Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this Thema dedicated to innovation for environmental security. Thank you for joining us remotely through the live stream or right here in this amazing space in the Outernet in London. We are together for two hours to explore Veolia's historic commitment and continuing investment in innovation with a purpose to secure critical resources for communities, for cities, for industries, to future-proof the business, as you'll see, and we'll also hear how this is benefiting partners and clients. The agenda very quickly. First, Group CEO Estelle Brachlianoff will take the floor, followed by Deputy CEO in charge of Finance, Emmanuelle Ménard. We'll have a roundtable with senior leaders across Veolia's water, digital, and growth activities, alongside a senior representative for AWS to bring us a client perspective. Finally, of course, we are going to open to the room to all of you following online for a Q&A session with all the speakers. Now, before we begin, just a quick note for those of you who are here in person. As usual, we have given you some booklets with all the slides and all the key figures, so you can refresh your memory after the presentation. I'd like to warmly encourage you to keep those booklets for after the presentation and to take full advantage of the immersive experience that we have created for you here today. That's it. Let's get started. [Presentation] [Presentation] Please welcome Veolia CEO Estelle Brachlianoff. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to the Outernet. Just look around you. This is a place that was built in March 2020 during the London lockdown, right here at the heart of the city. Some dared to ask, what if? What if people came back for something bolder? A place that's open, alive, deeply human. A place that constantly reinvents itself. That same question has driven us for 170 years. What if we could secure water from diseases? Turn waste into new resources? Not only capture CO2, but also reuse it. Every what if became a solution, and every solution, a proprietary technology or know-how. We're not just an environmental services company, we are the innovation powerhouse for critical needs. The R&D engine for the invisible systems that keep civilization running. While some innovate for needs you didn't even know you had, we innovate to secure what communities cannot live without, water, energy, critical minerals, the resources essential for prosperity, health, and well-being. When we planned this event, we knew the world was changing, but it's fair to say we didn't know how fast. Before I go any further, I need to pause, because what I'm about to describe isn't theoretical. Our people are living this reality every single day. In Africa, in Ukraine, in the Middle East, where up to 95% of water depends on desalination plants, in every conflict zone, keeping entire communities alive with water, sanitation, and energy, their work reminds us every day that environmental security is not a concept, it is a reality. What's happening is part of something bigger, a full geopolitical and technological reset. Water has erupted as a center of conflict in the Middle East, as strategic as oil, if not more. Energy is weaponized through the Strait of Hormuz. China has restricted export of rare earth minerals, essential for batteries, electronics, different systems. Climate change accelerates droughts, floods, more extreme events, new contaminants. 9 million people die annually from pollution. Everything is connected. Resources are no longer a given. They have become a competitive advantage, a matter of independence, geopolitical power, and ultimately, a condition for life itself and prosperity of communities. This is environmental security. Securing available, affordable, reliable resources. Inventing proprietary solutions for critical needs. Delivering competitiveness for industries, resilient cities, healthy communities. Our solution address those three critical challenges. Securing our critical resources, starting with water. Circular economy, finding local resources into waste, reducing therefore dependency on distant supply chains. Pollution treatments, protecting health and securing license to operate. Innovation has been in our DNA for 170 years. Science and challenge evolve, and we evolve with them. Picture this. Paris, 1853. Cholera has devastated the city a few years before. Thousands died, and the risk remains. Engineers were challenged by contaminated water infecting resources, and they asked, "What if we connected to people only clean water sources?" They created the Compagnie Générale des Eaux to pump and deliver clean water, eradicating the epidemic. Since then, we've never stopped anticipating. We find solutions, then we keep searching for the next frontier. Take plastics. Almost 10 years to master food-grade recycling at the highest quality. The new frontier? Wind turbine blades, solar panels, new high-performance recycled compounds. Water pollution? We started by treating biological contamination then. Over the last decade, we learned to treat PFAS, microplastics. The new frontier? Pesticide metabolites. Energy. We know how to reduce consumption for industries and buildings. The new frontier? Capturing, but also utilizing CO2. A true environmental security powerhouse. The world's leading innovation force for critical needs. Today, Veolia operates in 44 countries across five continents. That global footprints, it's about learning and scaling up. Every challenge we face in one place teaches us something we applies everywhere else. Take PFAS. Australia, early 2000s. Near military bases, we started developing solutions. The U.S. regulated PFAS. We were ready. Now we are scaling up. Now Europe is waking up, and once again, we are ready. We don't wait for problems to occur. When a problem occurs, there is a good chance we've already solved them somewhere else. Here's something else that makes us unique. Over 170 years, we've captured know-how embedded in data. Today, this data is the next generation of resources, almost as precious as the natural resources we manage. This is quality data, long-term data, real operation data from tens of thousands of sites operated in 44 countries across decades. When a new crisis hits, we don't start from zero. We have the records and the pattern which help us learn quick and find the right solutions. That's a key strategic advantage. This has allowed us to develop world firsts. Barcelona, reusing cold from LNG terminals to power industrial freezers. Australia, recycling water almost infinitely for a lithium mine, enabling them to double its capacity. Take Japan, recovering lithium residues from battery factories. Oman, the world's first desalination plant powered entirely by renewable energy. The Pudong district in Shanghai, China, the largest water PPP featuring AI that allows plants to self-optimize in real time. Port Arthur in the U.S., a high-temperature incineration, destroying up to 99.9999% of PFAS. We're not just operators. We are the innovation lab for essential services. This environmental security powerhouse rests on three goals, three outcomes we target when we innovate. First, keep essential services running no matter what. Second, protecting health. Third, securing industries licensed to operate. We apply this innovation firepower across our entire portfolio. In our boosters, with the Water Technologies, Hazardous Waste, Bioenergy, we push the frontier. We perfect emerging technologies, develop tomorrow's offer. Also in our strongholds, water operations, solid waste, district heating. Because innovation is what keeps us competitive. It's what makes our service more resilient, more efficient, more affordable. Both fuel growth through revenue for today and tomorrow and the day after tomorrow through efficiency and competitiveness. How do we do all this? How do we stay ahead? It starts with scale. Sorry, I was dragged a bit into this small brain. I have always a small vibration when I see this. We are a Fortune 500 company with global reach. That scale allows us to invest in R&D, in patents, in pilots, in attracting the best expert from around the world or partnering with local ecosystem and universities, investing in startups. During our GreenUp plan, we will have dedicated EUR 1 billion to innovation. This is a significant step up to drive growth today and build it for tomorrow. Our portfolio has grown to over 4,600 patents, positioning us as a European leader in patent registration for Water Technology alone, for instance. We have 26 research and innovation labs on five continents, and we will soon open a new lab in Singapore dedicated to ultrapure water for the semiconductor industry. This makes us the world's largest private R&D force for environmental security technologies. Scale gives us reach, but our decentralized model when it comes to delivery allows us customer proximity and gives us impact. We operate close to the ground, close to local innovation hubs, which helps us adapt our solution fast. Add to that our unique ability to combine water, energy, waste, creating proprietary solutions no one else can replicate. Global scale, local roots, unique combination, that is our winning formula. At Veolia, every innovation delivers real impact, and the potential is just massive. What if we deployed all the solution already invented at a larger scale? We could save 34 billion cubic meters of fresh water, London water for 200 years. At European scale, we could recover 4 million tons of critical materials, that is 25% of Europe's needs secured locally. We could unlock 400 GW of unused local energy, a country of 50 million inhabitants powered sustainably and avoiding imports. We could help prevent part of the 9 million deaths from pollution worldwide. For the future, let's scale up for the maximum impact. You hear it everywhere. The AI industry's revolution. Data centers and microchips factories rising across continent at double-digit growth rates, new possibilities, and very soon, a matter of strategic sovereignty for nations worldwide. Alongside the excitement, rising fear and resistance, because this technological breakthrough