Data Centers vs. Public Perception — DC Blox CTO Jeff Wabik on Nashville, AI & Community Trust

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: Thank you, everybody. Welcome back to Data Center Revolution. What an exciting podcast. It's an honor to sit down with you. Jeff, do me a favor, introduce yourself to all the listeners, anybody [00:00:15] Speaker 2: that doesn't recognize you from LinkedIn. It's great to be here. Thank you so much. My name is Jeff Wabick. I'm the Chief Technology Officer at DC Blocks. DC Blocks is a data center infrastructure provider. We're based in Atlanta. We're about 10 years old. We're having a really interesting and exciting time building data centers that everyday people get to use. Yeah, so listen, Jeff, thanks for [00:00:35] Speaker 1: flying into Austin. I know that you have a million things on your plate right now, but I also know that you guys are pretty committed to the community and the industry as a whole and getting out in front of this stuff. I commend you and I appreciate you giving us the opportunity to use the platform to share what what's going on in Nashville. So to all you guys that are listening, I'm going to tee this up a little bit and then Jeff, you're going to walk us through, right? So this is a podcast to help get the other part of the narrative out there. A couple weeks ago, I was asked to do an interview on Fox 17 in Nashville, Tennessee, and not a lot of prep work prior to it. Just say there's a data center company that's coming to Nashville to build a data center next to a zoo is what it was said. So I did about, I don't know, a dozen minutes of interview with them in which during that time, I did everything I could to explain to the community that all of their concerns are valid. But there's a conversation to be had, right? If I was not on the inside of the industry and didn't understand some things, I would be just as concerned as some of the people in that community. I think you would be too, probably, right? Absolutely. So I did try to answer the best that I could in a way that defended the industry with empirical information, objectivity, and sadly, none of that stuff made it to the real, right? And thankfully, Jeff, your CEO reached out and gave me the opportunity to explain like, hey, they didn't take the words that I had in context. So to make it right, I was like, please give me the chance to share with you this conversation because there are a lot of data center owner operators and developers going on right now in the United States. And all of them are scared shitless about what's happening because it turns out the existential crisis or the existential threat to this industry is an energy or shortage of talent. It's not having invested early enough into the relationships in the communities which build, which we're building. So I know that this is something that you're pretty passionate about and you can tell that I am too, right? And for everybody that's listening, Jeff is the chief technology officer for DC blocks. And I'm going to let you unpackage what that is and what's going on in Nashville. But I'm also going to add some things on top of it from based on things that I know, right? Things that maybe you're not going to talk about or you'd be too braggy OC or you can't talk like that because you're not designed to talk about the good things too, right? So the reason why we have this platform is so that this industry has a voice and right now the media is not going to let us tell our side of the story. Social media isn't doing us any favors either, right? So this is a source of truth where you could talk about that project, the program, what you're doing and let's use this to help others figure out how they could get ahead of these problems because you're battling the narrative right now. Yes. So Jeff, where, where do we begin in Nashville? Well, well, actually, can I do a favor? Can I ask you a small favor? Anything you want. I've had the opportunity to meet you and have a good, healthy conversation with you. But others that don't like, where did Jeff come from? Where are you [00:03:36] Speaker 2: from originally? Yeah. So let's see. It's hard for me to talk about myself. But you know, I have been a technology nerd since I was a little kid. You know, I built my first computer with a soldering iron when I was 11 years old. You're a nerd nerd? Super nerd. Yeah, super nerd. Okay. And, you know, it just kind of caught on from there, right? So... Where are you from originally? Grew up in northern Minnesota. Okay. Spent a lot of time in my room playing with my computers. You know, all the cool kids were playing football, doing what they were doing. And I just sort of fell in love with, you know, later I realized it was about automation and programmability. I loved being able to take a machine and give it instructions to do something, whether it was play a video game or solve a math problem for me or compute pi to a trillion places or whatever it was. I just enjoyed that challenge. And, you know, went off and got an undergraduate degree in computer science, thought I was going to get a master's and PhD and never did any of that. Just stopped at the undergraduate degree because I had the good fortune in... What year this was? I'm old, so I'm trying to go back in time. I think it was 19... I'm going to do the math on this. Call it the late 80s. The internet wasn't a thing back then, right? There's a few things. It's called DARPAnet. There was the ARPAnet and the DARPAnet that was the precursor to the internet. Same protocols, but just crude stone knives and bearskins, right? And, you know, research institutions, government, and some universities were connected to it. You know, the university that I was at was on the internet, but you couldn't really do much because the internet, as we know today, has really been a generation that started in the 90s and forward. Long story short, I could talk about this for a long time, but with some other folks, I had the opportunity to start one of the country's first internet service providers. It was called MRnet, Minnesota Regional Network, and it started by asking the government for the National Science Foundation for a $50,000 grant to buy some equipment and to get a, at that point, 56 kilobit connection, which was super high speed in the day, you know, off to the next point of presence, which I think was University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Sure. So I started the first, you know, put the first internet node in Minnesota. I forget the years now, it was like 87, 88, 89, something in that range. It was 88. Sounds like 88. Anyway. And then, you know, I got so excited about this, right? The internet's here, and I went out to all the little colleges and universities and showed them what it was, and went up to all the companies and showed them what it was. And it was so cool to teach people about this cool new thing, having no idea that it would explode and become the, the tool that we all need now to just simply survive. Sure. Right. But that just launched me on a career of, of either building and operationalizing networks, or I spent a lot of my time in my career working for companies that actually built telecommunications equipment. So routers and switches, optical transport gear, things like that, doing as much as I could on the design side, evolving that technology to be better, stronger, faster, like we want to do. And then about 10 years ago, I met some, some folks who, you know, gave me another opportunity to move into what I call an adjacent space. I'd always been, you know, right down there in the nuts and bolts with networking and connectivity. But, you know, data centers, you know, one of the phrases I use today is a data center without connectivity is a really expensive warehouse. Right? So I said, okay, well, this is cool. I don't really know that much about data centers, but I know that we need connectivity in them. And that was really the genesis of DC blocks, right? So we started off as I've got my data center, I've got connectivity, we're going to offer those two things, mesh tightly together. And that became the paradigm and our initial offering. So, you know, I'm not sure this answers the question, where did I come from? Well, this is good. I'm a nerd from way back. And I've always just enjoyed solving problems and creating, I would say more, right? You know, the next, what's, what's the next thing you do? It's like, well, more, more of what I did before. Remembering that more is different. More is not just more. It's, it's different. And a great analogy is there's completely different engineering required to build a 100 story building than a 10 story building. Correct. On the one hand, 100 stories is just more, but the stresses, the infrastructure, everything that that 100 story building has to endure is different. So it's always been fun for me to build more, recognizing that more is different. And what does that different mean in imagining solutions for that? So listen, [00:07:49] Speaker 1: let's zoom from that a little bit. And we're going to come back because when there are people that are going to listen to this podcast, maybe they're in Nashville and they saw the news that article. And as you can tell, there's a lot of people paying attention to that program and we'll get to it, but a lot of people don't even know what a data center is, right? So, you know, in that time frame, you said 88, I think 87 is when amazon.com went live. So a lot of people really think that between 85 and 90 is when they, you know, the web went live, so to speak. And we know the truth, but the reality is it's then during that time when you were building networks, we were building data closets and then we got really big more. We got into data rooms, right? And that followed like the internet of things. And then I led to e-commerce and then we, we started getting into applications, we got into cloud and that for that, we started building data halls more. And then when cloud people would come in, they're like, I need the whole building just to myself because these consumers, which are us are, they demand so much of this that I need to build an entire data center just dedicated [00:08:52] Speaker 2: to me. And let's make sure we circle back around this. This is all consumer driven. This is a hundred [00:08:56] Speaker 1: percent consumer driven. So everyone that's listening right now is using multiple data centers to get this, right? Right. That's exactly it. It's touching a dozen data centers. Go ahead. The way I say this, [00:09:07] Speaker 2: right, you know, is, you know, the cloud is somebody else's computer and that computer has to live somewhere, right? And the computer needs storage that needs to live somewhere and that, and to disseminate that information from that cloud computer disk data, you need the network. Well, that's network equipment and that has to live somewhere. So a data center is where the cloud lives and the cloud is, you know, everything that that's on here. Right. We use the cloud and we know we do, right? Whether you're asking Siri, if there's a sushi restaurant down the street, that's open from five to nine. Right. That's AI and cloud. It's, it's everything, right? So everything we do anymore, right? Is all cloud. You're making an airline reservation, you're booking dinner, you're asking Siri or, or you're asking Siri for directions someplace. That's somebody's computer and that computer has to go. It's another utility. That's it. So the data center is the home for the, the knowledge and the intelligence that underlies everything we as consumers require our phones to do. And I think we can all agree that if we had to give up our phones, that's like the hardest. I'm always, I'm always rather give up food than my phone. So yeah, I don't, obviously the opposite [00:10:11] Speaker 1: would be the healthiest. Right. But I, I think it's important that some people that are going to be tuning in for the first time that don't know you now know a little bit, you're from Duluth, Montana or Minnesota. Oh, I love Montana too. Me too. But you, you kind of just nerded yourself into the industry. All of us, there was no path to getting into the data center industry. There's even today, if you were to go to college today to learn about data centers, whatever you would know by the time you graduate would most likely be obsolete. Right. [00:10:40] Speaker 2: Oh yeah. I mean, especially this last few years, you know, and especially I, I'll probably use the phrase hyperscalers a lot in this conversation, just to, to level set that, you know, the hyperscalers, you know, Meta, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, those guys, right. So those hyperscalers, but you know, this whole space has just been lit on fire because of those hyperscalers making applications that run on everybody's phone. So we're, we, the consumers are, are driving this increase at the demand for increased capacity. Right. But I'll say this just in context of DC blocks. We've been around about 10 years. We put our first data center on the ground in early 2016. It was in Chattanooga, Tennessee. It was a half an acre of land was an acre acre, a half an acre of land. It was a 500 kilowatt facility. And now we got down the ground, you know, we, we met the community, we got some local