16:29] Todd R. Zabelle: It’s a little bit more complex, right? We’ve got SMR, small modular reactors, which 17 acres, we’ve got MMRs, micro reactors, modular reactors, and it’s interesting to think about it. We’re trying to keep countries from getting nuclear capabilities, but we’re going to just go build a bunch, let guys go build nuclear stuff, right?

[00:16:51] Todd R. Zabelle: The whole thing doesn’t really add up You got to give them credit for trying. So we’re going to go triple our power and someone from the government says, the good news is we’ve removed all the roadblocks and we’re good to go. Yeah. That didn’t really work for AWS when they were going to go do something to nuclear power plant and they said, no, we’re not going to allow that.

[00:17:13] Todd R. Zabelle: So the politicians who are mostly attorneys maybe have a false sense of what engineering is all about, and what it takes to do this. Okay. So nuclear has really come back into the fold. And how we do nuclear is a big, it’s gonna be a big part of that, but globally, the ability to be deliver nuclear power has been very challenging.

[00:17:45] Todd R. Zabelle: Again, we’ll make this available, but basically what this says is from a cost and the schedule’s the same. Things are three, four times what we originally budgeted, right? Three, four or five times. One of these projects was abandoned. They just tapped out. The one, the far large one, the ATR is, was a research thing that’s no longer applicable because it’s taken too long, right?

[00:18:18] Todd R. Zabelle: So even if we decide we’re going to go nuclear, we’ve got a lot of challenges, right? So I guess what I’m proposing to you is digital transformation, energy transition are coming together, right? And it’s all going to get very blurred for all of us. And if you’re involved in data centers, you’ve probably seen out there now nuclear power data centers and so on and so forth, right?

[00:18:40] Todd R. Zabelle: There’s a lot of challenges with doing energy transition, digital transformation at the same time, they have to work together, but they’re competing as well. So it’d be interesting to think, and maybe this is getting a little too far out there is it’s an energy company, a data center company, there’s a data center company, an energy company, and will four companies control all the energy, right?

[00:19:03] Todd R. Zabelle: Who knows? It’s something to think about. But at the end of the day, when you cut through all the bullshit that’s going on out there, it’s the ability to deliver capital projects that are going to make this or break this. And I don’t understand why people don’t get that. You listen to the news, they’re going on about the PE guys are jaw jacking and the VCs and all these guys and the politicians are gone.

[00:19:26] Todd R. Zabelle: And then we just get down to construction and manufacturing. And no one’s ever really talking about that. And I don’t understand why, right? The only thing that keeps these technologies from becoming reality is the ability to deploy them to engineer, construct, or deploy depending on what you’re doing.

[00:19:49] Todd R. Zabelle: Because they’ve already figured it out technically. It’s just, they got to get it built and getting it built is very challenging, more challenging than people realize. And so when we talk with people, we basically see, especially when we get in the data center development type guys very immature companies that may not even have an ERP system in place, and I might call it QuickBooks and ERP system, lots of spreadsheets. Okay. Lots of expediting. I came from a big data center player. Now we’ve started up this one or I’m on the team. I’m not really certain what we did because we had a lot of infrastructure, but we’re going to go get this one sorted. And so they start off and they’re just begging for transparency.

[00:20:35] Todd R. Zabelle: They’re just trying to figure out what’s going on. Okay. And it’s interesting to to listen to them on how it’s just this desire that if I can get transparency. I could figure out what to go do. And we always think to ourselves, if you get transparency, you probably wouldn’t be trying to figure out what to do because you would have put control in place, but that’s for people to talk about later.

[00:20:58] Todd R. Zabelle: The next thing they moved to is some form of what we might call what lean has become. Not what we set out to make lean, which is more of a production focus, but this idea of collaboration. We need to collaborate, right? When you send an RFP to Caterpillar and they don’t respond because they really don’t care there’s a different level of collaboration that’s occurring.