rests on something fundamental, resources, water, energy, critical minerals, but also land. These communities where those facilities are built, in a world where resources are already scarce, they're starting to see them as a threat. Competition for water, strain on energy grids, and we're seeing the consequences. In 2025 alone, $156 billion worth of data centers project was stopped in the United States. We are seeing the same pattern emerging in Europe, permit refusals, moratoriums. This revolution is part of our reality today and for the years to come. At Veolia, we have the capacity to help do it better. The key here is to help the AI and microelectronics supply chain completely rethink or redesign how they use resources. The good news is we already have many solutions they need. For data centers and chip factories, our innovation give us three unique capabilities. Unique proprietary technologies from Water Tech, like the capacity to produce ultrapure water to the chips manufacturers. Chips are currently 50,000 times smaller than a human hair. You can therefore imagine in that case what ultrapure means. It's at the molecule level. An installed asset from Hazardous Waste base, like high-temperature incinerator operating at industrial scales at more than 1,100 °C. Also the capacity to bridge with local communities for water access and recovering waste heat to provide heating to communities. I must say, I'm super happy to announce that today we are launching our new offer, Data Center Resource 360, the turnkey solution that can transform data centers from resource consumers into potential resource contributors. Take energy. Every data center generates massive amount of heat. Most of it is wasted. Thanks to our solution, we capture it and turn into heating for entire neighborhoods, up to 20% energy reuse efficiency, moving therefore towards carbon-neutral operations. Take the cooling water. Instead of just consuming it, we treat it, reuse it, and replenish it, and can reduce water footprint by up to 75%. Take waste, electronic waste, cooling chemicals. We're recovering up to 95% of it, turn it back into new resources. This isn't just three separate contracts, it's one integrated system across all our businesses working together to make data centers more sustainable. What really makes it work is that it's designed to earn the license to operate from the communities that host these facilities. Today, I'm excited to announce that we've signed a very promising partnership with the data center developer SDC. This is just the beginning. We are also developing initiatives with all the major hyperscalers, including AWS, and Will Hughes will share more about our collaboration in the panel discussion shortly. In the meantime, here is Data Center Resource 360 in a nutshell. [Presentation] [Presentation] Now let's move to semiconductors. Because if data centers are demanding, chips manufacturing, I must say, is on another level. A single large fab uses 20 million-38 million liters of water per day. Chemicals, 30,000-50,000 tons per year. The industry is growing at more than 20% annually. We are accelerating development with Micron, TSMC, Intel, our global clients, through Water Technologies and Hazardous Waste. Take Micron in Boise, Idaho. We use our regulated municipal water expertise to secure water access with the city. Deployed Water Tech for ultrapure water and Hazardous Waste for chemical management. This is typical of Veolia's winning formula. Once again, we anticipated and are investing. Arizona 2025, Chemours acquisition for sulfuric acid reuse. Taiwan and the U.K., new solvent regeneration plants commissioning now. Our incoming Clean Earth acquisition, which will give us reach across all 50 states in the U.S., including a stronger presence in the western part of the country. SarTec, our 30% stake in this Taiwan pioneer with a game-changing technology that regenerates spent sulfuric acid to ultra-high purity for 2-3nm chips. Singapore 2027, our first clean room opening with our electrodeionization technology, filtering to less than one part per trillion sodium ions. Just last week, a new partnership I'm very proud of with the Berkeley Spin-off, founded by researchers who won the Nobel Prize last year, an advanced treatment technology that will redefine what's possible. In 2022, our revenue coming from AI industries, data centers, and chips factories were EUR 410 million. Today in 2025, we've reached EUR 560 million. By 2030, we are targeting EUR 1 billion. That's doubling our business. Our innovations, unique offers, and investment underway give me real confidence about reaching this ambitious target in one of the most critical sectors today. Now we've talked about water and energy. This revolution also depends on another resource battle, which is critical minerals. The geopolitical reality is dark. Congo controls 64% of cobalt. Chile 44% of lithium. China dominates with 70% of all critical minerals refining. Meanwhile, Europe produces less than 10% of its copper and 1% of its lithium. This is where circular economy and recycling become strategic factors of autonomy, independence, and sovereignty. At European scale, that can secure locally 25% of Europe needs. How do we do? Our Hazardous Waste recycling plant near Metz in France uses a hydrometallurgical technology to extract lithium, cobalt, nickel, copper from used electric batteries at 99% purity level, turning waste into a strategic resource. For plastic, we've pioneered PET food-grade recycling since 2005. Even more difficult, this year we're opening a closed-loop tray-to-tray facility in the U.K., every plastic package you see in the supermarkets. With PlastiLoop, we create unique plastic recipes for any industrial needs. It could be car bumpers, vacuum cleaners, dashboard component packaging, 75% less CO2 than virgin plastic. This is circularity at industrial scale, turning dependency into autonomy. When you look at who we are partnering with, Micron, TSMC, SK hynix, Intel, SDC, AWS, Samsung, STMicroelectronics, these are the companies building the AI revolution, and they're choosing Veolia because we are not just a supplier, but more so a partner, a partner that transforms resource challenges into opportunities, a partner that turns communities' resistance into acceptance, because the future of AI industries depends on environmental security. You will see how we are approaching this from both sides, serving AI industry while also using it to make our own services more efficient and sustainable. Emmanuelle will elaborate about that. Emmanuelle, the floor is yours. Thank you, Estelle. Good morning, everyone. You've just seen the innovation that open new markets. World-first technologies we have invested in, build over the past years to answer our most critical need of our client. As Estelle start to explain, innovation at Veolia does not stop there. There is another kind, one that's just as critical, one that make essential services better, smarter, more efficient every single day. Think about it. This morning, you turn on your tap, water flowed, and you didn't think twice about it. Behind that simple gesture, there are decades and decades of innovation, sensor monitoring quality in real time, AI optimizing treatment processes, network designed to never fail, and technology making water affordable for millions of people. That's the innovation I want to talk about today, the kind that help us keep 110 million people supplied with water, that heat 7 million home, and that treat waste for entire cities. Inventing new market matters, but perfecting what we already do, that's what keep societies running, what make essential services affordable, and that's what drive growth in our core operations. Three imperatives. Business continuity, essential services that never fail. Second, health, protection from threat people can't see, and competitive business. Differentiating solution at scale affordable for everyone. Business continuity. I will start with water. Water security is becoming the defining challenge of our time. Today, 3 billion people live in area facing water stress. By 2050, this could reach 5 billion. It's not a future stress, it's already happening. We have invested and innovate to secure water with multiple approach. Reducing leaks, reusing wastewater, making desalination affordable. Reducing leaks. In the U.S., water network lose up to 50% to leaks. We are bringing that down to 10%, using sensor and AI that detects leaks in real time and prioritize repair for maximum impact. Reusing wastewater. Over 2,000 references worldwide with a portfolio of proprietary technology that help recycle wastewater to drinking quality in Namibia, in France, in Spain, and each tailored to local needs and regulations. Making desalination affordable, we have cut consumption by 80%, making seawater drinkable for more or less than EUR 0.50 per cubic meters. All proprietary solution that give us a decisive competitive edge. Continuity also means resilience to crisis. We have built the capacity to respond fast. We operate the world largest fleet of mobile treatment unit across EMEA and the U.S. More than 2,000 units ready to answer in few hours all urgent situations. Water reuse, desalination, sludge treatment. We are the world leader of mobile water solution, with revenue around EUR 500 million, an average EBITDA of 25%, and we expect that business to grow around 10% per year on average. We are not just operating infrastructure, we are securing it. Which bring me to our second imperative, because continuity mean nothing if the water flowing isn't safe to drink, health protections. Across every country, every political fraction, every social class, 97% of the people put health first. It's the one thing that everyone agrees on. Back in the 19th century, it's been decontaminating water from bacterias. Today, it mean removing the smallest and the most toxic contaminant like PFAS. PFAS, it's a great example how an innovation goes from R&D lab to a package offer to profitable growth for the Group. It follow the typical Veolia methods, anticipate, find solutions, deploy at the lowest cost for everyone, and combine our businesses