The latest episode of The Leaders’ Room podcast season four features Peter Lantry, managing director of Equinix Ireland. This series is created in partnership with IDA Ireland.

Once again in season four of The Leaders’ Room podcast, we get to know the leaders of some of the most influential multinationals in tech, life sciences and innovation, as well as getting insights into their leadership styles and the high-tech trends they see coming down the line.

In this latest episode, we speak to Peter Lantry, managing director of Equinix Ireland, about the intersection of energy, digital infrastructure and sustainability – and about what Ireland’s digital future could look like if we get the balance right. It’s a wide-ranging and eye-opening conversation about the global data centre giant that sits at the heart of Ireland’s digital ecosystem, and about a man whose career trajectory is decidedly well-matched to the task at hand.

Equinix is the world’s leading co-location retail data centre provider – something Lantry describes, cleverly, as akin to being a “digital airport”, connecting networks, cloud platforms, content providers and enterprises across more than 280 data centres in 35 countries. It works with major players from Nvidia and AWS to Google, as well as with smaller retail clients.

In Ireland, while Equinix has been here 10 years, many of the data centres it now owns, like those of Telecity, have been operating since 1998. The Irish operations have grown significantly since, most recently with the acquisition of two BT data centres and a new Blanchardstown facility, DB7X, now under construction.

What strikes you listening to Lantry is the sheer scale of what Equinix does – more than half a million direct connections between businesses globally, and more than 90pc of all internet traffic in the world flowing through their data centres. The subsea cables that connect Ireland to the rest of the world terminate in Dublin, most of them into an Equinix data centre.

The energy and sustainability conversation is where this episode really catches the imagination. Lantry and his team are doing genuinely pioneering things at Equinix Ireland – hydrogen fuel cells already operating at one of their Dublin sites, solar canopies going in, and an innovative grid solution planned working with the IDA, EirGrid and ESB Networks.

Lantry believes Ireland has a real opportunity, with its ambition to have 22GW of renewable power connecting to the grid by 2030. The question, he says, isn’t whether Ireland can become a leading sustainability hub, but whether we have the collective will to all work together and make it happen.

His vision of data centres that can flex dynamically with the grid – stepping in to support it when needed, rather than adding to its burden – is a compelling one. If we export our data and digital services rather than our electricity, he argues, we could generate perhaps 10 times the value for the Irish economy, so it is crucial, he believes, that we get our digital infrastructure right.

Lantry’s career trajectory means it’s easy to see why Equinix came calling. Starting as a civil and structural engineer with Arup, moving into management science and then consultancy with PwC and IBM, followed by 17 formative years with EirGrid – where he was connecting data centre customers, wind farms and working on the design and implementation of the Irish single electricity market. This was followed by a spell as managing director of Hitachi Energy, where he grew their global data centre business from €350m to €750m in a single year.

It is a CV that makes you understand why his Equinix colleagues remarked, with some amusement, that he was “fairly unique” when the energy crunch hit. He brings something genuinely rare to the role – a deep, practical understanding of both utilities and digital infrastructure, earned over several decades.

On leadership, Lantry talks about Level 5 leadership, referencing James Collins’ book ‘Good to Great’ – leading by example, listening deeply, supporting others and removing the barriers that stop teams from delivering. What comes through clearly is his sense of purpose: the utility-like nature of what Equinix does, connecting everyone and everything in a sustainable way, gives the whole team something genuinely meaningful to rally behind, he says.

I found his emphasis on being fully present in every conversation particularly striking – that good leadership means making the people you are talking with feel truly heard and understood. He describes himself as something of a translator, someone who has spent a career connecting the dots between brilliant people with different expertise and different drivers. Perhaps that instinct was shaped early he says. Lantry grew up moving between countries with his parents – the Netherlands, England, France, Colombia, and back to Ireland – learning to navigate different cultures and ways of engaging. Whatever its roots, it is clearly central to how he leads today.

We’re grateful to all our interviewees again this season, for taking the time out of busy schedules to come into the studio and share their insights and their intelligence with us. And a big thanks as ever to our partners IDA Ireland who make this series possible.

The Leaders’ Room podcast is released fortnightly and can be found by searching for ‘The Leaders’ Room’ wherever you get your podcasts. For those who prefer their audio with visuals, filmed versions of the podcast interviews are all available here on SiliconRepublic.com.

Check out The Leaders’ Room podcast for in-depth insights from some of Ireland’s top leaders. Listen now on Spotify, on Apple or wherever you get your podcasts.