Name: As Demand For AI Surges, Infrastructure Needs To Adapt
Uploaded: 2024-06-20
Duration: 4 min 1 s
Description: IHS Towers CEO Sam Darwish discusses the challenges the telecom industry faces to meet the massive data requirements needed to ensure global connectivity. He emphasizes the industry-critical need for robust infrastructure to support the world's increasing demand for communication.

IHS Towers CEO Sam Darwish discusses the challenges the telecom industry faces to meet the massive data requirements needed to ensure global connectivity. He emphasizes the industry-critical need for robust infrastructure to support the world's increasing demand for communication.

As Demand For AI Surges, Infrastructure Needs To Adapt

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IHS Towers CEO Sam Darwish discusses the challenges the telecom industry faces to meet the massive data requirements needed to ensure global connectivity.

Telecom industry is heading one way. I mean, if you look at basic examples, artificial intelligence is just going to take us to the next level in terms of data consumption. Apple just came with Division Pro which basically is aware of it. Now at the moment, it's still bulky, it's still not utilize, it's not going to be adopted. But this is a pro time for a pair of glasses that can have your phone that can have your computer that can basically allow you to interact with people. So that's where we're going and and because we're going there, the data requirements are going to be matter. So our industry is just going to growth after growth after growth is the company that I founded 25 years ago and currently run is one of the largest digital infrastructure platforms in the world. We operate across 10 markets covering 800 million people. Our markets are largely emerging markets, young market, fast growing markets. We own roughly 40,000 towers across those markets and tens of thousands of kilometers of fiber that covers roughly 8 million in home and we provide connectivity to our customers. Our industry has several challenges. But the biggest I would say is somehow positive, negative because of the fast growth, fast growing nature of our industry. Everyone wants to consume more data. You have more people that are being bored, more people that are moving into the connectivity age, which is changing by the day, my daughter who is seven now wants a phone. Our Children are starting to kind of like a adopt the phones and and when you talk emerging market, it's not only about the initial cost, which again is large, we're talking about the operating conditions. The operating cost is also large because we have challenges. Security is a problem. Power is a problem. Governance is a is a problem. So you kind of like layer up all all these challenges. So I would say funding and how do you organize the funding would be the biggest challenges. But there are ways around that at the basic layer, our business model is inherently sustainable. We provide shared infrastructure, effectively splitting the cost of building, splitting the cost of running. And of course, kind of like minimizing the harm done to the damage to the environment through that. But there are of course other layers because most of our markets do not have electricity, we need to provide power to the site. Thus, diesel is largely what you use. So we've been over the years spending hundreds of millions of dollars probably in the billions of dollars to try and minimize the impact of what diesel does into the environment leading with purpose definitely requires a different type of skill set in the sense that you still need the traditional skill set of being able to manage balance sheets, manage PNN manage investors, manage that aspect of life, manage the operation itself. But you have to be ethical at the core. You have, you have to be, you have to be mindful of the impact of whatever you're doing on the environment. Again, on your employees, on the countries that you operate in ethics is at the core of it. That's kind of like the mindset shift that you need to undertake. When you're, when you're leading with purpose, communicating your purpose to your employees is actually two ways. You need to listen and then you need to talk to them. You need to listen in the sense of what is important to them, especially that they belong to certain markets, especially that they, they, they, they, they do certain tasks. You need to understand their pain points, you need to understand the aspirations. You need to kind of help gather their points of view. And then at the end of the day, you filter everything, you put it together and then you communicate it back. But because it's somehow coming from there or it has, and their input was taken into account, it resonates and then the communication becomes easy and becomes more technical