business, it was all going good. We put some more on the ground. And I always knew that we would have a good business, right. You know, there's, there's always been demand for data centers, whether it's hospitals or the law firm or the credit union or, or whatever it is, the university, right. There's always, you know, we talked about the cloud. We didn't talk about the cloud so much 40 years ago or 30 years ago, but those, those needs were always still there. So I always knew we'd have a good business, but you know, I don't know that any of us saw the incredible ramp that's caused by, again, the consumer demand for phones to work and Google and meta and Amazon to ramp up their ecosystems to be able to satisfy that at the rate they have. It's been, you know, I don't actually have the numbers in my head, but you know, we've had a nice linear growth over decades. In this last few years, it just spiked, you know, in terms of what the industry demands. So that's why we're seeing all these companies, you know, spend hundreds of billions of dollars, you know, an unfathomable, unfathomable amount of money almost on data center construction and infrastructure. You know, all, all the GPUs, all the CPUs, all the disk, all the memory, all the everything, right. And all the network gear. It's driving the economy. It's absolutely driving the economy. You might have the number in your head better than I do, but I think the hyperscalers this year are spending the neighborhood of six to seven hundred billion dollars. I think the American defense budget is a little bit more than that now. It's 900 billion going to 1.4 trillion next year. Okay, right. But 500 billion just on AI. Yeah. But so if you think about, you know, how much people in the 50s and 60s talked about, was it military industrial complex? Yes. And how all that money was going to, you know, do crazy things, but go build industry? Well, it did and it drove the economy. This is the new economy, right? It really is. And we're spending as much on, you know, hyperscalers infrastructure as the country spends on defenses, which is, it's so significant and it drives the economy so much in ways that a lot of us don't get to see. [00:13:24] Speaker 1: So, you know, for those that are listening in the last, you know, I say that we were working amongst the Henry Fords of our time. There we go. This is transformational infrastructure once in a generation. And I had imagined if there were social media back when we electrified the US grid, the concerns from the communities would very much match the ones that we see today from the local communities. I'm sure that even the zoos in every city were wondering why would you put a road so close to my zoo? Right. Or why would you have utility lines so close to my zoo? And I caution people what I said on FOX 17 that didn't get aired was not all data centers are the same, right? There are good actors and there are bad actors. And the type of data center that you described that you did in Chattanooga and your first one to the ones that you've done now, because I'm sure they've iterated and evolved as technologies do, but you've always probably had a very deep impact with the community where I'm building data centers for developers all throughout the country. And I'm not just building their data center. I'm building the soccer field or the dog shelter or a pizza shop or something else that needs to be added to that community. You guys do a lot more than just build data centers. And I want to keep- [00:14:35] Speaker 2: So I do want to answer that, but you said like three or four things in there. Yeah, bring me back. I kind of want to speak to all of them. So one of the first things you said was, you know, I think if there was social media at the time, and I'm paraphrasing you, I might have heard you wrong, but the social media at the time when electricity became a thing, I'm sure somebody would have complained about electricity. And I'm sure that in some of the first electrical circuits that were installed, I think it was in New York, wasn't it? Yep. Chicago World Fair. Chicago, okay. World Fair. But I think the first big deployments. Anyway, I'm sure somebody got electrocuted. Right? I'm sure of it. You know, I don't, I don't have the data. Still happens. And it still happens, right? So, you know, there, anybody who at that time would say, you know, I don't want electricity because my friend Bob got electrocuted. Well, there, there's truth there, right? There was something bad that happened. And, and, you know, we learn from those mistakes and we, we build our electrical ecosystems better right now. I think today, everybody wants electricity, right? And we've become so much better about how we generate electricity, how we transport electricity, how we use it, how it's, how safe it is, how we take steps to protect ourselves. Right? You know, there's a show on the History Channel called Modern Marvels. And there's this whole show dedicated to how, you know, nobody wanted in the thirties and forties to use electric power tools because there's electricity in that thing and I've got my hand on it. What if it electrocutes me? And a whole show dedicated to how you insulate those power tools, right? So that you don't kill yourself where you're trying to cut through a piece of wood. So we've gotten so much better about that. And, and, you know, one of the things I see in the data center ecosystem today with the people who are concerned about what we're doing and come to the town halls and object to, you know, water usage or noise or whatever it is, you know, there are kernels of truth in what they say. There have been bad actors. There have things, there have been things that have gone wrong in the past, right? Just like they were with electricity, just like they were, you know, somebody was the first person to get run over by an automobile. Right. Right. Well, you know, somebody was the first person or two people were first people to die in a car crash. Well, now, you know, cars smash into each other and they know how to bend the right way so that people stay alive. So we just continue to improve, right? You know, continuous improvement is always part of, I think, something we need to do as human beings just for ourselves. Well, I agree. But then certainly also with the work that we do. So again, a lot of the objections, a lot of the arguments, they're rooted in a kernel of truth, right? Yeah. And so you need to find a way, you know, in the course of getting to know people and having conversations with them, say, well, you're not wrong, right? That person did get hit by the car and die. That first person did get electrocuted. But look what we've done to make sure that those things don't happen anymore. And we do the same things now. You know, we're learning too. Every time we put a new data center on the ground, we learn. There's some new geological thing that we learn. Or, you know, and this is one of the things we've done since day one, and we have to, right? It's mandated by the jurisdiction of the government is, you know, we want to protect the planet. I'm a big believer, candidly, that I think we're destroying the planet at a rate that's not good for civilization. So I do want to protect species, right? I don't want to destroy the swamp or the marshland where the frogs lived. Do I do any of that? So, you know, we go through great, great expense and steps to make sure that we don't stomp on those things, right? Because we have to continuously improve as humans, individuals, as a civilization, and in the business that we do. But, you know, again, this is all consumer driven, too. So sometimes the consumer driving side pushes you harder. And it's possible that people have made mistakes, right? We really try not to, but we're all just humans. Yeah, I think that what we see now [00:18:09] Speaker 1: is the biggest thing being manufactured in the United States is an AI factory or a data center, a large data center campus. And I think that if you look back at the history of large-scale manufacturing in the United States, big companies have done bad things. They've done, I mean, look, Erin Brockovich made a movie about it, right? So there are real truths, the kernel of truth, as you said. There's real valid concerns behind everybody's thing, right? What I want to do is I want to address it, right? Because what I had said was Fox 17 was that there's companies that come into the community and they operate just like a utility. The type of data center that you're coming in with would function much like a utility to enable the first responders or the members of government that have access to emergency response services, like 911 call centers, you know, the local hospitals that have access to these things, the local enterprises. And it enables the ability for the local community to grow. You know, I think that the business wasn't being attacked, your business wasn't being attacked, the industry's being attacked. You know, I've talked to multiple people that work at DC Blocks. I've never met Jeff, your CEO, but I've never met a person that knows him that didn't go out of the way to tell me that that is an honorable person. So I have to imagine you guys have brought a lot of ethics with [00:19:23] Speaker 2: you as you guys were doing this. So it's an easy thing for people to say that they are good people and we do the right thing. And those are words that you hear people say, perhaps in politics, let's say, when you know, in fact, based upon their behavior, that's quite likely not true. You know, I've known Jeff Up Hughes for 10 years and, you know, he's an amazing guy. You know, he's smart and he's nimble, but you know, the, and I say this to him all the time, you know, I say to him, thank you for your leadership. And, and I don't mean the leadership in running the organization of the company. I mean that, that too, right. But his leadership in creating a culture at DC Blocks that is so focused on doing the right thing, taking care, you know, it's simple, so obvious, right. But taking care of your employees, making sure they have great health care, making sure they've got a great work environment, making sure that it's a, it's a fun place to work where they're not discriminated against you, whatever it is. Right. And, you know, Jeff's moral and ethical compass is as aligned in the right direction as any human being I've ever seen. And he has created a culture inside of the company that has made me a better person. Right. You look at this kind of go, wow. Yeah, that that's, I want to be that. I want to make, I want to be not to say that it wasn't right, but I want my moral and ethical compass to be as aligned as it is. So, and the thing is, you don't just wake up one day and say, you know, today I will be brilliant. Today I will be a better person. You can do that, but it takes time and it takes practice. But Jeff really drives into the organization with his leadership and that we take care of people. And it's not just the employees, you know, as we've gone out and this connects to the thoughts you had a few minutes ago, as we've put our data centers on the ground, we've got Chattanooga, Huntsville, Alabama, Birmingham, Alabama, Greenville, South Carolina, some other. Improving those communities along the way. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we will go out there, you know, and we were building smaller facilities at the time focused on retail. You talked a few seconds ago about the place where the bank does its business or the hospital has its records or the credit union does its thing or the law firm. Right. So we have those retail data centers and they tend to be smaller because everybody's sort of smaller than Google and Meta and Amazon. Right. But we'd go into those communities and, you know, and meet the people and go to where the land was. You know, we have some land in Birmingham, Alabama, that was the home of a steel mill. It had been out of, you know, I forget exactly the timelines. It hadn't been there for a long time. But there's a lot of soil that needed to be remediated because who knows what they have in the soil back in the day. And we went and did that. Right. And there's some homes just, you know, sort of right over there. It's like, well, let's go talk to those people and get to know them and understand their concerns. And then, you know, well, there's the afterschool center down the street where the kids whose parents, you know, work full time and they're not home at three o'clock. The kids will go there and hang out. Well, let's go give them some computers because we want to do the right thing. You know, we always have wanted to be that right neighbor and, you know, aligning again with what I said about Jeff and the moral and ethical compass and taking care of people. We've always done that. So some of these attacks, you know, that are, that are headed in our direction. They hurt a little bit because, you know, I'm sure that there are bad actors, right? I'm sure that bad things have been done. The first person did get electrocuted. That first person did get run over by the car. But when you feel like you've, you've really done the right thing at every step along the way, but now you're in the crosshairs as being a bad actor without really given, being given the opportunity sometimes to, I don't say defend yourself, but