In The Arena by TechArena - RackRenew & Circularity: Remanufacture, Recertify, Redeploy

Episode Date: January 21, 2026

From #OCPSummit25, this Data Insights episode unpacks how RackRenew remanufactures OCP-compliant racks, servers, networking, power, and storage—turning hyperscaler discards into ready-to-deploy capacity.

Welcome to Tech Arena, featuring authentic discussions between tech's leading innovators and our host, Allison Clive. Now, let's step into the arena. Welcome in the arena. My name's Allison Coy. We're coming to you from OCP Summit in San Jose, California, and it is a Data Insights episode, which means Janice Norowski is with me. Hey, Janice, how's it going? Hi, Allison. We are in day two of recording at OCP Summit. together and we have been all around the world with conversations. I am so excited for this conversation. Tell me who we've got with us. Oh my gosh. Heck yeah. Me too. Day 2 of OSDP was all about cooling, right?

But the other topic is really around infrastructure and how do you bring standards? How do you bring infrastructure together? So today we have an opportunity to talk about that and join with us as Rack Renew. We have Yelor Chilentes from Rack Renew and he's the director. So welcome. Thank you. Good morning. Yeah, good morning. Morning. So Rapernau is a new company to some of our listeners, Yala. You and I came together at the Yada conference recently

and had a fantastic conversation about what you guys are up to. Can you introduce the company and what you're delivering with the OCP communities? You know, absolutely, absolutely. I think he knew is a brand of change lifecycle services. That's a brand that's a little bit more familiar in the OCP industry. I think a good year or five were now active. This is our third summit where we're exhibiting.

And this year we're launching Recrenew, which is a brand of Sims, where the purpose is really to bring remanufactured OCP material to all. What we see is the OCP community. All the innovation is really coming from the hypers. Right. Sims lifecycle serves as strongly decommissioning. And Recrenew's purpose is to recommission that infrastructure, that technology, that opportunity to run your business models on,

to a wider audience. It's RECRew, simply said. Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah. So when you look at OCP, when you think about hardware overall and you look at infrastructure, you can kind of look at that as like putting together a Ferrari, right?

Super fast. You need all the right parts and all the right pieces to make the best car in the market. But if you think about recommissioning this infrastructure and it's in its useful life in hyperscale, what use cases in the industry support this? First of all, I think you not only want a new Ferrari, If I offer you a five-year-old for Lari or a seven-year-year-fall flying,

your heart goes up, right? You still want that. Now, technology is slightly different compared to the automotive because generally speaking, you think about technology, it's aging, it's becoming end of life. But we see use cases in several areas. I think we've seen some in the research and academia field. We've got some use cases where this hyperskilled technology

is for bare metal suppliers. We have some use cases of software as a service providers. Generally, they are tech-savvy, they are open standards, and they figure out that if you look at your car analogy, it's your cost-per-milege. There's still very good life left in OCP material, high-quality, and it's very affordable cost. That's benefiting a lot of business models, whether you just entry the market or whether you're a research in academia, that you do a lot of research.

You're not reliant on mission-critical. I think a lot of the computer out there is not mission-critical. For that, the remanufactured hardware is a very good alternative in times of where new material is either scars or your budget is a little bit limited. So we see several use causes. You know, I love this story, especially when you consider the commissioning that's going on in hyperscale and neocloud. And right now in terms of fueling AI and the amount, just the sheer volume of equipment that we know that gets decommissioned on an annual basis. It's astounding. But OCP hardware is not necessarily standard off the shelf.

There are some unique characteristics about it. How do you get your customer targets comfortable with some of the unique aspects of this infrastructure? It starts with education. So we need to explain it's a different form factor. A lot of the potential customers that we try to move the remanufactured hardware to are either standardized to 19-inch and a standard OEM. It needs to integrate in their networks. that needs to integrate in their PDU settings and power.

But as soon as we go over that first obstacle, we have built several experience centers across the world where they can play around a little bit, feel it, touch it. I think those are the things that we've brought to the industry to overcome some of those hurt. As we speak, there's a new wreck on its way to Scalup. Scalep is a player in Germany. They were listed yesterday on the OCP as a new neocloud.

Yeah. And we have a re-re manufactured wreck on its way to their experience center in Nureen. Wonderful. That's what we're trying to do is create stories, education. You show them. Yeah, sure. I love that.

Okay, so we're going to talk more about that. But I'm also really interested in your relationship with Sims. And how is Sims really, you know, it's a decommissioning services organization, but can you describe the relationship with Sims? And how is that really... It's a really important. It's a steady force, in a sense, purpose-driven. So their purpose is really around preserving the planet. We're turning waste into new energy.

or new product, new commodity. We're an Australian-listed company, and it's very important to feel the backup of that company. Now, another very big advantage is they serve the hyperscalers in their decommissioning needs, so they have the equipment available. Recrenew as first pick. We have the right scale.

We have plenty of volume, not only in the Americas, but really on the global scale. So we have a center in Eindhoven. We're about to finish our deployment center in Singapore, so then we could really say, we have three big hubs around the world to supply it, but that really comes from seeds. It's a financial backup, or we're publicly listed.

So as a startup, it comes with some challenges, but most of all, it comes with major advantages. Well, and it comes with steady supply of infrastructure coming out of their, yeah. So I don't need a resource procurement. Yeah. We need procurement on parts and components, but on the main material, no.

