Rajit Nanda on Building Next-Generation AI Data Centers with DataVolt

0:00Craving the coffee flavor you love, but without the caffeine? Kachava's got you covered with their newest coffee flavor. This all-in-one nutrition shake delivers bold, authentic flavor, crafted from premium, decaffeinated Brazilian beans with 25 grams of protein, 6 grams of fiber, greens, and so much more. Treat yourself to the flavor and nutrition your body craves. Go to kachava.com and use code news. New customers get 15% off their first order. That's K-A-C-H-A-V-A.com code news. Hey, I like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you'd like to apply to be a guest of the show, just head on over to missionmatters.com and click on be our guest to apply. All right, so today I have Roger Nanda on the line, and he's a CEO over at Data Vault. And this episode is part of our milk and Middle East and Africa summit series. We're bringing the best of those that attended the conference and participated. So, Roger, welcome to the show.

1:01Hello Adam, it's great to be on your show. Thank you for having me there. All right, so we got a lot to talk about today. I definitely want to get into Data Vault and the work that you're doing there. And of course, talk about Saudi and how it's positioned to become one of the world's largest global AI hub. So we got a lot to talk about, but just to get us kicked off here, the milk and conference that you went to, tell me a little bit some of the backstory. Like, where did this start? Is this have you been to a conference before? Like, how did you get introduced to the organization? Well, you know Adam, Mike Wilken is a legend. Okay, and he's a legend not only for being a subject matter on talk leadership for the whole world, on the market economy and the world of finance, but he is in my perspective. He's also a legend for the good humanitarian work that he has been doing for the last couple of decades through the milk and institute, the amount of philanthropy, the amount of research that is backing the philanthropic efforts that eventually get manifested.

2:07I think it's just phenomenal and is amazing. And we at the Kingdom of Saudi have a huge amount of respect for Mike Wilken and everything that he's doing for the society in general. So I think the opportunity Mike started this Middle East and North Africa conference, which ran into its second edition in 2025 and, but ever since he started putting this together, he's been able to bring together an amazing amount of talk leaders, financial experts, industry captains, politicians and key regulators and key decision makers in the region, and also from the Americas together. And his forums have been just very, very thought-provoking and have left all participants with a lot of knowledge and a lot of reality check on where the world is currently position,

3:11what are these key decision makers thinking, what is heart, what is on, where are the pain points, so that people can then take this feedback and work on it in order to make the convergence of the different market participants happen thereafter. So this previous conference, I know you went to like, what keeps you coming back, like what do you feel makes this type of conference unique that the milk inputs on? I think this event really, attending this event, the opportunity of the networking, hearing from all the participants directly, either on the podium or through the network, not networking chats, all of that really allows us to go back and work through and get deals done, deals that would have not been possible without all of these things coming together. So I would say that the milk and the event is a huge facilitator of deals and transactions in this part of the world.

4:19And that's what makes me really come back again and again. I'll tell you what Adam, this year, we were very fortunate to also have Mike come over to Saudi a day before this event was hosted in Abu Dhabi, the Middle East and North Africa, even for the South Sudan Abu Dhabi. And for the day that he spent in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Riyadh, we also had a shot and a small gathering of the local Saudi regulators and industry captains. And it was the first maiden inaugural event, but I have to tell you it was very well attended. And I would say that it put the whole microcosm of what's happening in the Kingdom. Also to the forefront and brought a lot of, I would say, investors and financial experts from the United States to get to understand and appreciate everything that's happening in the Kingdom. They could see it with their own eyes, they could connect with the people and you know

5:23seeing is always believing. So I think that's left a very, very impactful outcome and we look forward to welcoming him and his team to the Kingdom in the back end of 2026 when the world would have gone through another one year of a roller coaster lots to talk and lots to discuss. Well, that's amazing. And what an experience to be able to continue to build on that. I want to switch topics here slightly here and spend some of the time that we have. I want to get to some of the projects that you're working on. So let's talk about data vaults. So where do you want to start learn this? What kind of projects do you want to tee up? So data vault is a relatively young company just about two years since it has started working. We are a team of about 200 people coming from the data center energy and the compute industry with the vision of building the next chance of data centers that are not legacy data centers that are much more efficient data centers

6:26that are green in color and in terms of their energy consumption and data centers that are really bringing in a lot of innovation into the forefront. Today we have 60 megawatts of data centers which are in construction in two countries the Kingdom of Saudi and in Republic of Uzbekistan and between these three data centers all of them are going to be operational by the last quarter of 2026. In the meantime we are doing some amazing development of AI factories in the Kingdom and one such large AI factory is in the last stages of its development and we look forward over the coming three four months to start the construction of the first phase of it. It's a total 1.5 gigawatts super campus one of the largest in the world and the first phase is going to be between 300 to 360 megawatts. It's going to provide compute for high density workload between both