using our global presence to scale. Today, what make beyond PFAS absolutely unique is that it's a complete end-to-end solution. Mobile lab for measurement, extraction and removal technology for concentration, and 99.99% destruction at 1,150 degrees, approved by EPA and The Pentagon, the regulators. We combine water operation, Water Technologies, and Hazardous Waste. Three businesses and one integrated solution. Nobody else can do this. There are new developments. Last week we partnered with Berkeley Spin-off to go one step further on ultra-short chain PFAS. At the end, the results speak for themselves, 25% growth in 2025. We are targeting EUR 1 billion in 2030 through acquisition like Clean Earth in the U.S. or Enviropacific in Australia, plus organic growth driven by supportive regulation in the U.S., in Europe, in Australia. What is ahead of us? Endocrine disruptors, we have already done full-scale test on site. Microplastic, we demonstrate 99.9% microplastic elimination in wastewater thanks to partnership with Aalborg University and LESU laboratory. Each generation of contaminants gets smaller, it's harder to detect, harder to treat, and each time the technology become more sophisticated, more proprietary, deepening our competitive edge. Sophisticated technology mean nothing if it's too expensive to run, which bring me to our third imperative, competitiveness. AI and digital innovation will be the cornerstone of our next efficiency plan. Our approach to digital is global, shared across all function and operational directions with the strong involvement of HR to ensure that everyone benefits from AI. First, our employees, everything start with them. At every level of the company, we bring them along, empowering and upskilling them. Secondly, our assets, with efficiency is being enhanced by new digital solutions. Third, our customers, they benefit from new range of services as well as affordable tariffs. We are already seeing the impact. The digital share of efficiency rose from 10% of operational gains in 2023 to 23% in 2025. Water contributes the most. It represents more than 50% efficiency gains. Digitalization of meters boosted by AI increase bills collection and reduce network leaks. Energy contributes to more than 25%. In Waste business, our in-house softwares optimize waste collection routes and increase sorting error detections. At Veolia, we have not wait for Gen AI to start the digital transformation of our operation. For more than 20 years, we have worked successfully at scaling up our asset efficiency through digital improvement. Let me give you one concrete example. In China, at Shanghai Pudong, our advanced algorithm can anticipate consumption several days a week ahead, enabling optimized pumping and energy consumption, as well as world-class network efficiency. As you can guess, it does not stop there. Let me tell you about the transformation going on at Veolia, leveraging the power of Gen AI to become the first player to revolutionize resource efficiency management. As mentioned, the involvement of all Veolia employees is at the centers of our digital transformation. We are bringing them on board. Our internal platform, Veolia Secure GPT, is the first Gen AI corporate platform in France and already reach 90,000 daily users. We have already over 2,000 in-house agents to optimize functional processes, payroll, accounting, billings. The highest potential lies in the deep transformation of our operational processes. The way we manage our plant, our fleet, our maintenance, the way we sell our electricity, our heat, our recyclates. How will we manage that? Gen AI is fed with data. We have by far the largest available data bank of all the businesses we operate. This make already Veolia unique. Now imagine Gen AI powered by the largest environmental data bank, analyzing all the input and output parameters of our plants, communicating in a natural language with on-site technicians, suggesting in real-time optimization to drive them to their peak performance. It's the alliance of AI-boosted algorithm with on-site experienced workers. What I just described, this is Talk to My Plant. Nine use cases of Talk to My Plant are already being developed with very strong proof of value for each of them. For example, to increase energy generation at our waste energy plants. In water, optimize maintenance programs through predictive, and we are targeting 30% of our plants maintenance technician equipped within two years. Early results are promising. Time saved in finding sources of breakdown, higher availability rates, more water delivered. Ultimately, digital AI robotics at Veolia are already an operational reality, and it will be even more so tomorrow. We have a major ambition by 2030, delivering 50% of our operational efficiency through AI and digital solution. We optimize our operation and secure for the years to come, a long-lasting business model that deliver value through efficiency for our clients, our shareholders, and the planet. As I am talking to you, use case are being developed, team are being trained, and value is being delivered. Thank you. Thank you so much, Emmanuelle. Thank you, Estelle. From a strategy and operational efficiency to real-world applications, let's see what this innovation looks like specifically in today's fastest-growing sectors, data centers and advanced microelectronics. Please welcome our panel of experts. I'm going to call on stage Glenn Vicevic, CTO for Water Technologies at Veolia. Stuart Stock, Head of Digital Business & Technology at Veolia. Will Hughes, Global Lead for Water Sustainability at Amazon Web Services. Richard Kirkman, CEO Northern Europe Zone and Chief Growth Officer at Veolia. Welcome, gentlemen. My first question is going to be for you, Richard. Now, as you position yourselves at Veolia as the security partner for your clients, how is Veolia addressing the challenges that are caused by this growing demand for data centers and microelectronics? How are you turning these into growth opportunities through sustainable solutions? Well, Ellie, I think for this mega opportunity, what we're very focused on is what our customers need, what their projects need on the ground, and at the pace that they need them. It's a GBP 25 billion sector in the U.K., and it's powered by algorithms, but it's fueled by the available space, the available water, the available electricity. If that's going to treble in the next few years, we simply can't have the resources required trebling at the same time. We have to conserve them because there simply aren't enough. Our estimates say that around 50% of the cost base of AI infra is coming from the water and the power consumption. Having innovation deliver that resource efficiency is critical. You asked me how we're enabling it, and to answer your question, we think the enabling pathway is to use our technology to make it relatable to local populations. You've heard about our Hazardous Waste technology for PFAS, our ultrapure water, the way we can turn heat into cooling, the novel sources of power and energy, but they're all framed in the sense of a circular economy, a low footprint, a net zero application, and that makes it relatable to local communities where they operate. I think that's probably our core offering. Thank you so much, Richard. Let's hear directly from a city official who is navigating these very tensions with the support of Veolia. It's in Belgium. Have a look. We had a client testimony, and I'm now going to turn to Will Hughes. How do you approach, well, the issues of the scarcity of resources? What measures have you implemented to make your infrastructures more resilient and perhaps to reduce this energy consumption and water footprint in your data centers? Sure. Good morning, everybody, and thanks to Veolia for having us here at this event today. At AWS, we're working to operate in a resilient and sustainable manner across all of our data center operations. On the energy side, we have goals to be net zero carbon by 2040. We set a goal to be powered by 100% renewable energy by 2030, a goal that we met seven years early, and we're continuing to invest in carbon-free energy projects with over 700 of those to date. On the water side, which is the area where I focus, we have a goal to return more water to communities than we use in our data center operations, and there are three key ways that we're doing that. Broadly, we call them reduce, reuse, and replenish. On the reduce side, that's all about efficiency. We want to withdraw as little water from communities and from the environment as possible, and we've been innovating constantly over the past number of years to minimize that water use. We've improved our water efficiency by 40% over the past several years, really trying to decouple that growth in data center footprint from the growth in water use. Our water efficiency is about 82% better than the industry average. We've been succeeding in that, but we're still working to continue to improve efficiency. On the reuse side, this is really about what types of water are we bringing in for cooling our data centers. Wherever possible, we don't want to use potable water for cooling. We're focused on, as much as possible, switching to recycled water, which is treated sewage. It's not competitive with a community's water supply. We'll have in the next couple of years over 120 of our data centers around the world using recycled water instead of cooling water. We're making huge investments in public water infrastructure to enable that. Over $1 billion of investment to date in recycled water infrastructure. That helps to supply, of course, our data centers with non-potable water, but it also helps to build a more resilient water supply for that community, because communities still make wastewater even in a drought. We're investing, yes, to supply our data centers, but also in ways that build resilience within the community. After we've maximized in those first two areas, efficiency and reuse of water, then we focus on replenishment. These are projects that we fund within communities and within watersheds to help support water resources in that place. In India and Indonesia, we've done