[00:21:19] Todd R. Zabelle: We’re busy. Leave us alone, right? We’ll get back to you.

[00:21:24] Todd R. Zabelle: We believe, and that’s why we’re here, that by really focusing on production, we could solve this problem, right? A lot of the challenges, and that’s what we’re going to hear about today, what people are actually doing. All right. I think we could skip this slide. No. Why is this important? This is, I think, a quarter ago or two quarters ago.

[00:21:46] Todd R. Zabelle: Met his earnings call and they’re basically saying we can’t build the capacity fast enough. So that’s having some minor, and we shifted our focus to AI. So that’s impacting our ability to to sign up our users on our solutions. We offer our experiences, whatever Instagram and Facebook are. So this is important because it’s hitting people in the pocketbook that are the investors in these companies that are providing.

[00:22:14] Todd R. Zabelle: And using the digital infrastructure, right? That are providing the services through that. And now it’s gotten to a whole nother level, right? This was a guy that we talked with. He had it handled. He worked for a telco, decided he was going to go do a big project, serious project. Someone referred to him.

[00:22:33] Todd R. Zabelle: We were on the phone. He was telling us how great it was and it was just quite amazing to listen to him. And we got off the phone and said, that guy’s going to fly into the mountains. He’s since been removed from the project, his PE firm suing him. And Oh, by the way, the guy actually won an award the other day for his leadership in the industry.

[00:22:51] Todd R. Zabelle: So a group like this said we should, he should get an award. And we’re like, this guy has major problems. He got involved in something he probably shouldn’t do. He’s got a large PE firm coming after him. But yet he’s winning an award, right? And so that’s somewhat the state of things. Okay. So there’s going to be a lot of work.

[00:23:15] Todd R. Zabelle: There’s endless amount of work depending on where you play in the supply chain or the value chain. The question might be how’s this all going to turn out? And I’m not here to be doom and gloom, but I do think we need to have a reality check of where we are. Secondly, I talked about from construction to manufacturing, right?

[00:23:33] Todd R. Zabelle: That’s an obvious solution because we just standardized the product. We can get everything done. And there’s a lot of movement out there amongst a lot of organizations pushing this idea of moving work off site. Alright. Way more complex than you realize. Personally, I’m very excited to hear from our friends at TD Williamson on what we how a project can move forward.

[00:24:01] Todd R. Zabelle: The experience of a low volume manufacturer in the real world. All right. So we brought in a great customer who they’re going to tell you the real world of what happens and what their challenges are. And I won’t say I’m so tempted to say it, but I’m not going to say what they’re going to tell you.

[00:24:15] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay. It’s not that simple. Just moving to work offsite. As a matter of fact, it’s probably more complex, right? And so we’re seeing that more and more, but yet, and this isn’t to say anything negative about these companies. Rarely do you see a company coming out today. Okay. Involved in new energy technologies that doesn’t say we have a modular standardized modular design that we’re going to mass manufacture We’ve standardized that we’ve modulized it and we’re gonna put it in a manufacturing plant And so we could do something that no one else has ever done I don’t know.

[00:24:51] Todd R. Zabelle: There must be a hundred of these out there that said standardized modularize and do it off site All right,

[00:25:01] Todd R. Zabelle: but I was at a dinner one night. I just blurted this out and I just went back and said that’s pretty good if I don’t say so myself, but having not done it doesn’t mean you know how to do it. And so what we have is a lot of people that have moved into our sector who haven’t done shit that think they actually know how to do it.

[00:25:22] Todd R. Zabelle: Because if you knew how to do it, you’d have a lot more respect than what we’re talking about. So if you tried to move work off site you probably know what I’m talking about. And so there’s a lot of people out there that have made a tremendous amount of money writing software code that have decided they’re going to move into our business and go build stuff, right?

