Welcome to Let's Get Digital podcast.
I'm Keri Charles, your host, and I have two guests with me today.
Both of them live in Guam, and you're going to hear a lot about why in a moment.
So I have Jim Bigley.
He is the CEO of Citadel Pacific, and Jose Santiago.
He is the senior manager of interconnection strategy for the Guam Exchange.
Gentlemen, thanks for joining me on the show today.
Thank you, Kerry.
Thank you for having us.
It's good to be here.
Yes, so I want to know how did you both land in Guam?
Jim, do you want to start?
Sure, I came out to Guam, let's see, in 1992.
It was the first time I was studying in Taiwan, living in Asia for a brief period of time and had the opportunity to come to Guam.
So I came over here in early 1992 and fell in love with the place, to be honest.
So I've been out here in Asia since then, living in Guam three different times.
So Jose, what about you?
I was actually born on a neighboring island called Saipan, still in the Marianas region.
I came out to Guam in 2011 to pursue my degree in college and found myself working in the industry and stayed ever since.
So Jim, tell me more about the group of companies, Citadel Pacific.
So we're a diversified private holding company.
Our group here in the Marianas encompasses Palau, Guam, and the...
We have a telecommunications business that is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year.
ah We do fuel distribution and energy distribution.
ah
property company and most recently the Guam Exchange which we started a few years ago.
So why, what makes Guam such a strategic location for digital infrastructure and connectivity?
So that's a good question.
has been a strategic location for the United States for well over a century.
Guam is a US territory that is in Asia.
It's the westernmost US territory of the United States.
We're three and a half hours south of Japan.
We're three to four hours uh east of Hong Kong and the Philippines.
So it really is American soil in Asia.
um Guam has been a strategic location because it is the United States in Asia.
on the other side of the dateline.
We're seven hours, once you get to Hawaii, you're still a seven hour flight away from Guam.
So we truly are in the middle of Asia.
It's been an important point for the United States for many, many years.
And most recently, because of geopolitics, Guam is becoming a very important location for digital infrastructure.
primarily because as new subsea cables are built.
connecting Singapore and from the Middle East through India through Singapore into the Asia-Pacific region, the new digital cables are being built around, uh diverting around
the South China Sea.
And when you divert around the South China Sea, you come up through Indonesia and the Philippines and you run straight into Guam.
So Guam, because of its location, is becoming a very, very important...
digital interconnection hub for the Pacific.
And then when you bring cables from Singapore around Indonesia and the Philippines up into Guam, and then Guam serves sort of as the node to then get out to Taiwan, Japan, the
United States, Hawaii, uh Australia, New Zealand, and all the South Pacific island nations across the Pacific.
So it's really about the location.
Let's back up a bit.
Tell me about the Guam Exchange.
So the Guam Exchange is a facility that we built.
uh It went live at the end of last year and it's a IX facility, neutral IX facility that we built so that we could aggregate, have a location on Guam that aggregates all of the
subsea cables and subsea cable capacity that's coming into Guam into a single location.
for edge nodes for digital interconnectivity and Jose uh built and manages the Internet exchange the IX inside of the Guam exchange that gives the Guam exchange its name.
Why is this the right time to invest or build digital infrastructure in Guam?
Now is the right time, mainly because of the subsea cable infrastructure that's coming into Guam.
We have multiple new subsea cable systems, Apricot, Echo, Bifrost, TPU.
These are all brand new subsea cable systems, deploying the latest subsea cable technology, that are all basically converging on WALM and will connect WALM to Japan,
Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia, uh multiple pathways to the United States and then out to 15 countries.
South Pacific Island countries, all coming in and out of Guam.
these new cables are designed, uh latest technology, average of about 16 terabits per fiber pair uh and multiple fiber pairs on all of these cables.
it's the time for Guam is really now because of this subsea cable infrastructure that's coming here, providing.