a lot of work to expand water and sanitation access. In really drought-prone places, we've focused on improving the availability of water by, for example, providing technology to farmers that helps them optimize irrigation and avoid overwatering. We're also funding projects focused on water quality. For example, here in the Thames River Basin, we've worked with the Rivers Trust and are continuing to work with them, a local NGO, to build wetlands and restore floodplains in ways that improve water quality in the Thames River. All of that together, those are the ways that we're helping to ensure that community water resources are better off from our operations in that community than they were before we were there. Thank you, Will. What I'm hearing is that you're already doing quite a bit for water reuse, replenishment, availability. What do you expect from a partner like Veolia? What can they do for you? I think there are a number of potential intersection points. The one that really rises to the top for me immediately is on this water recycling question. We're really good at operating data centers. We are, for the most part, not water treatment or wastewater treatment operators. We have some really complementary skill sets here with Veolia that can help us expand our ability to use recycled instead of potable water for data center cooling. One example of that is a project that we're just beginning right now around our new data center campus in Mississippi in the U.S. There, one of our campuses is going to be switching entirely to recycled water in 2027. Now, the public infrastructure, the wastewater treatment is not to the point where we can use that directly in data center cooling today. We're working with Veolia to further treat that wastewater so it's safe to use in our data centers. We're actually piping that water from the treatment plant over to our facility, and we're doing a Water-as-a-Service approach with Veolia, where we don't have to worry about the treatment and the buildings. We are buying the water from Veolia, and they're doing all of the O&M of this facility to treat the water to where it needs to be. Now, one interesting thing about this is that we're actually putting the treatment that we're building just outside of the data center fence line so that it can potentially, in the future, be an asset for other potential users of wastewater and recycled water in that community. That currently it will be serving us, but there's a potential for others to tap into it in the future. And so that's the way I think one of the ways that we can work together to not only supply water to data centers, but also think about how we do it in a manner that helps support long-term water resilience for the community. Thank you so much, Will. Thanks to you. We've just heard. This was the perspective of a major industry player. Earlier on, we heard from a city. I'm going to turn back to you, Richard. What does Veolia bring to the table to meet both these needs? Since it's the theme of the day, how is innovation helping you anticipate what's coming next? Well, I think we've got the experience of not only developing new technology to address the technical needs, but also that deployment magic. I think that's often where the projects fall down and dreams fall apart. Our mantra is to get the solution on the ground, running quicker, on time, and affordably. That's what's important for us. We find innovation, I think, from what works. Of course, we've got deep research. We've got research institutes and labs, and patents, and open innovation funds, and developers and pilots. When a client like Will Hughes comes to us and says we need to deliver something, it needs to happen and it needs to be robust and always on. I think we look there to three key things. First of all, cross-fertilization. Can we find another sector where we've deployed a solution already and it's working, and we can adapt it for Will's business? It might be ultrapure water that we've delivered in defense or healthcare, and we adapt that for a data center. Secondly, we rely on the combination effect of water, waste, and energy. We put those three things together. We've very successfully deployed that in the food sector where we take food waste, we turn them into energy, we clean water, it's a circular approach, and we can use those combined effects as you've seen in our Data 360 offer. Finally, we've got a kind of what I'd call a scaling effect, and that's where our amazing CIO, he collects all the information from our thousands of water treatment plants, all operating in slightly different conditions, slightly different circumstances, but all that data comes together and gives us a unique insight which we can apply to a new area. Cross-fertilizing, combinations, and the scaling effect come together to deliver something really special. Thank you so much, Richard. Glenn, let's bring you into the conversation. Give us the point of view of Water Tech. How do you serve your clients' needs? Veolia is very well-positioned to take on this challenge because we have extensive experience in industry and municipalities, and we understand the opportunities and the limitations. If you think about it, the resources that are needed today include infrastructure, and we have a deep understanding of how to improve infrastructure. We are specialists at finding innovative solutions to squeeze more capacity out of existing infrastructure. We can do that by simply operating the facility in a better way, or we can apply our suite of technologies. For instance, we have a suite of wastewater intensification technologies that can turbocharge an asset to significantly improve the production out of it. We could deploy our ZeeWeed hollow fiber ultrafiltration membranes. We could install it in a conventional municipal wastewater plant and transform that facility into a water reuse factory. Really what we're doing is we're offering our customers options to deal with the needs of today and plan for the future. Maybe even more to the point, we have a deep understanding of what our customers actually do with these resources. We're here speaking about semiconductors and microelectronics, and over the last 30 years in Veolia, we have designed and supplied almost 400 full-scale ultrapure water facilities for our customers. I kind of look at us as a bridge between the needs and resources of today and the opportunities of the future. Thank you, Glenn. Stuart, I'm going to turn to you, and now with a very direct question. AI is often framed as part of the problem. We know that it drives up energy and water consumption. Is Veolia's use of AI different? If so, how? What makes your approach stand out? Well, Elli, since 2017, Veolia has been a pioneer in the cloud, providing services to our operations. We've had to provide reliable and resilient solutions for those operations to continue. Emmanuelle talked earlier about Talk to My Plant. This is an important proprietary software that Veolia has, where we have an inner source model with the zones in the BUs, so they can contribute to the innovation and the development on that platform. In terms of Talk to My Plant, clearly it focuses on operations. Because we are helping to reduce waste, water, and energy, that naturally offsets the carbon footprint that we use in terms of generative AI. From a responsible AI point of view, we have a governance model on a global scale that focuses and makes sure we prioritize the right projects based on the value that they derive. We also orchestrate from a group level to ensure that there's no duplication of effort between the zones and the BUs. In terms of training, by the end of next year, we want to have trained every single Veolia employee on AI so they know when to use the models and when not to. We don't want them to use LLM for something that a Google search can simply do. In terms of proprietary software, there's a middleware piece in the middle where it looks at the prompts that are being generated by the users and selects the most appropriate large language model as well. Finally, we're not really training any models ourself. We use knowledge bases that sit under the large language models, and naturally, that means we use less resources as well. Finally, sorry, I'd like to say, we take a very human-centric approach to what we do. There's two modes that we have at the moment. We have a normal mode, where the responses that are generated and give the answer to the end user. We have a training mode, where the end user asks or writes a prompt, but the generative AI talks through a series of questions to give them the answer so they don't use that cognitive ability. Thank you so much, Stuart. Glenn, we've spoken a lot about quantity up until now, but water quality is also a hidden constraint, particularly in semiconductor manufacturing, where, as you probably know, ultrapure water is absolutely essential. What innovations can realistically reduce dependency on high-quality fresh water? Well, the semiconductor industry is clearly pushing the boundaries of the 2nm -5nm tech node and even has ambitious goals to reach angstrom levels. What's clear is that if we're going to enable this technology, we have to improve the quality of our already very clean, ultrapure water. This is a real challenge for us. We've adopted something we call the PPQ mindset, PPQ meaning part per quadrillion. It's our call to improve what we already have to serve the industry, and also to develop new technologies. A real-world example is our electrodeionization systems that are found in many ultrapure water facilities to deal with ionic contamination. We recently released our newest product, based on the principle of PPQ, to improve it. It's called our E-Cell ME5 Pico, and it can deliver contamination levels lower than one part per trillion of ionic contaminants. Now, that is impressive, but it's also not good enough. That's why earlier, Estelle announced that we're developing a microelectronics innovation center in Singapore, and this will be an R&D laboratory, an associated clean room, and all of the unit operations that you find in a UPW plant. The point of this center is not just to develop these solutions and improve them, but as an area for collaboration with our customers, with other partners in the field who are providing the solutions. We really think that if we're going to deliver the solutions of tomorrow, we should do it together. You think about it. Releasing new microchips every 18 months, we have our work cut out for us, and we're ready and excited to be on this journey. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you so much. Will, we saw earlier that AWS and Veolia are collaborating on water reuse for data centers. I know that globally AWS is also doing water replenishment initiatives. Do you have any plans to expand on this? What role could partners like Veolia play in this expansion? Right. Again, replenishment are those projects that we're funding within the community and within the watersheds to help support water resources outside of our direct operations. To date, we've announced about over 45 replenishment projects that are collectively restoring 18 billion liters of water to communities with a lot more in development. Increasingly, and I think one of the most exciting ways that we're doing these projects are working directly with the utilities that are supplying us with water to find ways that we can help them operate more sustainably and more reliably. One example of that is by providing them with technology that helps them reduce non-revenue water. For example, in Mexico City, we don't have data centers there, but we still saw it as an opportunity to help address, given the major water constraints in Mexico City. Over 20 million people there, they've been on the verge of Day Zero, where they could potentially shut off the water system for the whole city because of scarcity, and they lose 40% of their water to leaks. We've worked with them to deploy technology that helps them optimize pressure, identify and repair leaks, and we're already saving billions of liters of water there, and we're working to expand that further. That's the type of thing that we want to replicate around the world, both in places where we operate data centers and where we don't. I think Veolia could potentially be a great partner on that. They have relationships with these water utilities. They know what those needs are. We're not coming in and telling a water utility what they should do. They know those systems. We're always trying to find the project that is going to help respond to what that community really needs on water. Having partners that can help deliver those solutions and that know those utilities is a great way to accelerate progress in building out this replenishment portfolio. Really, the goal here is not just to fund projects to meet our water positive goal, to return more water to communities, it's also to really help identify and elevate those key innovations that are going to help solve the world's water challenges more broadly. The types of technologies and solutions that Veolia and our other tech partners bring are a big way that we're helping to accelerate the uptake of these innovations that are critical to solving water challenges. Thank you so much, Will. Richard, one last question to close this panel. I think we can see clearly that we're living through a major technological geopolitical reset. What is Veolia's role in this new world, and what gives you confidence that innovation will be part of the answer? Look, as you say, I think we all do acknowledge we're at a pretty special moment in history with the technological acceleration. We've never seen that before at that pace. We've got the geopolitical situation and, at the same time, a bit of a resource crunch. There aren't enough resources to fuel that unless we do something differently. Veolia, from our history, we've never been a bystander when it comes to these things. We've always been there to address the current need, but make sure it's resilient into the future because we're a long-term player. We do innovation in a way which, yes, it deploys new technology, and we have researchers on that, but we have a kind of ingrained philosophy of, first of all, really listening to our customers, actively listening to what they need, what their strategic needs are, where they're going. Anticipating what the future will hold, what the regulation will look like, what the resources pathway is, and then putting that together and responding to what we've heard, responding to our anticipation and our prediction, and bringing together our cross-fertilization, our combination of our businesses, and the scaled data insights that we have. Altogether, it's pretty exciting, and we're looking forward to it. It's a thrilling moment, and we're ready, willing, and able to accelerate. Thank you so much, Richard. Thank you, gentlemen, for your insights. Shall we give our roundtable a bit of applause? Thank you so much. Thank you for them. Now to close this plenary and share her key takeaways, I now invite Estelle Brachlianoff to please come and take the stage once more. Today you've seen what innovation looks like at Veolia. This is innovation that secures critical needs, solutions that deliver real impact everywhere. In our boosters, pushing tomorrow's frontier, as well as in our strongholds, making essential services more competitive and more affordable. For 170 years, the pattern has always been the same. We anticipate before crises strike. We invent proprietary solutions. We create impact and sustainable growth. From Paris in 1853 to the AI industry's revolution today. We are backing this with unprecedented ambition. EUR 1 billion dedicated to innovation during GreenUp. By 2030, EUR 1 billion in revenue for data centers and chips manufacturing. 50% of our operational efficiencies, which will be due to digital and AI, because scaling up those tools can be a force for sustainable growth. I am very confident because we anticipate, we prioritize, we invest, and scale up, exactly as we've seen in our EUR 1 billion target for PFAS and new pollutant treatment, which is well underway. Proprietary solutions for critical needs. That's our winning formula for environmental security. Thank you very much. Thank you, Estelle. Now, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to open the floor to your questions. For those of you who are here in the room, you can please raise your hand, and then we'll bring a microphone over to you. For those of you who are joining us online, please use the Q&A tab to submit your questions, and I will get to them very shortly. Let me go and get my second iPad so I can see your questions. In the meantime, do we have any questions in the room? Over here. Can we bring a microphone there? Hi, Wanda Serwinowska. Would you please be so kind as to stand and perhaps tell us your name and your publication? Yeah, sure. Wanda Serwinowska, UBS. Just one question on the potential benefits from AI. You mentioned it helps your customers. Can you speak a little bit louder, please? Oh, yeah. Sorry. We can't hear you that well. Sorry, if it's possible. Great. The question is about the benefits from the AI. Can you quantify it? Because at the end, we analysts, we really like the numbers. Can you quantify it in million euros? How much do you benefit? How much was achieved maybe, or how much do you expect this year? The benefit from AI. Yeah In all the efficiencies we do. Emmanuelle has mentioned a few figures. We went from 10% of all our operational efficiency plan to 23%, and we target 50%, which is the operational part of our efficiency, which is only part of our global efficiency plan, as you can imagine. Last year, in 2025, it was around EUR 60 million, something like that, just from digital and AI-related. Basically, we're doubling that by the end of the decade in a running rate. It's here to stay. I think you have in the pack, Emmanuelle has mentioned that, but a lot of examples of what's behind that and why it's not just a, I don't know, sorry, but get-rid-of-a-few-people type of initiative. It's everything but that. Typically, Talk to My Plant was a good example. I think we have a page here with, it's whatever, 10% of energy savings in a desalination plant. It's 2% of leakage reduction in a network distribution. It's 20% less aeration into wastewater treatment plants, therefore reducing energy consumption. That's a series of a few percent of efficiency here and there on thousands of plants across the globe. So far we have them in a few of those plants, the tools applied. The idea just is to scale up, of course, and to deploy the solution to more and more plants across the globe. That's a good example of, we're usually asked, always with Emmanuelle, the question, how do you sustain efficiency for so long? I always say, we will sustain efficiency forever. The efficiency plan, AI is a good example of that, right? Emmanuelle, do you want to elaborate? Yeah. Hi, Wanda. I absolutely agree. On the value creation on AI, we have several pillars, growth, resilience, and capital allocation. I had a discussion last week with one of our investors and say something really true. When you look at the 200,000 people of Veolia, they are waking up every day thinking, on top of new business I'm going to win, what can I have as new efficiency? Because it's a main condition for us to be competitive. We haven't waited for AI to go for efficiency. For years, we have launched digital program, and Estelle mentioned it. At the end of 2025, it's 23% of our operational efficiencies. Two years ago, it was already 10%, so it's increasing and we are targeting 50% in 2030, meaning that it's making our resilience, it's confirming our synergies and making them even more sustainable. It will come from two elements. The first one, it's copy and adapt, because today we have digital solution which are implemented. That's for sure. For instance, just take the example of Spain. In the last four years in Spain, we have generated, for each of the year, EUR 4 million thanks to digital saving. Monitoring quality, decreasing the amount of chemical products, so EUR 16 million in four years. We can duplicate that in all the water plant and wastewater plant we have at Veolia. That's the first element. The second