Stop Building in Silos

I've spent well over a decade advising sovereigns, infrastructure companies, and technology firms on how they communicate what they're building and why it matters. I've also been an investor in some of these businesses. And one pattern I keep seeing is how stubbornly siloed the thinking remains.

Energy over here. Food over there. Data infrastructure in its own lane. Water desalination dealt with separately. Each with its own narrative, its own investor base, its own policy advocates. Each telling the market it's solving a critical problem. And each one is right individually. But the opportunity everyone is missing is what happens when you stop treating these as isolated solutions and start designing them as integrated systems.

The Waste Stream Is the Input

Data centres the infrastructure backbone of the AI economy that every sovereign nation is now racing to build consume enormous amounts of energy and produce enormous amounts of waste heat. That heat gets evacuated into the atmosphere. Gone. Wasted. But that waste heat is exactly what other energy-dependent processes need. Through commercially proven technologies like absorption chillers, you can convert waste heat into cooling and dehumidification capacity. One process subsidises the other.

The same logic applies across the board. Desalination plants burning natural gas produce waste heat at even higher temperatures plus CO₂ streams that can be captured and redirected. Steel mills, semiconductor manufacturing, refineries: anywhere heat is being dumped into the sky is a missed opportunity for co-location. Lets pose a question, does waste begin where imagination ends?

Companies like Abu Dhabi headquartered Pure Harvest Smart Farms have understood this instinctively. They've built climate-controlled agriculture infrastructure in one of the harshest environments on earth, proven that it works at scale, and are now exploring how co-location with data centres and desalination plants can turn waste energy into food production. Their thinking is exactly the kind of joined-up approach that sovereign planners should be demanding from every infrastructure project.

The Messaging Problem

Here's my take. Too many companies pitching for sovereign capital are still telling their story in isolation. An energy company talks about capacity. A digital infrastructure operator talking about transformation. A logistics firm talks about connectivity. Each narrative is compelling on its own terms, but are failing to connect with the bigger picture which is that nations building for the next fifty years need circular, integrated infrastructure systems, not a collection of standalone projects.

The companies that will win the next wave of capital allocation are the ones that can articulate how their solution fits into a broader system. Not just what they produce, but what their waste stream enables. Not just their own economics, but the economics of co-location. For this to happen we need a framework that links energy policy, food policy, water policy, and industrial strategy into something coherent.

This is a communications challenge as much as a design one. I've watched brilliant companies lose bids because they couldn't explain how their technology serves a national agenda beyond their own sector. And I've watched less technically impressive companies win because they understood the narrative that a decision-maker actually needs to hear.

Water Is the Catalyst Nobody's Pricing

If there's one policy shift that would accelerate all of this overnight, it's the proper valuation of water. Almost 70% of the world's fresh water is consumed by agriculture. Controlled environment farming is typically 80–95% more water efficient than traditional methods. But because water isn't priced as the scarce resource it actually is, the economic case for technology-enabled agriculture remains harder to make than it should be.

That's changing. The conversations I'm hearing particularly in the Gulf, in policy circles, among institutional investors suggest that water pricing reform is moving from theoretical to imminent. When it arrives, it won't just transform agritech. It will reshape the entire infrastructure investment thesis for arid and semi-arid regions, which is where most of the world's population growth is happening.

What's Next

I'll be exploring these themes in an upcoming podcast with Sky Kurtz, the founder of Pure Harvest Smart Farms, who has spent eight years proving that world-leading food production is possible in the harshest climates on earth. We dig into how co-location economics actually work, what policy frameworks could accelerate circular infrastructure, and why the era of building in silos has to end.

Drawing on what I've learned as an advisor across the lifecycle of industry and investment, it's become clear to me that the companies and the nations that connect these dots first will define the next generation of infrastructure. The rest, unfortunately, will lag behind. The rules of the game have changed.

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by Sean Pattwell