[00:25:46] Todd R. Zabelle: And it’s a different world, right? Basically what you have here is they’re moving from software where you could pretty much do anything. Now, I’m probably uniquely qualified to talk about this because I’ve been involved in all three of these things. I can assure you a capital asset is far more complex than the products that you manufacture that go into them, and that is more complex than the software that both of those use.

[00:26:15] Todd R. Zabelle: And Glenn Ballard, who’s with us today, said something one time. He said, construction encapsulates, encapsulates it all, right? And so we probably could rotate this thing and say all those OEM products, And all that software is consumed by an airport, a data center, hydrogen plant, nuclear plant, whatever the case may be.

[00:26:33] Todd R. Zabelle: So what you could do in software is far different than what you can do when it gets to physical assets, capital assets, right? There’s bees, there’s issues with local communities, there’s physics, right?

[00:26:54] Todd R. Zabelle: And we must be reminded that great minds with unbelievable amount of economic resources Have attempted this before, right?

[00:27:07] Todd R. Zabelle: This is the latest one. This actually let me go back when this is the story in the nuclear power plants, the scan and Vogel where the modularization didn’t actually work. And people are in jail right now are in prison because of it. That’s how bad it got, right? This is the latest one.

[00:27:32] Todd R. Zabelle: Northvolt, right? Largest tech company in history to go broke. I think it’s like 13 billion or something like that. Couldn’t get things built in time. Once they got it built, couldn’t get the people to operate the lines and they’re struggling to get the equipment that they thought they were going to make, that they were going to get from China in time to use it.

[00:27:55] Todd R. Zabelle: And so we just see all this keep coming together over and over again. I think James, she’s going to talk a little bit more with the panel later about this valley of death where you go from commercialization right to this radical ramp up and how you have to simultaneously build customer demand. Production system along with the supply chain, right? And get the financing to do all that.

[00:28:22] Todd R. Zabelle: We’re involved in several of these things, and it’s a very complex situation, because it’s a chicken and an egg. You got a customer. No, but if we had some money, we get one customer says you have any money, you have a plant. No, but if we get some money, you sign up, we could build a plant. And so you’re going around this whole thing, right?

[00:28:39] Todd R. Zabelle: It’s very complex. Someone once said to me, he said, Look, we’ve never saved any money doing offsite modular. We just do that because we’re in places where they don’t have the skilled labor or we’re literally going offshore. We probably don’t want to be welding out there unless we have to. We’ve never saved any money doing that.

[00:29:01] Todd R. Zabelle: Okay. All right, so I’m gonna wrap this up really quick. Couple things. One thing that Gary didn’t talk about PPI is we’re working on this center for digital infrastructure that came out of the thing of Monaco and the center for energy transition, right? Where we’re bringing people together to work on the problems that we’re talking about, whether it’s supply chain, labor, so on and so forth.

[00:29:27] Todd R. Zabelle: But more importantly, rethinking. The underlying mental models and the underlying frameworks for attacking these things with a production perspective rather than dealing with this administrative view that we’re so rooted in. Okay, but more importantly and more relevant is what’s going to happen today.

[00:29:48] Todd R. Zabelle: All right, so what we’ve done is brought together people and we’ve actually added some in real time as they’ve shown up. So thank you that have agreed to join panels. The the idea here is to listen or to learn from the people that are actually doing this and what they’re seeing out there in the real world.

[00:30:11] Todd R. Zabelle: So I’m just trying to set a stage here. So there’s going to be a shit flyer. The question is, are we going to be hung over or not? Some people like that, right? Some people just keep going the next day. Some people say, I gotta go sleep, pair of dog, whatever you gotta do. But the work’s gonna be there.

[00:30:30] Todd R. Zabelle: The question is, how are we going to approach it, right? So I’m hoping that you guys get some value out of today and have the opportunity to listen to people that are really doing stuff out there, right? I think that’s why you’re here. One last thing please join me in thanking Gary and Kristen for an excellent job.