element, as mentioned by Estelle, is Gen AI, which is a game changer for us. Just imagine the maintenance cost we have. We have in our CapEx EUR 1.9 billion of maintenance CapEx, but we have also maintenance costs in OpEx. It's EUR 4 billion. If we just save 0.001% of this amount, it's very significant on our EBITDA. AI will play a significant role on efficiency on top of everything that will happen on the top line. Thank you so much, Emmanuelle. Thank you, Estelle. Do we have another question? I think we had another question here, and then we will come to you, sir. Oh, it's you. Go ahead. Hi, morning. This is Arturo Zano from Expansión in Spain. I have two questions for Estelle. I'm very sorry, we can't hear you. Hi, morning. Please, the mic closer because it's a very wide room, so we look closer, but we cannot hear you that well otherwise, sorry. Yeah. Now better? Okay. This is Arturo Zano from Expansión in Spain. I have two questions for Estelle linked to the Spanish market. The first one is about CriteriaCaixa. You know is your shareholder since last year, and they took 5% stake. How satisfied are you with CriteriaCaixa as a shareholder? Do you think that they could increase their participation in the company? The second one is one of your tenders you have in Barcelona, which is value in EUR 1 billion, more or less. How confident are you on winning this tender? Thank you. Very specific to Spain and actually not Spain, to actually Catalonia. I am very happy to answer those. In a way, that's a big translation of what I just explained in my speech, which is we are very large in scale when it comes to innovation and ability to invest, but very embedded in the various communities. In a way, I love this type of question because it's an exact translation of what we are trying to explain. CriteriaCaixa first. CriteriaCaixa took 5% stake in the group last year. They are very happy about the investment. We are very happy to have them on board. They have a Board representative as well. It's not only me saying that. They are a long-term investor, happy about long-term sustainable delivery of result and dividends. Actually, the newly appointed Delegado General, sorry, I don't speak Spanish, so I hope I'm not pronounce this too wrongly, said he was very happy about the investment very recently, a few weeks ago. Everybody seems to be happy about that. Now, I guess we are here to stay as partner and as a long-term shareholder. We're talking about long-term. In a way, a year of living together is a great year. There will be many more years and why not one day increase the share? Let's start with being happy about the way we are dealing with that to start with. In terms of the tender in Barcelona, you're right. We have the large contract of the metropolitan area of Barcelona, but there are a few cities which are very nearby the metropolitan itself, which are in a different tender mode, and they are at tender at the moment. We've put a very good offer, not only taking all the benefits of what all our team in Spain and in Catalonia has learned over the years, so the best of what you can do in Catalonia, but the best of what you've seen today in a way in terms of innovation and worldwide and the group's capacity to make it specific to the needs of those municipalities in Barcelona. Of course, we including will be very efficient and affordable because it's, of course, Veolia. Let the best win now. We've put an excellent offer, which I'm very proud of. Thank you, Estelle. I'm going to take a question from online. This is a question from Ajay Patel from Goldman Sachs. He thanks us all for the presentation. You're very welcome, Ajay. We're happy to oblige. Here is his question. "Given the rising impact of AI and digital on operational efficiencies, should we expect the cost-cutting targets to increase over time? If not, what is declining in the other direction? No, I'm usually anticipating this question, and Emmanuelle has it regularly. I guess we're always trying to find new sources of efficiency to sustain a level, which, if you recall, used to be EUR 200 million a year when it was Veolia alone. We raised it to EUR 250 million a year. When we acquired Suez, we raised it to EUR 350 a year. We've exceeded our target. In a way, digital and AI so far is embedded into what we've already committed, which is EUR 350 million a year. If one day we could increase, we will. The only thing I can tell you is we are always looking for the more we can, and we always have new ideas to stand out for a very long term. It's already included in. Thank you, Estelle. I believe we had a question here. Who was first? Yeah. I think it was the person in front who was first. Yes. Correct? Would you please stand up? Yes. Hello. Arthur Sitbon, Morgan Stanley. My question was on the EUR 1 billion of revenues from AI industries. I was wondering, first, where you're starting from, if it's at zero today or you already have some revenues linked to that, and what's the typical EBITDA return on capital employed profile of those revenues? That would be the first question. The second one, quickly on the efficiencies that you were talking about, as I imagine you will not be the only company in the sector to try to drive those efficiencies, I was wondering if you think theoretically they will come with the same type of retention rate than you have on your usual efficiencies or if that could be higher, lower. Just any thought on that would be interestingW For the first question, you have the page 24 with the answer. We mentioned it in our speech, but I appreciate the fact that it was an intense information presentation. We started a few years ago at EUR 150 million. Now we are at EUR 560 million, and we basically aim at doubling by the end of the decade combining all the various forces. ROCE, funds employed, of course, Emmanuelle, is going to be a low-margin-making, super not profitable, super CapEx-intensive, isn't it? Not really. No. That is a very fair question because, you're right, development is nice, but it has to be profitable and contribute to our ROCE accretion. As mentioned by Estelle, we are close to the EUR 600 million for this revenue at the end of 2025, and we are targeting EUR 1 billion, meaning that, in terms of top line, it's an increase of globally EUR 1 billion. The major part of it today, it's microelectronics. Microelectronics today, it's mainly Water Tech and Hazardous Waste. When we are looking at our forecast and prevision, working with our business line, what we see is that a huge part of the growth will come from Hazardous Waste. It will be organically, but a small part will be also from a few tuck-ins. We did an acquisition that you may have seen in Taiwan. The name is SarTec, very profitable business. On top of that will come the water growth. On data centers, today, we have 50% of revenue which is coming from Water Tech and 50% which is O&M. What we expect in the years to come, it will mainly be on the O&M part, especially in the energy and the water part. In term of ROCE, you globally know the ROCE of Hazardous Waste and of Water Tech. We are reaching at a minimum this level for the project we are launching. Just to elaborate on what Emmanuelle said, the revenue, the EUR 0.5 billion We do already now, roughly, is a lot of microelectronics and not a lot of data centers. Progressively, I could see the data centers ramping up. It's not by chance, and it was a discussion, it was on the round table. Data centers is a boom which is relatively recent in its scale, and it started with, what about power? Now the discussion is moving into acceptability and water and stuff like that, but it's only starting. It's not by chance that we're launching the new offer today. Probably two years ago, I'm not so sure we would have any interest, if I'm honest, from big hyperscaler in such an offer. Now it's time. I can see the things moving. In terms of the ROCE and everything, the investments are mainly behind us. As we explained when we discussed on Hazardous Waste, we almost have no revenue, no profits, but almost all the funds employed already on our balance sheet because when I said we are opening now solvent recycling in U.K., in Taiwan, and everything we've mentioned today, pretty much by the end of the year is going to be in our balance sheet without the ramping up yet of the profitability. I guess, don't worry, we're going to go on with improving the ROCE of the Group, including with this new growth opportunity. Retention rates of efficiency? Retention rate of efficiency. I just wanted to mention one example regarding retention rates. Stuart spoke about Talk to My Plant, and we were a few weeks ago with some of our colleagues in the waste-to-energy plant in Rouen. It was really interesting to see what are they doing with Talk to My Plant. What we have seen, and what I like, is that they have been able to generate a saving of EUR 200 million just for one incinerator by doing one thing, thanks to this additional AI layer that we have. It was to optimize the steam production in order to reach thermal saturation. It's bringing, for one incinerator, EUR 200,000, meaning that when you multiply that by the 70 incinerators we have worldwide, it's potential saving that we can do. Today our ambition, it's at least to keep our retention rate as it is, which is between 30% and 50%. You have a lot of figures on page 43, 44, 45 in the presentation with a% of efficiency gained and things like that, which you can have an illustration and gives you color about what we're talking about here. Thank you, Estelle. Thank you, Emmanuelle. I'm just going to take a question from the people following us online. This is a question from David Poe from Tech for Good Recruit Mag. When can we expect the first data center to go live with your 360 solution fully deployed on the data center? I guess we already have 100 sites across the globe with data centers who use part of this offer, not necessarily the entirety of it. As it was said, in some circumstances, the question is more the water regeneration. In other places, it's more the wasted heat. We already have 100 sites which have part of the solution already now. The one I love is in