to, to explain and to have a calm conversation. That's hard. It's hard. Emotionally, it's got to be very charging. The empathy I [00:22:45] Speaker 1: have for your CEO is as a fellow CEO, my first responsibility is to the safety of my team. And knowing that your, has your team experienced death threats or anything crazy like that since [00:22:58] Speaker 2: this is all began to unfold? So I will resist the temptation to go into specifics. Sure. But yes. Yes. There's incredible. You know, we, we know where you live, you know, we heard what you said at the town hall tonight. We know where you live. All right. Or, or, you know, um, you know, after a town hall, you know, take the team, go to a restaurant, uh, to have a nice dinner. Well, some of the folks who were at the town hall followed you. Well, I'm not sure who got there first. Right. But I mean, almost an altercation. Yeah. Right. So, so there's been, there's been some bad things. Um, it's, it's, it's uncomfortable. Right. Which is why we're having this conversation [00:23:32] Speaker 1: because things have escalated to the point where it's just not making any sense. Right. How did DC blocks go from, you know, this group that's trying to bring something that could benefit the local community? How did it get mixed up with, you know, these AI factories that are, that are the ones that most people are concerned of right now. And it appears that you guys are building something that's based around network capability and enhancing the community, but people are just kind of lumping, they're lumping everything together. All data centers bad. Right. And I wanted to give you guys a chance to humanize the business because you guys are doing, I mean, are, is there anything that I can't ask you by the way? No, that's okay. So listen, what do you guys do when the community asked you, Hey, these are things that are concerning of us. What did you guys do to address their concerns? [00:24:17] Speaker 2: So yeah, if you gave some specific examples, it might be easier, but you know, how about noise? The noise, right? The noise. And you know, let's go, let's go to water. Water is always one of my favorites. Right. And, um, I'm going to just back up a second. I'm going to, I'm going to attack that. But, you know, one of the things that I've, I've said many times to many people, and I believe it, you know, not everybody does, but, um, there's a, if you, if you look at the political ecosystem in the country right now, you know, what, if you're, if you're lean to the left or lean to the right, yeah. Um, you go into social media and which has become the, the way that people communicate anonymously. Right. And sometimes anonymously, even not anonymously, people say interesting things, not anonymously, but you know, there's a huge polarization. But as you look at the, I'll call them the postings, right? You know, with, if you have an objective eye, you can look at these things and say, well, that can't be right. That, that, that just doesn't make sense. Again, whichever side of the political spectrum you're on, it's like, well, that, that can't be true. And then you go do a little research and sure enough, it's not, it's rooted perhaps in a little bit of truth, but it gets extra extrapolated, embellished, you know, um, bastardized into being a sensational story. Because guess what? Nothing, there's nothing that people like more than a great conspiracy theory or a great, you know, over-exaggerated story, you know, reality TV, what is it? We all know it's really scripted TV, designed to be as sensational as you can, because that's where ratings come from. So there's, there's a psychological effect to this too. Right. Yep. Um, where, where do you see, like, [00:25:49] Speaker 1: where do you see your guys' company today? Right now? Because the whole industry, every developer and operator is going to be paying attention. Everyone's watching what's happening. No pressure. Hey, but look what, what you guys are going to do is going to set the standard too. And I think that, you know, you guys are professionals, you guys are builders, you guys do this, you guys engage in communities and you solve problems, right? So this is probably a unique task that just, if it wasn't yours, it was going to be one of them that sparked enough attention to where everyone's leaning in and saying it's time to stop the rhetoric because now you have human beings that are trying to build utility plants for the local community. Cause that's all the data center is that size and scale. It's a utility for the community. And they're trying to build these things and they're being threatened with their lives or their physical security or their family security. And now we have to stop what we're doing and say, Hey, we have to address this narrative because it's going mainly unopposed. Let's talk about the fear has obviously entered the city of Nashville. Let's let some facts follow that, right? So what is it that you're doing and what is it that you're building and how do we battle that? This is your opportunity to defend almost your narrative and your position. And, and let's try to unpackage this to where people that are listening that may be living in Nashville are going to be able to listen to this and be like, this makes more [00:27:01] Speaker 2: sense now. Okay. So, so I might not remember all five of this sort of five big complaints that I hear. One is you're going to move in and my property taxes are going to go up. One is you're going to come in and either use all the water or contaminate my water. One is you're going to come in and make a lot of noise. One is you're going to consume energy and drive the price of electricity up. And what's the [00:27:21] Speaker 1: fifth one? The fifth one has something to do with air pollution pollution. There you go. All right. So they're saying, Hey, you're going to run these engines that are in a poll. Yeah. So let's just, [00:27:29] Speaker 2: let's just look at the water, at the water one, because it's, it's, it's an easy one. All right. And I'm going to go back to, you know, I think there's going to be a theme in this conversation with you this evening, which is yes, there have been bad actors and there may be bad actors, right? Let's just address [00:27:41] Speaker 1: it right now. There are bad actors that are just ruining it. I mean, I just saw CEO of one of those large hyperscalers. It was talking about like water for our machines is going to supersede humans. And you're like, dude, shut up, stop. You're not doing us any favors. So, so, you know, I'm not going to [00:27:56] Speaker 2: attribute there's bad actors is what I'm saying. I'm not going to attribute this to anybody or any particular place, but I've heard the argument. I've heard somebody say, you know, the data center, it came to my community and they use so much water and they took the water from the aquifer that we had a well and they took the water from the aquifer. And so now I don't have any water in my well. It's that data center that did it. And, you know, not the golf course, but I want to, I want to unpack that. So first of all, I have no way to confirm. I don't, I don't disbelieve the claim that the well went dry, right? I can't, because I don't, I don't get to know. So I can't, I can't say that that didn't happen, but let's just take a step back and think about the claim and what it is. So let's say that I'm a data center operator. Now we don't use water in that way. We, we are not a consistent user of water in the data centers that we build. I'll talk about that in a second, right? But let's just say that I build a data center and let's just say I'm going to build one that does use water, right? And it's a five billion dollar data center. And I go plop it down here and I dig some well or put some wells in and I start using all the water. I'm going to exhaust that water. And if it's just a hypothetically, I did that, right? Well then, you know, at some point there's no water. So then the data center doesn't run anymore, right? If, if in this example, which I'm making up, this is, this is not what we do, right? But if it's in this example, the data center uses water, well, I've got a five billion dollar paperweight now, right? If, if I was the guy that built that data center, why would I do that? It makes no sense for me to go spend five billion dollars to build a data center to deplete and exhaust the resource that I need to make it run. So at face value, it just doesn't really make sense. Yeah, you would have thought water out. You would have net zero water design. Right, right. Yeah. So, you know, if I was one of those guys that used water, we don't, you know, I'd find another way. And I, I believe that the people who use water, I think that they get that for utility, but you know, I can't speak to somebody else's business, right? In fact, we do use water, but we use water the way that the cooling system in an internal combustion engine vehicle uses water. So there's some water in there. And if you think about, I want to get too nerdy here, right? But if you think about how a vehicle with an internal combustion engine works, you know, the engine creates heat. So you pump cold water into it, the water gets heated, you circulate it through the engine, then it gets pumped out of the engine, goes into the radiator at the front of the car, where it gets cooled, right? So the water, the cold water goes into the engine, hot water comes out, and it makes a big loop like that. It's called a closed loop system, right? The only time you add water to your car is if you have a leak. Or evaporation. Or evaporation. And the evaporation is usually parasitic, right? You know, like once, you know, every five years you go, oh, yeah, [00:30:32] Speaker 1: I need to put a little bit of stuff in there. But it's not as much water as it is a radiator fluid, because water can't absorb and reject heat fast enough. So we use a mineral oil or a fluid like a [00:30:40] Speaker 2: glycol. It's purple and glycol, I think, is the additive in the water, right? That helps it be a factor of heat. But yeah, the point is, you know, so do we use water? Okay, Colonel of Truth, yes, we do in fact use water. But what we will do for our facilities is on day one, you know, we will bring in, and it's going to vary based on the size of the facility, but let's say it's a half a million gallons of water. But we're going to buy from the utility, right? We're going to run a hose to, you know, XYZ County Public Works, right? Get our half million gallons of water, and that water is literally going to live in that data center forever, you know, forever. And it'll just keep being pumped and chilled over here, heated by the equipment over there, and go in an infinite loop. If ever we need to drain the system to do maintenance, you know, the very last thing we're going to do is dump that out in the parking lot, right? So it goes in, there's all sorts of rules about this and that, you know, say we have to follow, but we want to follow, right? To take that water and propylene glycol out of the system, put it in a tank, do our maintenance, pump it back in. So we don't use water in that way, right? We don't, we're not a consistent, continual user of water, where we deplete whatever the ecosystem is, whether it's the well, you know, and we would never go to a well anyhow, I don't think anybody would, but, or whether it's the utility, right? There's, it's just self-defeating, [00:31:55] Speaker 1: it's shooting yourself in the foot to do that. And so we don't do it that way. Yep. So I'll use some math. It was, I spoke at the capital of Texas a few months ago, and one of the other developers that was there had talked about how they build 200 megawatts in a way using a closed loop water system that requires less water than five U.S. homes. So you could do the math, you know, divide five U.S. homes by four, and that's how much water is consumed in a 50 megawatts. Like five homes for a year, or five homes? Five homes for the year. Okay. Yeah. So, I mean, it's flushing toilets and cooking and things like that, right? So you're going to use water. I mean, if you had the 200,000 square foot data center and a 200,000 square foot Class A office space, I would argue today that Class A office space uses way more water than the data center does just because you have so many humans that are [00:32:37] Speaker 2: going on. Right, right. And again, you know, we're going to use water one time. Yeah. Fill up the system and it will be, you know, forever is a long time, right? But, you know, figuratively, the water will stay. So, [00:32:46] Speaker 1: check. If you're listening, you're paying attention in Asheville, your water's safe. And it's not going to have any impact on that, the quantity of water you have, the quality of the water you have, or the price of the water you have. Right. What about the other ones that these people are still concerned [00:32:58] Speaker 2: about? Yeah. So, let's talk about the air pollution piece, right? Historically, if you think about the mission for a data center, and I'll go back to holding up my phone a million times during this conversation, we all want this thing to work 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. Instantaneously, by the way. Instantaneously as well, right? But, you know, you know how frustrated you get when you go to do something and it doesn't work. It's three seconds for that thing to come up. The frustration level builds very, very, very quickly, right? So, you know, we have a thing called an SLA, a service level agreement. And basically, on the power side, our service level agreement target, mathematically, is 99.999%, which gives you something like 360 seconds a year of allowable downtime. In the entire operation of the company, we've never had a hard power failure in any one of our facilities, which has been super cool, right? So, we've been 100% uptime, but you want to have 100% uptime. So, how do you do that? On the design side, you know, the primary source of power, I won't say always shall be, but, you know, always has been, maybe always shall be, to get power from the grid, from, you know, it's Georgia power for us, or Dominion Energy, or whatever, the power entities that generate power in our geography, right? So, we get power from them, and that power is very reliable from them. But then, Hurricane Zelda blows through and takes down the power lines, or the tornado blows through, or something happens, and the power lines get cut. And, you know, you do your best to have multiple feeds coming into the data center. So, if, you know, Storm Zelda- Utility goes away. That one, you know, so you've got the other one. But, you know, it certainly has happened, where all the power goes out. In the local community. Well, at least to us, you know, power is always, outages are usually- Sure. Isolated wherever there was a cut in a transmission line, or something. Heavy industrial was going to be cut first. Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm just talking about, like, storm-related damage. It could even be, and I don't think we experience them so much in our geographies that I know of, but I, you know, I remember, I have a recollection, [00:34:56] Speaker 1: like, in- Data centers are designed to lose power all the time. Well, that's it, right? So, [00:34:59] Speaker 2: that's where I was going, right? So, utility power is our thing, right? We buy it from the grid, and then we have to be prepared for the eventuality that something's going to interrupt that power. [00:35:08] Speaker 1: Because grid utility is 99.9. It's only three nights. Okay. You're trying to get the- There you go. 5.9 on design, 100% on the uptime, right? So, we got to be, we want to be, [00:35:17] Speaker 2: we want to do 100. We designed 99.995, right? So, what that means then is, like, all right, if we want to get 99.999, we have to do power generation on-site. So, if we lose all power, I need to have a power generation facility on-site to keep the dentist running because everybody wants- [00:35:35] Speaker 1: Because I want my, when I'm scrolling through my ATM transaction, I want to see it right now, right? [00:35:40] Speaker 2: And, yeah, right. And so, we all get frustrated when our phones don't work or whatever. The internet doesn't work for us, right? Right. So, we have our own power generation facilities on-site. And historically, that has been with diesel generators. So, a very large, you know, V16 quad-turbo diesel engine that sits out there, and when, you know, I could talk for hours about just this little dance of what happens when the power goes out. I'll try not to do that. That 360 seconds of the year where it could go out. Yeah. But, you know, what happens is there's a UPS in the building, UPS just like you have, maybe you have a UPS at home on your computer. That's a battery, or a bunch of batteries in our case. So, the power goes out, the batteries still provide electricity to all the equipment, the cloud, right, that lives in the data center. And then, within 10 seconds, you know, the generators will start, come up to full RPMs and start generating power. And then, the system will start taking, you know, electricity from the generators rather than from the grid. And when the grid comes back, the generator is shut down, and then we go back to the grid and take power from the grid. So, that dance will continue, right, switch to grid, switch to generator, switch to grid as many times as it needs to for an emergency, or if there's a spate of outages. And it does happen, right? It's fairly infrequent, and it's usually storm-related when a power line gets cut someplace. You know, diesel generators have not historically been the cleanest things, right? So, there's a whole movement to put in what's called tier four diesel generators, right? Which is basically a way of just scrubbing all the pollution out of the exhaust, out of the diesel generators. And let's just be clear, I'm going to be very honest about this, right? I'm not going to stay in here, pretend that we live in utopia. You know, when you get in your car, you put schmutz into the air when you drive it. If you have an electric car, the power generation facility that made the electricity, put schmutz in the air, right? You know, these diesel generators, we can get them cleaner and cleaner and cleaner, but they're never going to be perfect, right? So, but there's, you know, huge energy towards moving to tier four generators if we continue with diesel. You know, one of the things that I've been doing in my role at Diesel Blocks is looking for alternative ways to generate power on site that doesn't burn. Yeah, so natural gas. So, you know, you've got to get the energy there, so it's probably natural gas. It could be methane, it could be ammonia, it could be a lot of things. But there's some really, really cool technologies. Fuel cells, which are great. On pencil as well. There's no combustion, right? So, the issue is always combustion. When you explode the fuel, whatever it is, all the bad stuff gets spit out of that, right? So, there's a technology called flameless oxidation, which is a way of pressurizing the fuel and getting the same explosive energy out of it without having combustion. So, there's some great linear generators that use flameless oxidation to do that. The fuel cells, right? You know, they work. They basically, I'm going to get the chemistry wrong, so I'm not going to try. I'll make a fool out of myself on the podcast, right? But fuel cells basically just convert natural gas into energy quietly, and the only output is water, drops of water, right? So, you know, working to not only clean up the diesel infrastructure and move away from it, but, you know, to adopt these new technologies that are flameless or use some technology that's not combustion, and then they're also quieter. They're more expensive, right? So, that's a problem, right? But just like anything else, with wind and solar, you know, the cost of wind and solar lately has, in the last 10 years, has reduced dramatically, which is a beautiful thing for the planet, right? Because, in my opinion, this is me, you know, we've got to move away from fossil fuels. We've got to move to sustainable energy. We just do. There's just, you know, there's just so much oil left underground, right? So, but it's a process, and it's a painful process for us all. But, you know, we're taking, we've taken great steps to move in this direction, and we'll continue to do that. [00:39:15] Speaker 1: So, I agree. I think the way that you challenge the narrative regarding these things emit a lot of pollutants and make a lot of noise is you throw a lot of money at putting things on top of those engines so they don't do those things. You put a lot of things around those engines so the noise is suppressed, right? Dampening. There's so many technologies that allow you to make sure that, you know, whatever that, I think it was 65 decibel, but whatever the requirement would be, that you're able to maintain whatever the requirements are of the city. So, you met the standards now on closed loop from a water perspective. You met the standard for air from a noise. I mean, did you guys do a noise study? Are you commissioning a noise study? I think I saw something that there was, hey, we're willing to pay for a noise study to make sure that we're not actually harming any of the animals that are pretty far away. I mean, there's a lot of things. I mean, the noise of that area, right? You're close to all the railroad checks. Yeah. Right? And there's mother heavy industries around there, right? Yeah. So, there's other things that make a lot of noise in that area is what I'm saying that. Yeah. Yeah. You know, if you're not going to throw stones at anybody else, right? Sure. No, no, no. It's a valid concern. But I'm saying, what are you guys doing? [00:40:21] Speaker 2: You know, we all get, I think we all, most all of us get packages from Amazon. Those get put on a truck. Yeah. And trucks, big engine, you know, in and out of the warehouse all day long. [00:40:30] Speaker 3: Before we continue with this episode, we want to invite you to join a mission that extends far beyond business. Anchors of Hope is our annual campaign running from D-Day, June 6th, through Veterans Day, November 11th, with one goal, create meaningful career opportunities for veterans, military spouses, and first responders. We're asking employers everywhere to make one commitment. Hire at least one. One veteran, one military spouse, or one first responder. Or don't even stop there. Hire as many as you can. These aren't individuals who have spent their lives serving others. Now, it's our turn to serve them. So, take the pledge and make the hire. You will quite literally impact and change a life. Join us on Veterans Day as we celebrate the organizations that answered the call. One commitment, one opportunity, one life changed. Become an anchor of hope for those that defended our freedoms. And if you don't realize it, also defended free enterprise. We've got to engage in it because of them. So, now this is our opportunity to give them a chance to engage in free enterprise as well. [00:41:38] Speaker 2: Thank you. We recognize, in our role as a data center provider, that we need to commit to continuous improvement. Okay. And we're going to do that. So, you know, I talked about energy. I talked about pollution. One of the frustrations is that there are so many polluting entities. You can just look, you can just go walk or stand on the street corner for half an hour. How many trucks go by or how many trains go by? I don't see anybody. I say this with love. We want to be a good neighbor. I listen to everybody's concerns. The community is going to tell us where we need to improve. We're going to do that. I don't see anybody out there protesting the trains. I don't see anybody protesting the 18-wheel trucks that are delivering their Amazon packages, right? And so, again, it's a little painful to be so demonized in certain cases. And again, committed to continuous improvement, right? But, you know, when there are plenty of other things, it's like, okay, well, if we're this much of a concern, isn't that rail yard? You know, and I don't want to compare and contrast. I don't want to throw stones at anybody else in this. But it does seem a little unfair. And it almost seems like, candidly, a little bit of a, you know, of a herd mentality. You know, people love a good herd to climb on, right? And I get that, you know. I think if they understood it as like a network gateway type of [00:43:00] Speaker 1: data center that's going to give that neighborhood, that community access to everything, because the network is what you're giving these people compute capacity towards. Yeah. In a lot of cases, you know, [00:43:10] Speaker 2: we, so we do have retail data centers. I mentioned the cities earlier. And, you know, those serve the local community or, you know, the community 50 miles that way because they want to have their gear not where the headquarters is. Yeah. Something like that. And that's the banks and the credit unions and the law firms and the hospitals and whatnot. And those things are, you know, really, really hands on with the community, right? You know, University of Alabama in Birmingham is one of our customers, right? And they have a whole bunch of, you know, research and education equipment in our building. You know, they call it high performance compute, right? So, you know, for research, for education, for things that people use, if you go to, if you go to the name of the credit union now, I probably can't mention it because I'm NDA anyhow, but we have a big credit union that's a customer there. Well, anybody who uses that credit union, their stuff lives in our data center. In the case of, you know, some of these larger facilities, you know, we're building them for the hyperscalers, the list of companies that I mentioned before, the biggest, now the biggest companies in the world, sort of by far, right? And there's a lot of times we don't actually get to see what, or even know what they do in the inside, in these buildings, right? Because you build the space, the power, the cooling, and then they move in. Because for them, you know, it's, it's a security issue for them as a company, right? Because they don't know how knowledge of that information could be used against them. I mean, in some cases, you know, there are homeland security concerns, right? You know, one of our facilities, we get a visit from the homeland security people often to make sure that we have all our controls and safeguards in place to prevent incursions, either physical