Hmm.
amount of redundant pathways out of Guam, tremendous amount of subsea capacity that's coming through here, and so as different hyperscalers and uh different networks that are
looking to interconnect Asia.
different locations around Asia into the United States, into Australasia.
Guam is the perfect place because you can come to one location and connect on all these different pathways and all these different systems and redundant routes to pretty much
anywhere you want to be in the Asia-Pacific region.
So how is Guam positioned in terms of geopolitical or network resiliency for multinational operators?
So it's position, well this is US soil.
So Guam operates under US laws, US security.
um And because of the different pathways that we have, if you are located in Guam, if you have a network node in Guam or a network deployment in Guam, you have redundant pathways
now.
Once all these cables are finished, which is going to be over the next...
12 to 18 months.
Many of the systems are here now and operational, but as these systems get finished, you're going to have multiple redundant pathways to key locations like Japan, Australia,
Singapore.
ah
States and other locations in Asia.
So it really is the only place in the Pacific region where you can locate your network and have these multiple redundant pathways out to all these important locations.
Are there any misconceptions that people have about Guam when it comes to its digital infrastructure potential?
I'm not sure if there are any misconceptions out there.
think right now the digital world...
are starting to look closer at Guam.
I think Guam was not thought of for many, many years as an important location.
It's been a strategic location for the United States, for the US military, ah for US geopolitics.
But then when it comes to the digital world, I think most people are now looking at the infrastructure that's being built here and the infrastructure that's being deployed
through Guam.
and starting to realize this is a very important location.
It really is, as I said, the only location where you can go in the Pacific and have a single deployment with multiple pathways to all of the most important destinations across
the Pacific.
Are there any specific industry trends that make Guam the right fit for particular workloads?
Jose, what are your thoughts on that?
of the hottest items in the market are the gaming companies, because one of the things that our geoposition provides is latency, equal distance to Asia, equal distance to
Australia, a level playing field to the US.
So all of the players that come together have all kind of a similar latency with one another, creating a level playing field.
And so that's one of the hottest items that makes Guam such a good position for the digital infrastructure.
What sets Squamix...
go ahead, Jim.
I was going to say we also have, if you've got a network that needs to access Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Taiwan, you're basically sitting in Guam and
you can have very low latency pathways, less than between 20 and 30 milliseconds to about 800 to 900 million eyeballs.
from Qual.
So it really does make it a very unique location as well for Edge node and Edge node deployment.
What sets Guam Exchange apart from other data centers in the region?
So Guam Exchange is the, we built Guam Exchange because it's the only facility on Guam that is carrier neutral, open access, carrier neutral, and aggregates as an aggregation
point for all of the different pathways and all of the different subsea connections.
ah And so that didn't exist in Guam before.
We had express traffic coming in through a limited number of submarine cables that were coming into Guam.
uh
and mainly coming in and out of the same location for express traffic and traffic through Guam.
And there hasn't been a facility that was built to aggregate access to all of the different cables, both the historical cables that have been near Guam for years, as well
as all the new cables that are being deployed.
So it really is the only location in Guam that is uh carrier neutral, open access, uh and is with a functioning uh internet exchange.
ah And the only point where you can deploy inside of the Guam exchange and access everything on an open basis.
Can you walk us through your infrastructure capabilities, racks, power, cooling, security, connectivity, compliance, et cetera?
Sure, sure, we have.
a lot, just in a short period of time.
uh
Sure.
We have, so what we're calling phase one of the Guam Exchange, which is what we've built, uh which is what we have completed now.
Phase one of the Guam Exchange is a two megawatt facility.
We have about 1.3 megawatts of IT load.
uh
It's tier three compliant.
It's built to tier three data center standards.
We have N plus one and three N two redundancy for power, diesel generators at UPS.
We have security monitoring, 24 seven security monitoring on an onsite NOC, BMS DCIM systems.
biometric CCTV safeguards.
um So it really is uh the first data center, open access data center that was built on Guam Trulite international standards and the latest colocation international standards.
Excellent.
