I Visited the Cradle of the Internet

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: - If UCLA was the birthplace of the internet, then Ashburn, Virginia is the backyard where it grew up into the marvel it is today and continues to grow. Chosen for its reasonable proximity to both Europe and North America, Ashburn has the highest density of dark fiber in the world and Equinix sponsored our trip here to show you their role as a connector of clouds, if you will, providing a neutral ground where every internet service provider and online service can connect to exchange data. Without further ado then, let's head into the belly of the beast. Well, not all the way inside. Apparently I need a confined space certification in order to crawl in here. Yeah, I'm getting the no. But I still wanted to show this to you guys because it's so easy to fire up Netflix on your TV or load up YouTube on your phone and go, I'm streaming a video over the air. But there's a funny saying at Equinix that goes, you know, there sure are a lot of wires in wireless networking because to get that YouTube video, the one you're watching right now, your phone is going to connect to a cellular access point on a tower somewhere, which might have a high speed wireless backhaul to another tower. But if you trace it back, every packet has to have come from fiber, just like this here in the ground. And eventually, if you keep going, an internet exchange like DC2 here, where Equinix leases cages large and small to everyone from AI and cloud providers, to financial institutions, to three letter agencies. Each of these is hundreds or even thousands of strands. Like, wow, look at it all. Since we're here, Equinix asked if I'd like to see what is probably the most crowded intersection on the entire internet, to which I replied, "Uh, yeah, above me is basically Internet Carrier Grand Central Station." All of these are completely occupied by optical fiber, including the layer above and the layer above that. I'm in your data right now! Now, we can't look too closely at any paid deployments, because Equinix takes customer privacy extremely seriously. Like, I'm talking biometric authentication up the wazoo, which, oh, sorry, no, it's not in the wazoo. It's just your fingers. Okay, that's actually really good to know. Thank you. Anyway, there's a lot of customizability, depending on your needs. Hot exhaust, error management and venting, dual redundant 240 or 415 volt power, all the fiber you could shake a stick at. Of course, if you watch the video that we did with Equinix a couple of years ago, then you'll probably know a lot of this. Why don't we go look at something a little different? This cage is specifically set aside for Equinix themselves to test experimental technologies and deployments and show them off to potential customers. And there are a few choice relics in here that really stood out to me. Okay, you guys have seen a liquid-cooled server before, of course, right? But have you ever seen a fluid-cooled server that's not all liquid? This right here is an older system from Zootacore. Do you see how tiny these coolant tubes are? That's because instead of using water, it's actually using a two-stage refrigerant and a rack-mounted compressor to increase its cooling efficiency compared to water. I don't know how it happened. But this paradigm totally escaped my notice over the last four or five years since they started building them. These things are super cool because, just like with water, you get dramatically better heat mobility, which makes it way easier to reuse that thermal energy for good. Equinix has aggressive environmental and community stewardship goals that are made much easier by waste-heat capture. They have a data center in Amsterdam, for instance, that kicks heat into a college dorm for heating, and they showed off an experimental deployment during the Paris Olympic Games that heated a swimming pool. That's a pretty good idea. I wonder where they got it. Also in this room is a newer generation of two-phase cooling from Excelsius, and you might have noticed the tubes are a lot thicker. Damn. One of the biggest pressures in the data center space right now is skyrocketing power requirements and especially increases in density that are just making the old paradigms for building these spaces and especially for managing thermals obsolete. The red and blue cabinets, those are in the 20,000 to 30,000 watt range. These ones were like 80,000 watts. And what's really crazy is that's not even the cutting edge. Okay, this is a bit of an aside, but I couldn't shoot it because it was a customer's space, but Equinix showed me a one megawatt deployment from about 10 years ago. It took up at least 1,000 square feet and was well over 100 cabinets full of servers. Now, this is 80,000 watts, and 100 plus thousand watts is commonplace in an AI build-out, with the cutting edge closer to 200,000 to 300,000 watts. Also, if Jensen's to be believed, and he would know, 600,000 watt cabinets are on the horizon. That would consolidate that old megawatt deployment with 100 plus racks down to less than two. Clearly, the innovation is needed. Moving on, this one is super cool. On first glance, it just kind of looks like a more rugged server cabinet, doesn't it? I mean, what could it cost, Michael? 10 dollars? Try 30,000 dollars. And that's just for the box. Why? Well, remember how I said that security was a big deal in this industry? Well, depending on who the customer is, sometimes it's an even bigger deal. These bad boys right here are for your financial institutions, your military, your three-letter agencies. What does it do? It blocks EMF. And not, like, mostly blocks it, like the IO shield on the back of your PC. I'm talking about it blocks the trace electromagnetic signals that can be emitted by computing devices that can maybe be snooped to collect sensitive data. Overkill when you're already in a facility that uses airlock-style access? Maybe. Cool? Absolutely. And Equinix says that interest in solutions like this is only growing. Coming back to scale, it's hard to accurately say just how much traffic flows through Equinix here in Ashburn. But they did give me some rough numbers that I could share with you. There are between one and 300,000 strands of fiber going into their Ashburn campus buildings. With current switching technology, each of them can do somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.6 terabit per second. Now, obviously, not all of them are doing that all the time. But the point is that the amount of traffic that converges here is unfathomable. And providing that kind of connectivity is a uniquely Ashburn challenge that kind of makes sense if you look at the history here. Equinix's first data center was built here in the early days of the internet to provide fair, managed communication across disparate networks. That incentivized more growth here during the cloud era, which pushed Equinix to keep up and so on and so forth, until you ended up with the snowball effect that turned this place into data center heaven. But especially lately, there's a dark side to the data center that has been thrust into the limelight. Power consumption. Now, Equinix currently sits at 96% renewable energy sources, according to them, which is pretty cool. But hey, life isn't as simple as, well, we did our part. And they're always looking for new innovations, including nuclear power partnerships, which we won't be looking at one of those today. But hint, hint, Equinix, nuclear plant. Anyway, what we can look at today is something I'd never heard of before. Check these out. These are called bloom fuel cells. And while I would need a postgraduate chemistry degree to fully understand everything that's going on here, I can give you the basics. In goes some kind of fuel, like hydrogen or natural gas. And then out comes electricity with somewhere in the neighborhood of 60% efficiency. Which, okay, doesn't actually sound that impressive. Except that it's just about double of what you would expect from the internal combustion engine in your car. How? Well, it's because these depend on a chemical reaction rather than the combustion of that gas, releasing heat and a concentrated CO2 stream. It can be used for either situations where grid power isn't sufficient or as a backup. And now this is just a test deployment. But they have a much larger one on the order of over 14 megawatts in California that Patrick from Serve the Home actually looked at fairly recently. That's worth checking out if you guys have a few minutes now that you're done watching this video. If you enjoyed it, I don't know, buy something on lttstore.com. You got the hoodie. Got this hat. Hope one of these is still in stock. Otherwise, there's always screwdrivers.