incursions to the property or technology incursions across the network, you know, hackers and things like that, right? So we don't really always get to know what happens in these facilities, but, you know, we will learn from the customer, well, this is a network node, okay? And it's just filled with networking gear. And, you know, again, the network is, the network is the new railroad, right? You know, in the 1860s, it was literally the railroad. In 2026, it is the network that underlays the dark fiber networks, right, that underlay everything we do. [00:45:11] Speaker 1: People don't understand the hubbyspoke backbone of the U.S. internet is using the right-aways of the U.S. railway lines connecting what's now known as the NFL cities, right? [00:45:19] Speaker 2: There you go, actually. [00:45:20] Speaker 1: So this, this Nashville's Grasmere business park, I mean, it's a 69,000 square foot data center, it's 10 megawatts. You weren't building Goliath, you were building a data center that is appropriate size for a utility plant for a data center in a community that is going to be expanding and growing like Nashville. This is, of the programs coming into a city, I think, like, it used to be like, hey, man, there, there's a million reasons. In Texas, the number one thing that pisses people off is, you got to remember, remember 12 years ago in this game, when every state of the union was racing to get a data center operator to come to their state, because it built jobs, right? And it built a tax basis, and it, I mean, look, it, it offered a lot [00:46:03] Speaker 2: to those communities. Yeah, well, in a lot of cases too, right? You know, the data center would come in and, and replace some old, dilapidated, some, some old industry. Repurposing a distressed asset. Yeah, like I said, you know, in Birmingham, the facility we had there was a steel mill. Yes. You know, and the steel, the, the structures of the steel mill had been gone for a while. The, the, the gunk that they put in the dirt was still there that we cleaned up, right? But in a lot of cases, these are eyesores. These are forgotten pieces of land that nobody wants to build on or can build on because you've got to remediate the soil. So there are a lot of cases, you know, several examples in our history where we'll go in and, you know, clean up a mess to put in a big, beautiful building that's, that's calm and quiet. [00:46:42] Speaker 1: Right. On almost any city, unless you're building greenfields for like out in the rural or the, the mid urban environments. I mean, you were definitely going to be remediating buildings with that vitamin A in it. And I mean, I've walked through, uh, semiconductor fabrication facilities to repurpose into data centers that I'm pretty sure I've got cancer just walking through the building. Right. So like we've come a long way, just, I mean, it took decades before we put seatbelts in cars to several years beyond that before they were required. So like every emerging industry like data centers is going to start off where people aren't happy. If we're driving cars like Model T's right now, nothing would constrain local infrastructure more than something like that. Nothing's noisier, more pollutant, but we don't, we drive really efficient vehicles now. Right. And we're building really efficient data centers. So you check the box on, I know that there are particularly controlled technologies and noise control, dampening technologies that allow you to suppress the concerns that come out of an engine. Yeah. And I think that if people understood where the real issues with engine emissions are coming from, they're going to be from your, again, your Amazon delivery drivers are going to pollute more. The guy that's pushing a two-stroke engine [00:47:50] Speaker 2: on his lawnmower. Yeah. That's a big one. That's a huge, anybody that you got, like an old school gas lawnmower, those things put so much stink. But people don't get it. Go Google this. Who's ever [00:47:59] Speaker 1: listening, right? The most efficient building on earth right now that you'll ever find will be a data center because they're designed to so many higher levels. The good ones, the good ones. You know, [00:48:07] Speaker 2: there are, there are, there's legacy data centers. There's bad actors. There's, there's data centers about there for 50 years, not throwing stones. Yeah, yeah. 50 years ago, we had a different understanding. But we could retrofit those facilities. As civilization about, you know, what was good enough. Yeah. And what was good enough 50 years ago probably isn't good enough anymore. It's not smart, it's not good. You couldn't support the workload requirements of an AI workload today. But you also talked about efficiency, right? You know, the new facilities have to be so hyper efficient because, simply because of the power that they burn, right? You know, I don't remember what my per kilowatt hour electric charge is at home. It's like 17 cents a kilowatt hour or something like that. You know, and we get, I think we get a little better rate than that. You know, all commercial, I think users, being big users, get a little better rate. Economy scale to get a better price point. Yeah. But if you think about, you know, what goes on in a 100-megawatt data center or a 200-megawatt data or a 500-megawatt data center or a gigawatt campus, right? You know, shifting, you know, a 1% increase in efficiency is, you know, crazy amounts of cash savings per year in not spending money on electricity, but then also not wasting electricity and leaving the lights on. Sure. Right? So, you know, we've had to become more efficient just because of the scale of these things. There's a thing called PUE, right? Which is the ratio of, you know, if I, how much of my electricity do I burn from my computer gear versus keeping the building cold, right? And a PUE of two means I use one unit of electricity to power my gear and one unit of electricity to cool it and keep the lights on and, you know, keep the refrigerator working in the lounge area and stuff like that, right? And so, you know, we strive for a PUE of like 1.2, 1.3, right? So, if I have a megawatt of critical IT load, I need another 200 kilowatts and 1.2 PUE to be able to provide the cooling and the lights and the security systems and the cameras and the monitoring gear, everything that I need to make it run. So, you know, in the olden days, you would see... PUE of force. And olden days is 10 years ago. They weren't measuring PUE probably. [00:50:08] Speaker 1: And, you know, like I think the Genesis... Christian Bilotti came on the podcast to talk about how he invented PUE. Oh, cool. Okay. He was at Microsoft. And when did he do it? What was the year? I can find out on the podcast, but he was flying home from Japan when he was challenged with that question. So, he invented the formula for PUE. And I mean, I think Dean Nelson and Infrastructure Masons really focused hard on driving that PUE down with all the things that they're doing to create awareness for sustainability. [00:50:33] Speaker 2: We have seen some data centers. I'm not going to explain the context here. There's this NDA stuff, right? But we have seen some data centers with a PUE of three or four. Right? And, you know, if you have a smaller data center and you're not burning that much... You're not heavily utilized. You know, it might be... I don't appreciate the inefficiency myself, right? Yeah. But you might be able to make a case that it doesn't matter. And people have clearly done that because those data centers exist. You know, we're continuously striving to get that PUE down to the most efficient number because it saves money and it saves electricity, which is what we want to do. You can spend that money. And those things equal sustainability. [00:51:13] Speaker 1: And that's exactly right. Because you're not wasting stuff. That's exactly what it is. Yeah. So, all right. So, listen. So, I think that we covered engines, we covered water, we covered the noise through what you do with dampening the noise. [00:51:25] Speaker 2: So, let's start. There's two things. I'm in the mode of being fully transparent. [00:51:29] Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. [00:51:30] Speaker 2: So, we talked about the noise, for example, from like a diesel generator. Right? And there's ways to... There's mufflers on your car. You know, cars, if you listen to a Lexus, man, those babies make no noise. Yeah. Right? So, let's just, you know, let's just accept for the sake of this conversation and how brief it has to be, that there's ways to make, you know, the diesel engines quieter and cleaner because there are ways to do that. As you see a diesel, you know, lots of SUVs out there right now on the road are diesel. You can't tell, right? Because if there's DEF, it's a special fluid you pump into the exhaust and it cleans it all up, right? On the sound side, you know, you know, the process of continuous improvement for me is always, you know, I need to learn more, I need to be smarter, right? And one of the things I love about AI, you know, people use it for different things and creative things. But one of the things that I love is every day I task myself with micro learning. Now, an example from a couple months ago, it was, was it Artemis II? This is the spacecraft that went around the moon and I saw this, this graphic, right? They said, well, you know, it launched in this direction, but the moon was over here and then, but they do this and then the moon catches up to it and, you know, it just perfectly goes around the backside of the moon and catches the gravity and whips it around the other side, you know? And I was like, yeah, how do you do that? I'm a different kind of engineer. So, you know, I, I do some micro learning to, to figure out how, how that happened. And then there's a whole, a whole spit of, you know, here's the formulas for how you calculate all that. So I love, I love the micro learn on a daily basis with AI. It's like, teach me something new because there's nothing it doesn't. No. But one of the things I did some micro learning on was, you know, I know from our operational data centers that when you drive up to them in your car and you park and you open the door, you cannot hear that thing running. Yeah, you won't. You can't. Unless it's on engine. You can't, if, if the diesels are running, you can hear, you can hear that, you can hear that. Right. But you can, if the data center is just a normal state operation, which is 99.99 something percent of the time, you can't hear it. You can't. And that's just me. And I'm, I'm old, but I'm not, my hearing's still good. You can't hear it. And, you know, I saw a thing again, I'm not going to point to any one specific thing, but I think it was a posting I saw on Instagram. There's a guy who's got his phone in his hand. He's at a town hall. He's at a microphone and he pushes the button and the phone starts going. Making this horrific, you know, noise. Right. And he says, now this is the noise from a data center. And I live three miles away from the data center, but you know, this is, this is the, the intensity and the amplitude and the frequency of the noise that I'm going to hear three miles away. And so let's, you know, just first, you know, try to separate that, that just is not, I don't know where he, I don't know where he got that information. I don't know how you put that forward without actually having the example in front of you. But, you know, so there's a lot, again, a lot of misinformation, a lot of false claims, but, you know, so there's the noise that you can hear. I can tell you, if you go inside of one of our data centers, right, if you think about what's happening in there, I have got a cabinet filled with equipment that might burn 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 KW. Right. And 60 KW is the equivalent of having, you know, 60 hair dryers, you know, like old school ones that mom had, right? 