That's incredible. balls. So can you walk us through the entire life of, you know, a hyperscaler is decommissioning one or a thousand racks. Sims takes that. It moves to rack, renew, and then it gets redeployed or recommissioned to a new order. Can you take us through that process? Absolutely. I say first of all, it's important to recognize the hypers is not just decommissioning racks, but a rack comes with IP, it comes with data, it comes with certain risks. And so we have a very, very, you know, rigorous transport, reverse logistics, from the data center to our circular center. And we have well-established receiving protocols when it comes to weight deviations. We do image

captures. The material goes into the area for processing. That we process through the lens of step one redeployment, step two is reuse and then step three is material recovery. It's important to mention, I think Sims is unique in its proposition to hyperscalers where we really serve them by sending back critical spares, parts. CXL is a new technology that demands a lot of use parts going back into the supply chain. So we send a lot of those parts back to the ODMs. That's why our sites are on the certain climate control areas and floors have certain densities and the ESD protection.

So it's a very high level of processing capacity. Once we've done that, the material grows through either micro factories or through hands. And we have a mixture of some activities in the process is done by robots. Some is done by a human. Then the Recklenew becomes the first pick. So we'll look at our demand funnel and say, what is it that we could bring to the market in a remanufacturing shape? The material is then going through a very rigorous process of 22 steps.

We deploy new BMC chips, BSM cards. We do burning tests, performance tests. So we really try to come as close to a new product as possible. Important to mention, it comes with a very low embodied carbon, because the carbon is already paid for a previous owner in a sense. It's amazing. Yeah. Sometimes we forget about them, but that's a strong thing.

And then any other material that is not going to reclignew, we look at depurposing and I call it material recovering. I think some people say recycling. But the recycling industry has a very robust process over the last 30 years developed with very high recovery rates. So all that ferrous, nonchernous, precious metal, that is very important. available in electronics as being reused in its manufacturing stream. That's amazing.

Yeah, so simply said, it has two outbound flows. It has recranyue and it has reuse, repurpose. I'm curious, based on everything you said as it relates to repurposing storage, how do you do that and how do you deliver storage solutions, say, with things like OCP lock. Speck? Well, our industry is still so much around IP protection, data protection, so. Unfortunately, we still see a lot of destruction of IP. But Grant, I don't think we've given the hypers

or its original users the right technology to mitigate that risk. And I think that's OCP lock. So I think what the industry has done, they come together and see, can we come up with the latest-unerators protocols to provide the hyperscalers or the larger enterprises to mitigate that risk of data? Yeah. So far that's not the case yet. It's in development.

It's nearly there. And I think how a contribution seems, REC Renew is we would really like to let OCP Locke contribute back to the industry to say, what do we as an industry need? I think verification for our clients is super important. Certification, so we need to give a certificate. Those are little things that I think we need to add to the protocols. But I think it's one of the biggest opportunities in our industry,

because at the moment we destroy a lot of the storage media advisors that still have good life in it. That's amazing. You know, I think that is an area where I'm going to be watching for sure from a circulate. perspective, and circularity as a whole is a huge benefit of this. Have you quantified some of the savings that is coming through this process that you just described? It's in the total addressable market, but it's hundreds of millions. Yeah. It's beyond calculations.

If we could nail this as an industry, and I think it's collaborative, but if we can nail it, we can really unlock some potential of the industry. And I think that's where Sims comes into play in servicing the OEMs, like the solidimes, in terms of can we develop together protocols where you take storage back from your appliance and we run those refurbishment processes for you where we recertified them together with you with the right software and the right tools

so we put a collective label on it and if we can move that material into say remanufacturing streams and we can redeploy that memory of that storage devices in the recital specs etc then it's a win-win situation and of course in storage minion breaks So sometimes you have to deploy Neo, although the fill rates are very low. Yeah, right.

She compared with the CPU's fill rates. I mean, storage media is a very robust adult product. Major lock of opportunity. That all. Amazing. So I'm really curious about the types of organizations and customers you're going to be working with. A few minutes ago, you talked a bit about NeoCloud, but who do you really see benefiting from your types of services?

I think it's a very wide. This is something I learned on this OSU. is everybody talks data centers. There's a lot of data in the centers. I think the demand for story, if you look at the deployment of the new AI models, et cetera, et cetera. First, you need to have good data that the models can make sense of,

but it also creates a lot of data. We see actually from all our product to market fit that we created, I think we see at the moment the best market to entry in storage. That can be enterprises, that have a lot of storage files, that they maintain where we use some spinning. Or in the inference space where we go to, say, the bare metal suppliers that offer some GPU capacity in that space where they run inference. I think flash storage is also one of the bigger markets that we try to address with the rec renew. So some conventional, and we see a lot of an inference.

Yeah, I've been so happy having you on the show. Thank you for coming. I know it's really busy at SCP, but I do want to ask you one final question. Where can folks find out more about what rack renew is delivering? and engage with you and your team around potential collaborations. Thank you. Thank you. Good question.

First of all, we have a much new website called www. ghertynyl.com. And we're here at Booth C63 on the Exhibition Hall. And today and tomorrow are available to have any questions. And otherwise an email always good. Awesome. Thank you so much for being with us. And Janice, that wraps another episode of Dead Insights. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Alison. And thank you again, Yala. Thank you. This is amazing. Bless to nature. Arena. Subscribe and engage at our website, Techorina.aI. All content is copyright by Tech Arena.