What To Expect From The Event & SERG Approach

This is the first dedicated national conference to explore data center license to operate across the complete development, operating and growth lifecycle.

Rather than treating community acceptance, political risk, infrastructure responsibility, power, water, disclosure and local impacts as separate conversations, the event brings them together around one question:

What does responsible, executable data center development and expansion now require — and what can the industry learn from what is already happening across the United States?

The conference has been built from more than 50 in-depth telephone conversations with developers, operators, hyperscalers, utilities, regulators and other stakeholders. Those conversations have shaped the agenda, the questions we will ask and the perspectives we are bringing together.

So, what should you expect?

Relevant, Properly Curated Content

This is not intended to be another broad data center technology conference.

There are important discussions around power, water, cooling and infrastructure, but they are considered through a different lens: how do these issues affect the ability of a project to earn approval, retain confidence, operate responsibly and continue to grow?

The agenda therefore moves between the different parts of the license-to-operate challenge rather than treating them in isolation.

We will look inside actual approval hearings to understand what gets challenged and what developers can learn from them. 

We will compare predicted impacts with what was subsequently experienced in operation. We will examine different regional approaches to power responsibility, water disclosure and community participation. And we will look at what happens when an existing facility wants to modernize, intensify or expand and the circumstances around the original approval have changed. 

The purpose is not simply to identify problems. It is to draw out what is working, what can be transferred elsewhere and where genuinely local solutions are still required.

A National Conversation With Regional Evidence

License to operate is intensely local — but many of the underlying questions are national.

That is an important part of the event.

Rather than organising the conference around a single data center market, we will use case studies and operating experience from different regions of the United States to compare approaches.

What can Texas learn from Virginia? 

What can an emerging market learn from somewhere that has already experienced significant development? What can developers learn from regulators? What can regulators learn from approaches being tested elsewhere? And what can everybody learn from the experience of people who have actually sat through difficult community hearings?

The agenda deliberately brings regional examples back together at the end to ask whether common national principles can be defined around power, water, disclosure, infrastructure responsibility and meaningful community participation — without pretending that every locality is the same. 

One Room. One Shared Conversation.

We reasonably expect this to be an event of around 100–200 people.

This is not designed as a 500–1,000-person trade show with multiple conference streams, workshops and side events taking place simultaneously.

There will be one principal conference room and one shared agenda.

When an important discussion takes place, everybody hears it. When an interesting question emerges from the audience, everybody hears the answer. And when that conversation continues over coffee or lunch, the people involved have shared the same context.

By the second day, we want the room to feel less like a collection of separate stakeholder groups and more like one informed industry conversation.

More Discussion. Less PowerPoint.

The format has also been deliberately designed to create discussion rather than simply move from presentation to presentation.

A typical major session might include three focused 20-minute contributions followed by approximately 40 minutes of moderated panel discussion and interactive audience Q&A.

That gives speakers enough time to explain their experience properly, but also leaves substantial time to compare approaches, challenge assumptions and explore the questions that emerge.

Our chairs are closely involved in the research and agenda-development process, so their role goes beyond introducing speakers and keeping time.

They know why the session exists, what the research identified as difficult and what attendees told us they want to understand. Their job is to connect perspectives, probe interesting differences and help turn several individual presentations into one useful conversation.

Solution-Led Rather Than Vendor-Led

There are no pre-organized sales meetings and the agenda is not constructed around paying sponsors.

That does not mean solution providers are excluded. Where an organization has solved a problem, implemented something interesting or has evidence that can move the discussion forward, we want that experience in the room.

The distinction is that the industry question comes first and the solution follows.

That is how SERG events are built:

Research first. Agenda second. Speakers third. Discussion and solutions follow.

What We Hope You Leave With

We hope you leave with more than presentation slides and a collection of business cards.

You should have heard how different regions are approaching the same fundamental challenges.

You should have learned directly from developers, operators, utilities and regulators — including what has worked, what has not and what they would approach differently.

You should have gained insight from real hearings, real approval processes, real operating experience and peer discussion.

And hopefully, by comparing those experiences, the room will begin to identify which principles can travel nationally and which decisions genuinely need to remain regional, municipal or site-specific.

Most importantly, we want you to leave with greater clarity about what license to operate means in practice — and better equipped to make the next development, approval, operating or expansion decision.

That is what this event is designed to deliver.