60 hair dryers, set to high, all making heat in one cabinet. And I've got hundreds of cabinets, hundreds of cabinets in this place. And each one of those has got 60 hair dryers in it, whatever it is. So the process inside the data center where I've got to be blasting cold air in there, getting the hot air out, getting the cold air in, there's a lot of air moving around inside of a data center. I'm gonna say it again. We want to be a good neighbor. We want, I want to be a good citizen of planet Earth, just me, just me, myself, right? I want to be a good citizen of civilization. Yeah. I don't want to hurt anybody. So the last thing I want to do, the last thing I want to do is harm the animals in the zoo. The last thing I want to do is harm somebody three miles away or whatever it is. So, you know, we all have to get smarter on this. And there's a lot of work that needs to be done to study, you know, what is, what is real in here and what is misinformation. And if it's real, if there's a problem, there's nothing. I personally love more than solving a problem, but you know, we're committed to doing whatever it takes, right? To, to be a good neighbor, to make these problems, you know, disappear. [00:55:40] Speaker 1: So what are you doing to engage with the community then? Like, were you guys aware that the community was going to have some resistance to this just based on the optics that it's close to a zoo? [00:55:50] Speaker 2: You know, hindsight is always, sure, perfect. And I think retrospectively, you can look back and say, okay, I get it. I understand why, if you're, if you're armed with misinformation about, you know, poisoning the water, poisoning the air. Driving at the price of energy. Driving at the price. If you're armed with misinformation and then you've got, you know, a zoo and nobody, nobody wants to kill the animals, right? Nobody does. So yeah, I think it's easy to make a correlation between those things and, and on, on the, the, the side of the community that's, the objection the community is raising now, right? I think, I think it's, if you've armed, if you're armed with that misinformation, it's easy to make that correlation and say, they're going to kill the animals. We have to stop this. And of course, if I thought that animals were being killed, I'd want to stop it too, right? But you know, we have to really focus on understanding what is real, what is the real problem? And what can we do about it? And, and, you know, again, a lot of, a lot of studies, a lot of work needs to be done to understand, you know, I know that we're committed to 65 decibels at the fence line, right? And 65 decibels is about right here. A normal, calm conversation like you and I are having are 65 decibels. I can tell you when you drive up to our facilities, you can't hear them run. I'm learning more about this low frequency noise, you know, in the 50 to 200 hertz range to understand what we can do with that. But, you know, once we have a problem to solve, you know, we, we do want to continuously approve and we're [00:57:22] Speaker 1: going to. So what do you, where do you stand with the city? I know you guys have your permits. Are you waiting for that? Are they being recalled? I think I read something about potentially like the city threatening an imminent domain. Where are you at? [00:57:36] Speaker 2: Yeah. So, so what I'm going to do, you know, at this point, since there's so much turbulence around this right now, and candidly, almost as soon as you have a thing that you think is a fact with regard to what's happening in Nashville, you know, it could be obsolete by the time you're able to say it again. Sure. So I'm not trying to be evasive or elusive. You know, I know that there has been some momentum. We originally had a larger facility planned there. I know we've backed away. [00:58:07] Speaker 1: Was that larger? It was like the 40 megawatts? It was 40 megawatt, right? Yeah. [00:58:10] Speaker 2: And so, so I know we backed away from the 40 meg and we're focusing on the 10 meg. Yeah. So it's a much smaller facility. So I know that that's happened. I believe that there's been good progress. So this, this is what I'm going to say, right? Because I don't, I don't want to say something that's obsolete. Sure. Five, or wrong, or I mean, no longer correct based on what I heard this morning even, right? But you know, I believe that there's good progress in, in addressing the concerns for the 10 megawatt facility, which is, you know, just feels smaller, is smaller, smaller. [00:58:36] Speaker 1: It's more of a utility for them to understand than it would be a bigger one when they're getting clumped into the bigger ones with the big. [00:58:42] Speaker 2: Well, if you think something is bad, you know, 40 of them seems worse than 10 of them, right? [00:58:46] Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Basic math. I mean, like there, there's so much about this site that I feel like people still, no matter how much you're going to explain to them right now, you're not going to change their religion, right? Some people philosophically, some are going to be open-minded and be like, all right, I think what they want is they want to know openly and transparently. And based on one of those articles that came out, they kind of implied that you guys weren't being open and transparent. I mean, was there, when you saw growing developments and people were pushing back on developments, did you guys shift your approach and figure like, maybe we need to get out here and control this narrative better? [00:59:29] Speaker 2: So I'm going to object a little bit to the way you phrased the question, not to control the narrative. With the objective facts. Yeah. So I don't necessarily want to control the narrative. I don't want to be in control. I want to... The media wants to control it. So what was the movie with, with Tom Cruise and, you know, I want the truth. You can't handle the truth. Oh, a few good men of honor. A few good men. I love that scene. Everybody loves that scene. So, you know, I don't want to control the narrative that, because that implies some nefarious, those words can be construed to imply. [00:59:58] Speaker 1: Yeah, we govern an intent, right? So if your intent is just to explain to the community what you're doing, that's not controlling the narrative, but that's, that's controlling the narrative, right? Because you're trying to explain to them, hey, this is what we're bringing. I mean, we haven't even talked about jobs. I'd imagine, you know, you have to do some math and you probably realize how many people it's going to take to build it and how long that takes. Yeah. And we leave the, this many people back to operate it. And, and that's, you know, let's say arbitrarily three per megawatt. And those people create, you know, six new jobs in the community they live in. [01:00:26] Speaker 2: They spend money, they do all sorts of things, right? So, yeah. So, you know, transparent, pure transparency, right? Now, let's just say that I was building a Ford Motor Company manufacturing plant, and I was building an F-150s, you know, and it was the same size as our data center. There's certainly going to be a lot more employees in that Ford Motor Company assembly plant of the same square footage than it's going to be in our data center, right? So, I mean, I can't argue that, you know, there's fewer full-time employees just because, you know, the equipment is, I don't want to say set it and forget it. It's, you know, everything in the world needs maintenance, right? And we're always maintaining the facilities, but it doesn't require a crew of 200, right? So, even like a car, it's a vehicle for [01:01:07] Speaker 1: exchange of information versus people. So, a car requires someone that could build it. There's people that make a living just building cars. They require people that operate them, just make a living operating those things. And there are people that make a living fixing them. Yeah. And that's what this data center would bring to the market is three different types of new jobs. All right. Well, [01:01:23] Speaker 2: so, you know, we're buying power, right? So, anybody that works in the power delivery ecosystem, whether it's the guys that generate the power, keeps the plant running, keep the power lines up, local trees, trim the trees, right? To make sure the trees don't fall on the power lines. So, we buy a lot of power. You know, we, you know, all the equipment needs maintenance and support, right? So, you know, there's a maintenance regimen for everything, right? We're going for that 100% uptime. So, it means we've got to continuously maintain these things. So, we're hiring local trades people to come in and do work. You mentioned the construction process, you know, hundreds, if not thousands, of workers during the construction process. And they're all over, they're all over the spectrum. I'm going to just go to a tangent for a second and talk about something, right? It's like, when I sit on a panel or at a conference or whatever, inevitably, there's some sort of 22-year-old person in the audience that, you know, raises their hand and they have a question and they're very eager and they're very energetic and like, "What can I do? Jeff, how do I get into the data center space? It seems so cool. I want to be in." And the first place that my brain goes is, "Oh, you know, they want to be the one that's writing the software to train the AI model or doing the inference or doing whatever it is to make the AI work." But, and that might be true. Maybe that's what they want. But my answer is always the same, right? It's like, "Okay, well look, if you think about what a data center is, right, I got to build the thing." And that is hundreds, if not thousands, of tradespeople and electricians and plumbers and masonry workers and- Blazers. I'll tell you what, anytime I've ever tried to like do drywall in my house, I cannot make those seams come out smooth. But those guys just smack that, that, what's the stuff called? I forget what it's called. Oh, when they're just- They're drywalling it. Mudding it. You get mudding it, you tape it and you mud it. Those guys just go "Wap, wap, wap." And it's perfectly smooth and it really irritates me because I cannot do that myself. -Grasping. -Yeah, right. But so there's so many jobs along the way, including, you know, and I don't want to- We all need each other, right? We live in a world where, you know, you know, we've got people who maintain the lawn. They've got their landscaping business. They're out there putting flowers and stuff, right? Maybe that's not a job you want to have, but it's a job they want to have. So there's so many different ecosystems that just having the business there feeds. And all those jobs are important. It's what builds a fabric of people, and a diverse fabric of people. You know, maybe somebody really loves flowers, you know, and they want to come and beautify the whole front. And we've done that. We work our best to make the buildings beautiful, right? With beautiful lawns and flowers and things like that. So the jobs that are created by data centers are not just, you know, you've only got, you know, 14 people in there, or whatever the number is. It's like, well, sure. But, you know, they have families and those families have kids and those kids go to school and they pay money and they go to McDonald's and the people that maintain the lawns and the people that keep the electricity running and the whole power ecosystem, you know, everything that we use, just like any business, we use things. The break, fix teams. Yeah. And it feeds the community. So, so just, just tactically in terms of jobs, right? I can't say that we have as many employees in the data center as a Ford Motor company plant building F-150s, because there's a million guys in the assembly line. But, you know, it's still an ecosystem. The thing I do want to point to is, is tax base, right? So, you know, anybody who owns a home, anybody who owns a home or owns a condo, you know, what happens once a year? Well, the county sends you a bill that says, "Thou shalt pay these property taxes." Right? Right. And, and you just, you have to pay those every year. So, and, and what are property taxes based upon, you know, the value of property? So you've got a $200,000 home, $300,000 home, whatever your property taxes are going to be. So, you know, we've just put in a $2 billion. Yeah. That's a lot of taxes. Home, right? So, you know, one of the things that data centers do is, you know, in, in some jurisdictions, it might be the most, it might be the single greatest generator of taxpayers. I mean, the single greatest taxpayer in the jurisdiction. [01:05:12] Speaker 1: And that's why there's a lot of pushback in other markets on data centers is because they did get tax incentives and abatements to go into those markets. And they're like, you don't need them. And, you know, Texas, I think of Governor Abbott right now is going after that, right? So I, I think you guys are coming to the market saying that you're paying your way without [01:05:28] Speaker 2: those incentives. Let's circle back to that. So, you know, in, in fact, we did receive some tax incentives in certain markets to come in and build data centers when, when we cleaned up. Yeah. When you're repurposing, they were so, you know, not gonna mention any places, right? But the, the government entities there were so excited, right? The two things, right? We're cleaning up that old mess that's been sitting there for 40 years and you're bringing cool tech and tech jobs to my town. How can I help? That was a message for a really, really long time. And now that message is, you know, because of politics. Politics and misinformation, it's, it's flipped on its side. But, you know, in many cases, you know, these, these big hyperscale data center campuses are the single largest payer of property taxes in these jurisdictions. And those property taxes go to the same places that they go. Schools. When you, when you pay them, it's parks and schools and potholes. First responders. First responders and, and all of that. So, and, and that's just the property. There's another component to this too, you know, inside these buildings, you know, and, and I said earlier, and it's true, you know, we don't necessarily, as, as the folks who build the infrastructure, we don't always get to know what Google and Meta are doing in there. But there's a lot of really expensive computers and disks in every, you know, the GPUs, those Nvidia chips are amazing, but they're also not cheap, right? The entities that own that equipment, they have to pay business personal property tax on that equipment that's in the data center. And that also goes to