Anything, Jose, to add?
Yeah, so on top of our security, our security is also SOC 2 certified.
About 260 racks offering, know, a jim's at 1.3 megawatts of IT load throughout those 260 racks.
Okay.
Do you offer services such as remote hands, IX peering, cloud on ramps, or managed interconnects?
Yes, so we offer all of those services that you just mentioned.
So, IXpring, course, as Jun mentioned, we operate one of the largest, or the largest IX on Guam.
uh We offer remote hands.
Being how far we are from everywhere else, remote hands is uh a key thing for lot of customers.
Did you have something to add, Jim?
ah That's Jose's world.
He's really the expert.
But yes, we have a cloud hosting capability that is actually geo-redundant uh in the CNMI.
So located in Guam, also a geo-redundant point ah in the CNMI.
ah And yes, we have remote hands, smart hands, all available 24-7 for any customer deployments that you're looking to.
facility.
Let's talk about your sister company, IT &E.
How does IT &E factor into your overall offering?
So IT &E is our telecommunications company.
They're the largest regional carrier between Guam and the CNMI.
IT &E offers fiber connections, lit circuits uh between the Guam Exchange and any of the cable landing stations or any other digital facilities on Guam and in the CNMI.
ah and IT &E is one of the providers that we work with.
So certainly our relationship with IT &E allows the Guam Exchange to bundle any of the products that any customer may need for deployment in this region.
ah But we also work with all of the other carriers that are available in the market.
So if you're working with an existing carrier already, ah
can work with that carrier but IT &E has a very robust and diverse fiber footprint across the island of Guam uh with redundant uh and protected routes to any facility on Guam, any
of the existing or future facilities on Guam we have that capacity.
So we have a very close partnership with ITV, but we also work with every other carrier that is present on the wall.
So then can customers get those end-to-end solutions between Subsea, Metro, and Edge through this particular partnership?
Yes, we've worked with a couple of customers already who wanted an end-to-end solution.
oh And so we've reached out to our subsea partners and found them end-to-end solutions, both on subsea, metro, for edge deployments.
oh It really depends on what the customer wants.
But with our partnerships with the different cable operators and capacity providers, as well as with IT &E,
and the other carriers that are located on Guam, we can provide those end-to-end solutions if that's what you need.
uh If there are some customers who have a small presence on Guam ah and are now looking to scale up their deployment because of the due.
that are coming to Guam and so they may need one or two different services.
ah It's really about figuring out what the customer needs and with our deep relationships here on Guam and in the region, we can provide those end-to-end solutions whether you're
trying to get to a specific location in Japan or you're trying to get to Taiwan or the Philippines or Indonesia or Singapore or even out to some of the more remote
Pacific Islands for whatever reason, uh we can enable that end to end.
That's not a problem for us at all.
So what does IT &E bring to enterprises or hyperscalers that's unique in the Guam context?
ah So to primarily the fiber footprint, uh we have an enterprise solutions division inside of IT &E which works with cloud migration and cloud hosting and really the whole suite of
any enterprise solutions that local industries will need.
And so bringing that expertise from IT and E, I think they really understand through our experience here what it is, what issue any customer, any enterprise customer is trying to
solve and then bringing the different tools together to solve that issue from a telecommunications, digital connection, cloud hosting uh perspective.
solutions for communications and network that someone is looking for.
IT &E has uh a deep experience with that um and so that partnership allows us to work hand-in-hand to bring those end-to-end solutions to any customer.
Okay, em let's look at the future.
How do you see Guam evolving as part of the global internet and cloud infrastructure landscape?
So I think what's happening now is you have the first, I would call it the first wave of subsea capacity that is centered in Guam, that is coming to Guam, that is going to provide
all of these very large and redundant data connections.
as those pathways are created and as those pathways are deployed into Guam, we're seeing interest of different uh companies starting to look at Guam and say, okay, maybe this is
where I should forward deploy my Edge Note.