the U.K. We're in the U.K., so what about taking a U.K. example? What about the Genome Campus? Who wants to talk a little bit about the Genome Campus? Shall I? Genome Campus is in Cambridge. It's a massive new investment, super high-tech. There will be a lot of startups, whatever, on genome. Not so sure I understood perfectly everything they are going to do, but super R&D near Cambridge University. We won a large project there, very much in anticipation, because it's under construction. It's not yet fully developed, where we will use the energy heat from the data center to feed the campus. It saved, I think, 30,000 tons of CO2, if I remember well, and that's not very far away from here. We have, I think it's GBP 2 billion of pipeline in the U.K. alone. The problem is usually I'm not allowed to mention any names or any locations. It's so secret, and I understand it could be a bit frustrating, but there are a lot of projects, for instance, in the U.K., so very confident. Currently in the pipeline, yes? Mm-hmm. Understood. Thank you so much, Estelle. I'd like to gently encourage you to not forget that you have access to all of our lovely panelists this morning, so you can address your questions to every single one of them. Do we have any other question in the room? Yes, sir. Let's bring a microphone here. Bonjour. Alexandre Brandsozen, Bank of America. A follow-up on margins and numbers and innovation. I think you mentioned for mobile water treatment units, and I think that's the units we saw in Poznań a year and a half ago. 2,000 units, 25% margin. Should we think that this fleet is fully utilized, or do you have upside to those 25% margin if use cases grow? And then secondly, if we think about returns from new innovation revenues for Veolia, should we think about that 25% margin as a floor? Not necessarily for the half billion of data center revenues, which I think you mentioned are now more O&M, but in general at Veolia. Thank you. Emmanuelle? Thank you for your question, Alex. Regarding the retention, the utilization rate, we are targeting at least 80%. The short answer is we still have room of maneuver and the possibility to increase, that's for sure. In term of profitability, what we have seen so far, it's really profitable. I was mentioning our small acquisitions, SarTec in semiconductor industry. We are reaching more than 25% margin. For a lot of projects, we are around 20%. What we are targeting worldwide is to be at least above 20%. I guess on profitability, in more general terms, less specifically to your question. You've noticed that we've increased by 150 basis points the margin of Veolia in the last two years alone, and this is not going to stop. The more we are international, the more we are techie, like we've seen today, the more it goes with higher margin. That's not by chance. That's exactly what the GreenUp plan is about, investing in priority outside Europe in the techie stuff, exactly to drive growth, which is more and more profitable with higher margin. We've demonstrated it, plus the efficiency plan, as we've seen this morning, fed by AI. That's exactly the transformation. The Group is moving at a very fast pace. We'll soon have the keys, hopefully, of Clean Earth's acquisition in the U.S., which will be another big game changer for us, doubling our size in the Hazardous Waste in the U.S. That's high margin as well. Each time, we are increasing that differentiation element, which goes with high margin. I think it's here to stay really. Thank you, Estelle. Thank you for the question. Do we have any other questions from the room? Can we bring a microphone here, please? Hello. This is Paula Solanas from La Vanguardia in Spain, and I'm sorry to ask you again about the Spanish market. You do mention in your plan of operations in data centers and microchips in the U.S. mostly, and some European countries like Germany, the U.K., and I think also France, but not Spain. I wanted to ask you if this is also related to the bigger, more aggravating scarcity of resources in Spain, especially when it comes to water because of the recent droughts, and what is the scalability you see in Spain for these data center plans in terms of investment and number of data centers? Thank you. No, I think we still have a lot of opportunities with this new launch of this Data Center Resource 360 today, new offer in Spain. We have many other opportunities. When Daniel Tugues, he's here, our head of Spain, he can tell you a lot about our ambition to grow the business in Spain, where we already are very present in water, very present in the energy efficiency, very present in recycling of plastic. We have many other opportunities. Data centers is one. What are the positives and negatives about Spain in that regard? The positive, green energy at a reasonable price. When you look at the map of Europe green energy price, Spain stands out in a positive way, thanks to everything which was developed over the last five-10 years. On the negative side, you're right, water scarcity is everywhere, and that could be a limiting factor. The good news is, Veolia in Spain has learned progressively to develop reuse of wastewater, recycling of a lot of things. In a way, we have the solutions as well to unlock this potential if there was data centers who wanted to be implemented in some places in Spain. For the rest, it's going to be for political elected members to decide if they want to give a permit or not to those data centers. It's not for us to decide. We can tell you what can be done. It can be made sustainably. It can be even water positive at one point, but the rest will be for them to decide. Yes, we have a question right here. Can we bring a microphone? Hi. I'm Nicolas Madelaine with Les Echos, French paper. I would like to know of the EUR 1 billion you expect from AI and chips industries, how much will come from Europe, including the U.K.? Also another question, I'd like to have a comment on how your U.S. business is doing at the moment, given the current environment. Thank you. I won't give a split between Spain, France, whatever, the U.S. It's a global reach, and the billion is everywhere. It's fair to say there is a competition as we speak on data centers implementation, and Mr. Hughes will be well-placed to talk about that if you wish to expand on the, everybody's trying to attract investment, but not at the detriment of local communities or resource scarcity and so on and so forth. There is a big demand. That's everywhere. Same applies to microelectronics. It's fair to say that so far the big two places where the microelectronics is well in advance, as in 2nm, which is the smaller you can go, are more Southeast Asia, Taiwan in particular, and a little bit South Korea, and the U.S. Europe has an intention to catching up in many respect with STMicroelectronics, just to mention one name. We have project in, I think it's Sicily, is it? With STMicro. There is one in Grenoble. Europe is not lagging. Everybody realize that microelectronics is of a matter of sovereignty, and therefore there is a big ambition in Europe to try and catch up on that front as well. We'll see, and we will be ready to serve them. How is our U.S. business doing? I'm regularly asked. Actually, I remember when we announced that we would invest massively in the U.S. with the big Clean Earth acquisition, which we are under the various procedures of getting the approval, should be done by mid-2026, so in a few weeks' time. People were saying, "Okay, Estelle, with Donald Trump in the White House, you invest massively in the U.S. when you're an environmental services powerhouse? How is it possible?" I was asked this question quite a lot. The answer is quite simple. The demand is here. It's a sustainable demand, whatever the political agenda in some respects. The demand comes from the population, the demands come from industries, and the demand is a demand for environmental security. It's to secure water access. It's to secure health, as in remove PFAS, for instance, in the U.S., which is a big theme. In a way, whoever you voted for now almost a year and half ago, in the end, you don't want to have pollutant when you open your tap. When you're in Arizona and you have a TSMC massive factory, without pure water, without solvent recovery, anywhere, there is no factory at all. The question is not who's elected in Washington. The question is critical needs, and I think that's a very important element. That's why I talk about environmental security, which is what we do, because it goes down to critical needs, and I'm daring making the link with what's happening as we speak in the Middle East. We suddenly realize in the Middle East that water is as important as oil, if not more. Even for data centers, we couldn't be working without that, obviously for agriculture, for everybody to live. In a way, critical needs in the U.S. are critical needs like they are in Europe. There are critical needs in the Middle East. We're talking about vital, essential services. Our U.S. business is doing well. Thank you for this candid answer, Estelle. Do we have any other questions? Yes, we have a question right here, please. Thank you very much. Bartlomiej Kubicki, Bernstein. Just on the data centers and the energy side of the data centers, I just wonder if you can offer actually power access to data centers as well. I'm thinking about your incinerators, whether you thought about maybe offering them the connection to your incinerators, and they can be partially off-grid. Consequently, also, if you can offer data centers access to grid, for instance, via your decarbonized power plants you have in Central Eastern Europe. I guess you will have excess capacity once you decarbonize those, and also maybe related excess land. Just thinking loud, I mean, whether this is also on your offer or it's only water and waste being discussed here. Thank you. I don't know if you want to. Would you like to? Richard, do you want to? Just pass over to. Answer on that one, maybe? Richard. Yeah, I think in terms of energy supplies to data centers. We can hear Richard, right? Can we? Is it on? Are we okay? Yeah, that's it. That's on. I think in terms of energy supplies