the jurisdiction. So, you can, you can argue about whether they got a three-year incentive to build the building. But, you know, these buildings are going to be there for 15, 20 years, forever, 30 years, going to be there forever, right? A long time. So maybe there's a few years of incentives. Maybe there's not anymore, right? But, you know, the, the tax generation vehicle for this, and I'll say it again, in some of these jurisdictions, the data center is the jurisdiction's single largest taxpayer. And, and, you know, we should pay that money. I'm, I, you know, we all hate paying taxes, but, you know, we live in civilization, and civilization has to work. We all need each other, Sure. Right? And that's just another way we support each other, and it has to happen. [01:07:34] Speaker 1: I think another way that people don't realize, I think the number one fear regarding energy with the data center is, one, it's either going to take the energy that I need in the future, or two, drive my price up. The reality is, the way the wholesale energy market works is, if you're a small city, or even a medium-sized city, you're buying power from the wholesale market based on the demand that you'd have. Right. And a large data center owner operator is going to be a star, a long steady state base load user of energy, which allows some cities to get better economy at price point on scale of cost of energy, and drives the price down for local consumers. So there are certain things that, like, people are going to complain about the noise, and you're going to talk about how you're going to get it to the fence line, and from that point forward, it shouldn't be anything beyond a whisper, right? You're going to talk about, you know, the particulates for the technology, for making sure these backup engines that when we're running in an emergency aren't. What else do you want these people to know? You're closed loop. You know, you're, are you, are you going to have an impact on their energy costs? [01:08:31] Speaker 2: Speaker 2: So I'm not going to pretend that I understand the nuances of, of, of the power utilities, right? I, I do know from my, my experience with them, that it's one of the most heavily regulated ecosystems, right? So, you know, if, if you go to the hamburger store and the taco store at the corner, right? If the owner wants to raise the prices, he raises the price, right? And you can do it on a whim, or you can do it because his, his, his beef costs went up, right? Again, I'm not going to pretend that I know the nuances of this, of the way that that ecosystem is regulated, but the visibility I have to it suggests to me that these power utilities don't just go get to say, let's make it another, let's increase the price 10% today, right? It's a, it's a process, right? And it has to go through a whole set of hurdles and hearings and whatnot. And again, I'm not going to represent that here. I don't honestly know what all the steps are, but I do know that it's arduous. But, you know, fuel costs are higher every, you know, have, have electric costs gone up. Sure. Well, where do those, where does electricity come from? We burn natural gas or we burn other things and the cost of those things has gone up. Yeah. You know, so there's a correlation between, but I'll say this, just in terms of demand, I've also heard, hey, you're going to build your data center and then there's not going to be electricity for my house anymore. Again, I'm not going to, I'm not going to get into something. I'm not going to try to explain something I honestly don't understand, right? About how power utilities allocate power, right? To different entities, right? But I do know that there have many, been many locations that have been great geographical locations for us that we've identified. You know, they're near what we need to be near or away from what we need to be away from. But we go and say, well, hey, you know, I want to, I want to build this data center here. Hey, Mr. Power Utility. Hey, Georgia Power. Hey, Southern Company. Hey, whoever, you know, I need 50 megawatts. I need 100 megawatts. And, you know, most cases, the answer is, uh, yeah, no, we don't have any more power. You know, we're focused, you know, we're here to serve the consumer and you're a consumer too, but we can't give you power and not give it to that guy. Legally, they just can't. I was almost representing something I don't understand. I believe that legally, they can't do that. And I'm happy to hear, I'm happy to hear comments from people that are going to correct me. Oh, I'm sure we're going to get plenty of people that are, we'll get feedback. Yeah, I do. You know, I don't want, and I want to hear it because I want to be smart, right? But, you know, I do know that we get rejected, right? We go and say, hey, can I have 10 megawatts, 50 megawatts? It's like, well, you can have three because that's, they come back and effectively say, that's what I've got. I've got three left. Do you want it? Sure. If you don't, somebody else will take it. [01:11:04] Speaker 1: So, I'll bring this one home. Sure. Unless there's other things that you feel like I didn't unpackage, you know, we didn't talk about, you know, storm drainage water and how you use it, or if you, I mean, there's, there's about 10 different things you could do to approach water, water net positive, billing, you know, tapping more aquifers, building water treatment facilities. There's, there's just a generalized fear, right? And I think that a lot of people think that this is a polarizing thing, right? And, and they have to kind of pick a side. Right. And the reality is, is this is probably very normal. Again, I, I, even the guy that you're talking about that pulled up a phone and saying, Hey, this is noise. This is the truth is we've agreed that there's bad actors. There are markets in which they made noise that they shouldn't have. There's markets where data center operators have definitely not taken responsibility for the pollutants of running their emergency engines. There are groups that have abused water. There are groups that have built data centers in a way that had a negative impact on the price of energy in those markets. So I don't want to trivialize any of those things, but it sounds like this DC blocks, 10 megawatt data center that's going into this community is really the perfect. I tell people, I'm like, you could protest certain data centers, but certain utilities, you got to be very careful because those are the ones that will limit or stunt the growth of that community based on the, those local enterprise companies have nowhere to grow. Those, those hospitals don't have technologies to support their residents because they don't have technologies to support that from a utility perspective. Right. So, you know, looking back at this, like you said, hindsight's perfect. Right. I wouldn't ask you what you did wrong, but what would you do better the next time? How do you get the people of Nashville to change their mind? So there's like, [01:12:47] Speaker 2: there's like four questions in there and all of them are super impactful. So let's, let's try to do them one by one, you know, what could we do better? Um, I'm going to give you my, I'm going to give you this, this is me talking and there may be people at my company who don't agree with me and that's okay because that, that conversation inside the company makes, makes us better. Um, one of the things we talked about a few minutes ago was we went from an ecosystem of getting tax incentives to build data centers and communities to not only having them gone, but to having no data centers here now. So now, now there's more touring full circle. It's come, it's come full circle. So, um, for me, I'll just, I'll just make it about me. Right. I have been so head down focused on solving the problems that I saw, which was, you know, uh, hyperscaler wants me to build this 40 megawatt building, 10 megawatt, whatever it is. Right. And where's it gotta be? And how do I get the power? And how do I make it quiet? And how do I make it clean? And how do I make the community? How do I interact with people? Um, that didn't necessarily see the, the tide turn, right? So, you know, we've been so welcomed for providing what we provide, you know, whether, whether it's somebody who, you know, it's a smaller retail market and now the, you know, uh, the credit union, you know, that was always unreliable with their IT now it's reliable. Cause you know, so we've been so welcomed. You, you do get sort of a sense of I'm doing great things. I'm a good person. I'm contributing. I'm a good steward of the environment. I'm all these things. And, you know, and then I'm like, okay, what's, you know, earlier I said, you know, I've had so much fun in my life and my career more, you know, I'm gonna make more. What's the, what's the next thing we have, the next technology or the next solution, or how do we package if we're going from four to 40 to 400 megawatts? How do we do that? You know, it gets so busy solving those problems that, you know, disengaged the community, the storm, the storm, it's brewing over here. Like how many times have you been outside on a walk or on a bike ride? I'm not sure if you are athletic outside, right? But you're out for your bike ride and then it rains on you. It's like, I didn't see that coming. Right. I should, I should have checked the weather, but you know, you're focused on your bike ride or you're focused on your run. And, and so for me, I was, you know, personally, I was focused on my run and trying to do the things that our customers wanted, which is what their customers wanted that, you know, I think we were a little, we didn't see it coming. I didn't, I didn't see it coming the way that it's, it's happened and to go from being embraced to being shunned. It really did happen pretty quickly, but you know, making mistakes is always the best teacher. Sure. Right. So, you know, whatever mistakes we made, you know, they seemed pretty clear that we could, there's things we could have done better and we know what they are and, and getting, you know, information in the hands of people about how much water do we use? What's the noise going to be at the fence line? How does it impact people? What's the tax base look like? We never need, we didn't need to do that. There was no demand for it. We were like, come on in and build your data center. Thank you for cleaning up the steel mill. And, and so, you know, could, could have, I should have seen [01:15:58] Speaker 1: that coming. Yeah. I don't think you own the market on that. Every one of us, I mean, I was telling you on the drive here, I'm going down to a, a city just outside San Antonio where there's one, there's 14 cities in that county. And one of the mayors reached out and asked if we would help them understand what data centers are all about. Okay. And then she said, Hey, can I bring the other 13 mayors along? Right. So we're going to sit down with 14 mayors tomorrow and have those types of conversations. I like, I'm not here to defend every one of these data center owner operators. There are bad actors. There's plenty of, I call them the, the clown car that rolls into town and a bunch of idiots pour out and they typically have a private equity background. They've done some stuff and renewable energies never once have had a touch of a data center in their backbone. It's just now everyone's seeing a sprawl of demand for energy and everyone that had anything to do with energy now becomes a data center operator. And that's, that's the clown car posse. And I'm not here to defend those ones. Right. And I'm not here to defend the companies that have done bad shits in the neighborhoods in which they live in. And that certainly has happened. But to your point, we just get better as we iterate and we get safer and we don't, this is America, we won't stop. We just do it better and smarter and safer and more sustainable. And I think that right now you guys are the project in America that is going to catch the most attention. And I think that hopefully this podcast rallies the fellow operators that, I mean, you have a lot of courage, right? Jeff, how many operators have called me in concern of programs at risk. But when I offer them a platform to talk about it, they're like, no thanks. Just for the same reason that they get state senators, I've only got one, right? I mean, it's to get people to talk about this is very, really difficult right now because it's polarizing politically. Yeah. But the reality is, is we're creating, this is the next industrial revolution and we are leading it. I, I, I'll say it again, you know, that it's just me personally, [01:17:56] Speaker 2: right? The single, the most profound and greatest learning experiences of my life are places where I've made mistakes or didn't get it quite right. While it can be hard to hear a community so against what you're doing effectively for them. Um, I appreciate the feedback. I appreciate hearing it. We take it serious. I take it deadly serious, right? Because I don't want to, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want to be the guy that's destroying the planet. I don't want to be, let's just take it out of Nashville, right? Let's just push Nashville to the side for a second. I don't want to be that guy that kills the flowers or kills the