How AI Data Centers Stay Online — Behind the Build Ep. 6: The Responsibility of Reliability

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I'm a North Dakota native. I've lived in Brooktree Park, which is approximately one mile north of Harwood, for 15 years. My name is Brent Lundstrom. I am the Site Director of Operations at Applied Digital. I'm building an operations team that will run the facility once it's completed with construction. So we're the people that will keep the lights on, keep the electricity on, keep the cooling going, keep the building functional for its intended purpose. Being a North Dakota native and having moved to the Twin Cities, lived there, I decided that this is the place I want to be. I like the people, I like the culture, I like the opportunities that are available. When I graduated from NDSU in facility management, I think everybody in that program for the most part went, "Well, if I want to work in facility management, I've got to leave Fardo." And then Applied Digital started building their data center. I drove by it every day through construction and thought, you know, I should apply for that. I'm sure they'll have facility type people there. A few months later, they hired me. I really felt that stepping into this role is a great accumulation of I've done this for a long time. And they're building a really, really big facility in my backyard. So I now have the opportunity to do things, the same thing that I've done my entire career that I've hopefully gotten good at. But I have a five minute commute. Mission critical infrastructure really means that the building has to be up 100% of the time. So that's why the redundancy is built into the building. And that's why we have staff on site at all times. A lot of the facility staff that we've hired have worked in hospitals, have worked in pharmaceutical manufacturing plants, have worked in electronics. One thing Applied has found and they're honest about is there's not data centers in Fargo. So if they go to Virginia, they can find a staff of people that have worked in data centers. When they come to North Dakota, they don't have a bunch of people that have worked in data centers. But we have people that have worked in those industries that are still mission critical. We're getting to the point where we're going to start handing it off to operations. That's my team. When I was being interviewed and we were talking about the systems, it was explained to me how much redundancy is built into the building. I kind of got a little giddy. So as we're walking through spaces, we're familiarizing ourselves with the equipment. We'll go back, look at the plans, look at how the systems are supposed to interact with themselves, what activates it, how it shuts off. So we're in a generator hall right now. There are 12 generators in this room. We have eight of these rooms within the facility. The generator hall is what provides us electricity when the utility goes down. And that's our number one link to the critical infrastructure is keeping that electricity going. So if we lose utility, these generators come online. We can run self-sufficiently for at least two days without utility power. These generators within here are redundant to each other. I don't need all 12 to power that section of the data center. There's four blocks on each side, so eight total. I could lose one block on either side and still be fine. So out of these four, I only need three. That's really giving the mission critical uptime backup that drives the whole system is the generator hall that we're in now. So our redundant systems also help us with that in that we can put the redundant system on while we maintain the primary and then put it back to the primary. So that's where the redundancy becomes not only in an emergency, but also for our ability to do preventive maintenance on these systems. Once operations takes over the building, really our day-to-day is monitoring the systems, doing our daily checks, and then doing our preventive maintenance. The day hopefully is boring. Things will break. Emergencies will happen. Part of our day-to-day is rehearsing for those emergencies. So hopefully it doesn't catch anybody off guard. We'll know what to do and we can handle it in a reasonable fashion and get back to Standard State quickly. Having the franchise model in North Dakota helps us with our redundancy. So we're able to take a long lead time item that may not fail, but it may fail. And let's say it does, it's going to take 18 weeks to get a transformer. We can buy that transformer and we can hold it in North Dakota and know that we can have it to any of our sites within four to five hours and get them up and running. There's a level of redundancy that's even outside of this building. Reliability is something that you really have to keep earning. You keep the reliability by doing the correct maintenance, by doing your inspections and, you know, making sure that everything is maintained in the correct fashion. That gives you the reliability of the equipment. The team around me, that's what will negate the negative impacts. When you can trust the guy next to you who trusts the guy next to him. It's really having that trust within the team and the cohesion. I'm responsible for every person that's in the building. So I want to make sure they're safe. I want to make sure that the building is functional. I want to make sure that everybody goes home at the end of the day. I want to make sure that we're still a part of the community ongoing. Just the support of being here, being a good community member. We're here for the long term. We'll still be involved in the community. At some point in time, I'll probably retire. But I'll be able to drive by that building and know that, you know, I was on the team that brought that thing up and made it what it is. We'll be right back. [00:07:11] Speaker ?: We'll be right back. [00:07:11] Speaker 1: We'll be right back. [00:07:12] Speaker ?: We'll be right back.