to data centers, we've got an incredibly flexible offering under our 360 offering, because we can either use our existing energy supplies from landfill gas, from incineration, from digestion of food waste, and sleeve that to data centers remotely, or locate those facilities close to data centers, or we can bring those novel fuel sources to the sites. As Will mentioned, we've got a project in the U.S. where we're taking biosolids and using that as the water source. We could just as well be digesting those biosolids, getting a biogas, and using that biogas to provide energy to the data center. It's these combination of effects, this circularization of what we're doing with water, waste, and energy, which is the capability which we're rolling out. At the moment, on our existing data center micro-e assets, we're really providing one or two of those things. Going forward, it's more looking like three because you get a combined effect and a better efficiency. You've understood that at Veolia, nothing is wasted. We turn waste into resources. Thank you for this question and these answers. Do we have any other question from the room? Yes. We have a question right here. Can you keep your hand up so we can see you? Perfect. Hello. Sasha Eady from The ENDS Report. I was just wondering if you had any reflections on a big. I'm very sorry. We can't hear you, Eady. Oh, sorry. I'll speak a bit louder. Is that better? I wondered if anyone had any reflections on a big headline for us in the U.K. recently, which was that OpenAI is pausing its development of the Stargate data center. I wondered sort of if there's any comments you have on the regulatory barriers in the U.K. when it comes to data centers and AI, and on the water scarcity issue in the U.K. as well. Thank you. Thank you. I won't be able to specifically comment on the OpenAI announcement, and then removed, and all the rest of it, which is news in the U.K. What you can say is a few things. Richard mentioned that if we follow up the trend on data centers and micro, we are three times the consumption of water and energy by 2030 in the U.K. Basically, it will mean we would need the water for the equivalent of an extra 3 million inhabitant city and an extra 3 million inhabitant power generation by 2030, which is tomorrow morning. A lot of people, apart from the British in the room, probably think that water is a problem for your Spanish colleague but would not be a problem in the U.K. You would be wrong. For a lot of geological reason, I would be very happy to explain with clay and everything. Correct me if I'm wrong, there are people more aware than I am here. Everything south of Birmingham is in water scarcity mode in the U.K. You even have desalination plant in this country already now. There is a scarcity of water even in the U.K. As far as electricity is concerned, and grid, there is a big strain on the grid, and there is a question of affordability and grid connection and so on and so forth. Acceptability in the U.K. is something absolutely critical. I don't know how the legislation is going to move, but we've seen in Europe a few places whereby instead of a mayor, say, saying no to a project, he said yes, but those are the conditions. Those are the conditions, that you reuse the wasted heat to feed my district heating. In the U.K., we are developing district heating. There could be even more. There is a potential for more, and that could be a good option. It could be a yes, but let's use, as Mr. Hughes said, recycled water from a wastewater treatment plant as opposed to new water, if you want, and so on and so forth. I can see the trend of legislation moving from the yes and no, black and white, to the yes, but with some condition, and of course job creations and so on and so forth. This is the way I see it. There is an extra one in the U.K., which is a country of roughly 70 million inhabitants on an island which is wonderful, lovely, not that land-rich. It's super dense, which is a scarcity for land. That's why we even have project, which I cannot talk about in the UK, where we use land which had another usage before, if you want, industrial lands, to redo something out of them for a data center, as opposed to use new land, new green land, for a data center. And I think that's all the series of that, which at one point can make it acceptable. Thank you. Do we have any other questions? Is that a question, a hand I'm seeing raised over there? Back there? No. Any other questions from the room? Do not hesitate. We still have a few minutes left on the program available for this Q&A. Sorry, I'm a bit blinded by the lights here. Yes. Right here. Can we bring a microphone here? Hi, good morning, everyone. First of all, thank you so much for extend invitation for this amazing event. My name is Santiago Sellart. I am the leader of Latin American of Toyota. When you speak, Estelle, during your speech that Veolia want to be very close, like the different things happened, you mentioned that in Latin America, we have the most research of lithium around the world. My question is if you consider perhaps a new unit of business related to circular economy of lithium recycle in Latin America, because as a vehicle industry, it's very important start to think with strategic partners about, for example, vehicle lithium batteries recycling. In fact, in Argentina, we are developed with Veolia, like an strategic partner, a project like this. Thank you so much for the invitation and for this space to Q&A. Which country are you from, if I may ask? Which country are you from? Which country? Argentina. Argentina. Maybe my English sounds a little bit strange. No, I was wondering if it was Argentina or a neighboring country. I won't mention its name. Anyway. I guess, the Desert of Atacama, roughly between Argentina and Chile and everything, is super rich of a few things, lithium. In Chile, you have copper as well, and other minerals. There is a mining boom of lithium, which has its positive and negative. It's super water thirsty, the mining, and we have specific technology to try to, again, recycle the water, because if you're in deserts and you don't have water, you cannot mine. To recycle the water almost infinitely, to be able to extract with limiting the impact on the water resource. With regards to circular economy in South America and Argentina and Chile, that's an interesting question. Gustavo is here, our Head of South America and Iberia, who could elaborate. We already have a few initiative, a few idea, and a few projects in Colombia, I will miss one, in Chile as well, in particular, just to try to move the needle in terms of not only extract but be circular. Gustavo, if you want to elaborate. Yeah, in fact, we work with Toyota in Argentina recycling solvents today. We work in Colombia recycling plastics. The intention is there. The capability to do it is there. Sometimes what we need is to have the conditions of the markets, the demand, the consistency of the feedstock for these kind of installations. All these kind of things needs to be analyzed country by country. You can count on us to analyze specific issues. We talked before about recycling some kind of batteries or giving a second life to some kind of batteries. Of course, we will be there. We need to analyze very carefully that all the conditions to make it a sustainable activity are also there. In the plant in Japan I mentioned earlier on in my speech, this is a battery factory in Japan, which some of the effluents still have a trace of lithium and cobalt and nickel into the water, if you wish. Instead of just treating it and that's it, we're recouping. In a way, we are mining the wastewater. That's exactly what our Water Technologies can help us do, to extract a little bit the remaining traces of lithium, which are traces, but even in nature, you only have traces. It's not pure lithium. We have as well, things that we've done in Japan, in Australia, exactly doing what I said. Maybe that will be of interest for you that we can discuss about that. Thank you, Gustavo. Thank you, Estelle. I have a question from our online followers. Question from Philippe Urpation from ODDO BHF. "What would be the equivalent installed capacity or production in GWh," is that gigawatt hour? Mm-hmm. Available for the DC needs in your AI 360 solution offer?" And I believe that this may be a question for this side of the room. Thanks, Ellie, for that question. You're very welcome. I don't want, maybe Stuart will. I know. Yeah. I think Stuart's got this one. No? Anyway, I can start. When you're Veolia, you've understood that for AI and digital, it's two flip of a coin. On one side, we are serving customers to help them be more sustainable, like AWS, the hyperscalers, or the microelectronics. On the other flip of the coin, we want to use it for our own needs to be more efficient and therefore produce more green energy, consume less water, and so on and so forth. Of course, if one was to be a big negative and the other one a small positive, we would have a problem environmentally speaking. We are constantly checking exactly that the positive is largely outweigh the negative. That's why I was alluding to Stuart. When Stuart is doing Talk to My Plant, we don't necessarily use the large language model, the latest version of them. If we can use a bit less, but less consuming resource, we always will have this very big focus on we don't want to use too much resource ourselves. No Because it's precisely our mission. If I remember well, there's 20,000 tons of CO2 altogether that we consume with our digital and AI, something like that? 2,000. 2,000. I was even too big. 2,000 tons of CO2 we consume, whilst at the same time a super big positive. Yeah Reducing water consumption and energy savings and so on and so forth. It's 99% positive and 1% negative, as in we consume some resource, something like that. Absolutely. Thank you so much. Do we have any other question from the room? All right. This brings, I believe, our Q&A session to an end, and it also brings our live segment to an end. To all of you who followed us remotely, a big thank you for joining us today, and we hope to see you soon in a future Thema. Goodbye.