puppies or, or is a bad player or a bad actor. In any regard, I just don't want to be that guy. And, and, you know, the way that I can learn, one of the ways that I can learn is by making mistakes or having people tell me that I was wrong. And, and one of the things I learned a long time ago is, you know, you were right and I was wrong. Something that we all have to be able to say, right? You know, I'm so sorry that what I did hurt you, you know, or offended you. You know, I'm sorry seems to be one of the hardest phrases for human beings to say, especially you were right and I was wrong is really hard for people to say. I have no problem. You know, in my professional relationships, in my personal relationships, I'm saying those things because I'm wrong. There's times I'm wrong. Right. And, and what I do from being wrong is I, I get better. Right. And I might not be able to fix the thing, but I can do my best to, here's my phrase, right? Put right to what once went wrong. So what's the path forward for you guys at DC blocks, we're, we're going to continue to, to do what we always have done, right? We're going to, we're going to continue with the best moral and ethical compass that we have. Um, recognizing that as human beings and as companies and as collections of people, we all need to be committed to continuous improvement of ourselves and, and the things that we do. Um, it's, it can be really hard when people are angry to hear the words, angry words that come out of their mouth, but I want to hear those words because I want to learn why they're concerned. And, and my ask, right, is, is on the other side. Um, be open, you know, so I just said, you know, I'm happy to say I was wrong. There's been so many times in my life when I've been wrong. Right. And I'm happy to say that my, my ask is, um, if I'm willing to say that I was wrong, or I did the wrong thing, or I did a bad thing, but now I want to make it right. Now I want to be better. Now I don't want to do that again, which is who, who I am as a person. I ask for the people on the other side of this is, can you, can you meet me there? Can, can you meet me in that place? Can you meet me in a place where we can have a conversation? And I don't expect you, you know, um, life as a human being is a matter of perspective. You can have two different people watch a car accident happen in an intersection and the stories that they will tell will be different because their perspective is different. Maybe this guy has been in a car accident and this guy has two different realities. Yeah. So people, so every, everything in, in, in our human existence is a matter of perspective and I have my perspective. And, and so, you know, again, my ask to the folks who are anti data center and raising these claims is what will you meet me? Will you meet me at a place where you're open to the possibility that you were wrong and we can have a discussion about this or, or maybe, you know, I'm here and you're here and maybe neither of us is right and neither of us is wrong, but maybe the truth is in the middle. And we, and we know that from sometimes personal relationships, right? He said, she said, well, the truth is a lot of times in the middle. When you hear the couple, the couple is getting the divorce, you hear both stories, the truth is in the middle, right? So that's my ask, right? Is, you know, I'm, I'm there and I know that we're there because we don't want to be that bad actor. So, but my ask is, you know, will, will the folks who are, you know, in opposition, in opposition, thank you for that. Um, you know, will you meet me there? Will you meet me in a place where you are open to, if it all goes well and I can demonstrate my best intent and my best will in this and show you what I'm either doing to improve or show you that maybe what you're arguing about was actually not true, right? If you'll meet me there, then I think we can start to, to really, you know, I hate to say that it's a cheesy word to say heal, right? But I mean, we can at least start to solve this, this disconnect. Yeah. And [01:22:35] Speaker 1: that's, that's all. I'm an optimist. I think you guys can solve this. I mean, one of the questions, the closing question then maybe for you perhaps is in five years from now, what outcome would allow both DC blocks in Nashville to say this conflict produced something better than either side originally proposed. And I say that assuming that you guys work with national and figure out a way to make this work because Nashville's going to need this technology. I, I want to answer that question [01:23:01] Speaker 2: and I, I'm, I'm going to decline to do it because I just don't know, you know, my crystal ball, um, for when I'm going to have for dinner tonight is a lot more clear than dinner tomorrow night and dinner on Friday night or whatever it is. Right. And so, you know, I, I don't know what the future looks like here, what, what the five-year vision is. You know, my, I can say what I hope is and tell you my hope, you know, and hope is not a strategy. It's one of my classic lines. Right. But my hope is that, you know, we can start to stop and listen, you know, all parties, stop and listen, understand what we need together. We all need each other in this world. Just do. I believe that philosophically. Um, and, and we can together design what this future looks like. Um, you know, you, you, you asked me the closing question. I want, I want to back up a little bit right now. The one thing I want to say is, and I said it several times, you know, the reason that these data centers are being built is because of these things. And, and so, you know, step one is agreeing. It's like, okay, if you want your phone to keep working and continue to get better and smarter and, and, and do all the things that AI is bringing to it, right. Then, you know, data centers need to be there. And, and we just want to be part of the conversation and know how we can peacefully cohabitate with all the things we need to, with which we need to cohabitate to get that done. So, um, it's a process, right. And that process is gonna, there's gonna be some days, I think you make three giant strides. I think there's gonna be some days you get kicked in the head and fall backward too. And I, and I just don't know what that looks like, but you know, I don't want to project a world of peace and harmony and love, even though that's what I'd like to have. But I think it's gonna be an interesting road. And, and for me, um, again, personal philosophy, my whole life has been about the journey. I love being on the journey. I tend to do my best not to worry about tomorrow because it's the journey. That's the interesting part. So this is, this is a journey. It's a journey with the people in Nashville. It's a journey for us every place. We're putting a data center on the ground, um, and hope to put a data center on the ground to serve the people of Nashville and to serve everybody else. And, and I just, you know, it's hard to, um, it can be hard to stay open and conversational when faced with anger. If somebody's yelling and screaming at you, it's hard to, to, to engage with that. Right. So I guess that's, that's my, my ask is that, you know, meet, meet us at a place in this conversation, emotional range to have a conversation. Right. And, and, and, you know, be willing, all again, here's me feeling like a philosopher all of a sudden, right. But you know, all of us, I think needs to be able to say I was [01:25:48] Speaker 1: wrong. This is bigger than just Nashville. This is bigger than just one data center program. This is, the industry is coming together right now. And, and, uh, this one has some attention. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you hope that you got to leave? I know I look, I've been here for a minute. Um, no, no, uh, anything you want to mention that I didn't ask that you feel is worth noting and it's [01:26:12] Speaker 2: okay if not. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I'm, I'm thinking, right. We've, we've kind of, you know, we've, we've unpacked my, my brain is kind of in this whole tactical list of, of what's, what's, what are the [01:26:19] Speaker 1: concerns out there? Right. And, and, and, you know, I didn't bring you on to put you in a defensive posture. So I don't want you to do that. I brought you on to humanize the, the reality of the situation, which is there are thousands of people that are going to depend on those jobs that are coming from that program. There's a lot of families that are going to be fed because of programs like those. In fact, my challenge to the people that are in Nashville, that are not about data centers, ask yourselves why, and then challenge us, ask you, ask me, but you should be leaning at it the opposite direction. I think they should take the binoculars off and flip them and see them through the other optics. And that if you're a parent, your kids are going to have 20 to 30 years in which you're going to join the workforce and they're going to need some sort of stabilized job. And this is the only job that doesn't require a college degree that has the fastest track to becoming a millionaire. See the trades, building data centers. These are the jobs that build back the middle class. All right. So I think that these people should lean in and not only figure out like, Hey, they can raise the bar and increase the standard. We're paying attention. We're all listening and, and, and their concerns are valid. We're not trivializing any of them, but let's talk about them. Right. So I encourage everybody in Nashville to reach out to you guys at DC blocks, because I'd hate to see you guys. You're not one of the groups that I think people should be targeting. You're one of the groups that are there to help the communities. There are other groups with clown cars, full of people that just don't care about those communities. And I'll leave it to each city to figure out which groups are good and bad. But this is one of the good ones. I'm hoping that you guys get a fair shake. I hope that you got a chance to explain your side because we're going to unpackage the long version. No one's going to be able to edit it out. Yeah. So I'll say this when you said, [01:27:55] Speaker 2: explain my side. It's like, this is my, I remember earlier I said, everything is a matter of perspective. Right. So I have my perspective and I'm, I'm open to the, I'm open to the possibility of not the reality that my perspective could be wrong. It could be on any, any issues. Or incomplete. [01:28:12] Speaker 1: Or incomplete. Right. So. But this is a healthy thing. Where we're at as an industry, this will make a break moment for our industry. And I think what you're doing right now is going to set a standard on how every other operator goes out and engages with those communities and says, well, we're listening. Some of your concerns are valid and some of them, they're misguided. And let's walk through the difference between those two and see if you still agree or disagree to the best. But at least know if the juice is worth the squeeze. Don't just say no. Right. So Jeff, probably a very challenging time because I know how busy you guys are with everything that's going on with this stuff, but I appreciate you getting on a plane and flying out here. Yeah, it's my pleasure. Thank you for [01:28:48] Speaker 2: the opportunity to, to be here and to, to share our perspective. Right. And, and, you know, we're just people too. Right. We're, we're just, we are not some big faceless company that's, that's hell bent on smashing people's lives and smashing water supplies. It's like, we're people too. And you've proven it over [01:29:05] Speaker 1: and over again in these communities you go in that you help. Right. So it's not like you're the clown car. Those are the ones that would be concerned about. This is the one that is, is a real utility and you don't serve a region. Right. You guys are there to help those, those people in those [01:29:18] Speaker 2: markets. Thank you again. It's been, it's been great to be here. A little anxiety. Right. Because I think there's so much potential for, you know, what's, what's the, you know, a single word can start [01:29:30] Speaker 1: a war. We don't want that. You know, this podcast is not designed to be the protagonist. Right. We're trying to inform and educate and hopefully inspire. And I hope that we didn't do that with this. I hope that with this podcast, we just opened up some other people to listening more about this conversation and learning more. That's all we can do. Jeff, thanks for joining the Data Center Revolution. For all of you that are listening, please like, post, comment, share. The chorus sings louder than the soloist. There's about 50 other DC blocks right around the corner that are all facing the same type of situation that you're facing right now. And, and as an industry from a national security perspective alone, we can't afford to let that happen. But as an economy perspective or winning the war on AI and cloud, we can't afford to let any other nations overtake us. There you go. All right, Jeff, thanks for joining the revolution. I look forward to seeing how this unfolds and seeing what the feedback is, but I know we're going to get a lot of it. Appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, bud. Thank you.