Or this then becomes a very smart location to say maybe this should become a cloud region, not necessarily serving the local population in Guam, but a deployment that
sitting in Guam could serve Sydney, Australia.
It can serve Indonesia, Jakarta.
It can serve Taiwan.
It can serve Japan and even as far out as Singapore.
low latency high density connections it makes sense to look at Guam and we're finding more and more people looking at Guam saying this is a smart place to centralize some of my
infrastructure because you can serve multiple locations with one network deployment and
we're seeing a lot more interest come to them as these digital pathways and as these some see systems are being deployed and being interconnected.
Jose, what do you think?
What's next for the Guam Exchange?
Well, um with all of the different industries booming and coming into Guam and how things are starting to grow as we see customers rolling in the densities of rack space of the
need.
The next thing is probably going to build more data centers so we can accommodate all of this booming infrastructure and booming technologies, especially the buzzword of the year,
AI.
AI racks take up a large amount of power and capacity in a data center.
And so as this develops, we're going to see a lot more of that take up space quite literally in the data infrastructure.
Speaking of space, do you have challenges around uh finding space to build data centers there?
um The short answer to that is no.
There's enough space in Guam to build data centers.
Our limitation most recently was more of a power limitation than a space limitation.
The island of Guam has a brand new 200 megawatt base load generator coming online.
It comes online later this year.
So moving forward, power is not going to be an option.
At our Guam Exchange campus, um our phase one is the Guam Exchange that we've built now.
We have adjacent space to build up to eight megawatts more capacity in adjacent facilities that we already own and operate.
uh
And so expansion of capacity is as this industry grows and as Guam continues to become more important for caching for Edge nodes.
as Jose said, we've started to have some interest in looking at uh remote AI deployments.
ah Power is not an issue going forward and space is not an issue.
main issue on Guam is because we're so far out in the Pacific is really your build time for construction.
That's really more of the limiting factor.
But we have today about two to three billion dollars per year of construction work that's being done by the US government into Guam and its neighboring islands.
construction capacity on and capability on Guam today is higher than it's ever uh been uh because of all this infrastructure that's being built um out in this part of the world,
out in our islands.
So we don't see any limiting factors for future growth.
think Guam as a community has solved...
very well and very thoughtfully those issues of power needs and space needs oh and all of the different components that are required for us at Guam Exchange and for us at Citadel
to take advantage of what we see as many, many years of growth in this space oh and making...
digital hub that it is becoming in the Pacific and in this region.
So the future looks very bright.
It's a bright and sunny tropical island and the future for this industry looks right.
The infrastructure is in place now.
The bedrock of the infrastructure is in place now.
And so we see this being a high growth area, not just for us, but for the industry on the bomb.
That's good to hear because so many people are struggling, so many data centers are struggling with power issues and I mean and staffing issues which I wanted to talk to you
about in just a moment but before we go there are you seeing interest from specific sectors besides gaming?
Yes, we are.
um There are a number of digital commerce um companies that uh have a digital commerce platform across Asia that are looking to centralize some of their deployments in Guam.
um Trans-Pacific networks or global networks, um network operators that are enabling enterprises or large global enterprise customers to get to where they need to be.
from point A to point B to point C or wherever that is across the Pacific have to look at Guam because all of the new future trans-Pacific subsea capacity is reading through Guam.
So we're seeing a lot of interest in that space and really
any US enterprises that have a network presence in Asia or that need to establish or expand a network presence in Asia, it's making sense for them to look at Guam because you
really are deploying your network in the United States, but you're deploying it in the United States at the edge that is 20 milliseconds away or less from the key.
regional commerce centers in Asia.
So uh finance companies that are looking to host their data in a secure U.S.
uh
have expressed interest in deploying on Guam because you have US law, you have US security standards here.
ah hosting certain data sets in Guam, ah you're hosting them in the United States, but you're hosting them on the doorstep of Asia.