7:33training and inferencing. It will be located in the beautiful zone of Neon, Oxagon which is in the northwest of the country and amazing place with a lot of infrastructure already built in and having very powerful connectivity due to three subsea landing cable landing stations out there which will allow us to reach eyeballs within the African continent within the European context and even through Europe right up to the United States of America with connectivity speed that will be anywhere between 15 to 20 milliseconds for Africa to as high as 120 milliseconds for the Americas. We really are looking forward to getting the shovel to the ground on that project which is hopefully expected in the next few months and put Saudi into the map of AI data centers. That's amazing. That's an amazing story. What do you think is the biggest challenge

8:34you see facing data center operations to meet this future AI demand? What do you say is the biggest challenges? Look, I mean the data center today industry is hugely challenged by power, the need of energy especially as you know data centers which are being built for AI workloads are extremely energy intensive and the world is running out of all the energy that these AI data centers are requiring. I would say that the single biggest enabler of data centers are today the availability of energy and in context I would like to say that the Kingdom of Saudi is a very well position because it is a country that is producing at the lowest cost renewables in copious amounts. It's the fourth largest producer of renewable energy in the world today and on top of that it is

9:35the world's lowest cost producer of energy and it is also one of the most reliable provider of energy. So if you put together all of these elements the lowest cost of energy provided reliably translates into what I would call the lowest cost of compute and where the world of data centers lies today is it is at the cusp of transitioning itself from a story of availability to a story of affordability. So the Kingdom now will not only be able to provide all of this energy for the compute needs of the world but it will also provide them at a very competitive cost and that makes it a very compelling value proposition. Yeah that's so interesting to me too especially when you think about it becoming in a one of the world's largest global AI hubs like

10:36it makes it really a reality huh like it may like you can see it clearly. Absolutely. Yeah it's going to be interesting. I got to get over there more budget. I want to see more of this development. I've been hearing about you. I've been hearing about Neon for years. I remember when I first went to the first they got I don't know if they called it a road show but it was a road show of sorts when they'd come out and they kind of like started to introduce the project to LA and all they see this is years ago now already I have to remember seeing the model for the first time and I love it to hear all the progress and just all the things that are happening. To me it's absolutely amazing. I love to see the development. Well, Roger this has been really a lot of fun having you on the show and getting some updates on what's going on with the data vault and your work over there and to see the which you're building like this is great. How do people if they want to continue to follow your work if they want to continue to follow the projects with data vault and everything else like how do people do that? Oh, we are relatively active on the social media

11:37and of course we have a corporate hotel which is www.datawall.com but I think on the social media we have a handle on the LinkedIn under the name of Data Vault which is got plenty of followers and we do keep posting all the progress that's happening on the construction front as also all the fun stuff that's happening in terms of the development around the Neon project but I would also like to tell you that Data Vault is doing a lot in terms of being very proactive towards the development of human capacity in the context of data centers. So even before we put our money into our first assets that are right now on the build-out stage, we actually invested in building academies, academies for training the youth of both the Kingdom of Saudi and Uzbekistan. We have about 150 students who are going through a three year rigorous program which is like an undergrad

12:42program of which six months is actually on the job training outside of classroom. These guys are being trained to be the operators of our data centers. So that's amazing. How cool I must be an amazing experience to see it being built and then it's like that's almost like our new project right to go to school and then get to see what you get to run after that's amazing. Absolutely and I can tell you in the context of all of those academy training and building the human capability that we are also focusing a lot on the gender diversity especially the Saudi youth are seeing 50 percent of our students in the form of female students and that is something that we are enormously proud of because we all know that the Saudi on the gender diversity have been a little bit behind until about a few years back and thanks to the vision of the Crown Prince. We are now seeing a very important and a very valuable participation

13:47in the workforce of the female population of the country who are doing it's simply fantastic and in that spirit we are also making sure that in our academy we are training these young girls between 18 and 22 years of age who will be running this data centers. I would like to welcome all all viewers and all the audience that are listening in to to come in and discover for themselves in about 10 months from now when our data centers are ready for service operational and are being run by the young Saudi youth for the ones in Saudi and by the young who speak youth both boys and girls in Tashin. Oh man what a great story I'm glad and that's a great way to end it I love what you're talking about here Rajit and for everybody listening just so you know my team where we'll put the links to the to date of all to LinkedIn and website and all that good stuff in the show notes so you can you know go check them out on LinkedIn and you can see

14:48the updates and what's going on of course with the projects and then also check out the website so those links would be in the show notes for you and speaking of the audience if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven't done it yet hit that subscribe or follow button this is a daily show yes you heard me right each and every day we're bringing you new content new ideas and hopefully new inspiration help you long the way on your journey as well so hit that subscribe or follow button and Rajit thanks again for coming on the show it's been a lot of fun I'll do that for sure Adam and thank you for having me in your show I look forward to staying in touch and following all the interesting stuff that you guys bring