So there's a number of use cases that we're seeing interest in that make a lot of sense when you put these ingredients together of
US soil with tremendous amount of redundant connectivity, literally sitting in Asia.
We're just south of Japan.
uh And so there's a number of use cases that we're seeing across, it's federal and government use cases, uh private enterprise, network operators, as Jose mentioned, gaming
companies.
um We're working with a number of them that are looking to uh
to deploy a centralized network in Guam.
So there's a tremendous amount of use cases and we just see that growing as awareness of Guam starts to permeate the industry.
And we're seeing that awareness grow.
It's been growing tremendously over the last two years, mainly as uh more announcements are made about more subsea capacity coming through here.
With all this talk about growth, I can't help but think about people.
Is it challenging to find talent in Guam?
I mean, do you have any specific strategies that you use?
mean, it sounds like an absolutely amazing place.
I know I spend a lot of time in Puerto Rico and it's just, you know, again, sunshine, palm trees, beaches, weather.
It's absolutely amazing.
So I'm sure you can, you know,
use that as a benefit to get people to come to the island, right?
But what are your challenges that you face with talent?
The challenges with talent are you have a fairly small population here, a natural population of 150,000 people.
So naturally you're not going to find every bit of talent that you need locally.
ah Having said that, there is a tremendous amount of local talent.
I'll let Jose talk about his own pathway and his own journey in this space.
ah But when we do need to bring in specialized talent, oh it hasn't been too difficult to convince someone working in the United States or even someone working in the Philippines
or Japan or Korea.
m
to come out to uh a beautiful tropical island in the middle of the Pacific with beautiful ocean, beautiful beaches, and wonderful scenery.
So uh because everyone on Guam is a U.S.
uh and it is U.S., it's just as easy to move to Guam as it is from New York to California.
So long term we haven't had any unsurmountable or any unsolvable talent issues.
We've been able to build world class infrastructure out here and operate world class infrastructure out here for many,
Locally there are some great programs within the University of Guam and the industry I think has done a good job training local talent.
Most of our workforce in both ITD and Guam Exchange is local and has been developed locally.
Jose, your journey is a unique one and so maybe you can talk more about your experience out here.
Yeah, so I'm a product of the University of Guam, so I'm locally grown and grew for this industry and a lot of the attributes where I learned all of these skills are from actually
traveling uh different parts of the world to meet different mentors, meet different trainers, colleagues and learn from them and uh learn the industry from them.
And uh over the years of cultivating all that knowledge, last year the Guam Exchange actually sponsored a local network operators group where we invited all of the different
carriers, technicians, IT people to come learn about this industry.
And so we could kind of homegrown, homebrew more people who can help boost this industry and support this industry.
But the great thing about the industry that we're in is that it's all digital.
So as Jim was saying, if we ever had a problem or we needed some consulting or needed to onboard some staff, remote work or remote conversations are an easy click away.
So essentially, the talent kind of spreads beyond just the physical island of Guam.
And we can have reaches to other people in nearby regions.
So I'm sure there are people listening that are thinking, number one, how do I get a job here?
So I'd love to know more about that.
And if you do have openings, and where can we find out about those job openings?
And secondly, uh someone listening who wants to explore Guam as a digital hub, what should they do?
Reach out and contact us.
Contact me, contact Jose, GuamExchange.com uh or IX.GU or sales at Guamexchange.com.
Just reach out.
uh We respond very quickly and because it is such a unique location with so many different unique um attributes or unique use cases for the infrastructure here, we are used to
dealing with
challenges that people have um and so we're very flexible and very responsive but just reach out to us and uh if you've got an issue that can be solved then we can solve it.
I love it.
Jim, Jose, thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you, Kerry, we appreciate it.
I hope you can make it out to Guam at some point.
I would love to.
It sounds amazing, especially after this interview.
I'd love to come out and have a tour of your uh data centers and be awesome.
That would be great.
We'd love to host you.
Well, I appreciate it.
Hopefully I'll see you soon.
Take care.
Thank you.