Touring the "Center of the Internet" and AI

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: The internet isn't just a bunch of websites and apps instead there's physical infrastructure and buildings that really run the majority of the internet and you're in luck if you ever wanted to see that because today we're going to be looking at one of the most famous connectivity data centers along with a brand new AI data center and a really cool AI cluster that's in that data center. So today I'm in Silicon Valley because we're going to take a look at two Equinix data centers. Now these two data centers are completely different in a lot of ways although they sit on the exact same campus. SV1 is like the first Equinix data center that was built in the Bay Area. It's been around for a quarter of a century and then I wanted to show Equinix's most modern facility on this campus which is SV11 which houses large AI clusters. And we're going to be joined by NVIDIA who's going to show us their DGX super pod that's running just upstairs and runs many of the demos that you've seen from various GTCs over the last year. Hey guys I just want to say thank you real quick to Equinix for both sponsoring this video and also giving us access. Normally you can't go film in data centers. We can here and multiple data centers. This is going to be exciting so let's go. This is Equinix SV1 which is famous in the industry as being a huge hub so let's get inside. This building is a living working fossil that's also super popular. It is a central part to so many of the world's applications right? Financial institutions, hyperscalers, social media platforms. I mean you name it there is all kinds of connectivity that happens in SV1. Now SV1 is also famous because of this spot right here. It's often been referred to as the center of the internet because something like over 90% of all west coast internet traffic passes through this building. Equinix also had this breakthrough idea that instead of having a single carrier go to its data centers, it would allow multiple carriers to come in and meet customers that were here. Well if you can go through multiple different pipes, go to different service providers, you can find more efficient routes. And so having that rich connectivity on site is really what enabled a lot of the internet innovation that we know today. Now when we say rich connectivity, I don't mean like there are five carriers or something like that. There's well over 200 carriers that come into SV1. So how do you even get over 200 carriers into a facility? I mean that requires a lot of fiber, right? We went back outside to where everything starts under the parking lot in something called a fiber pit. And down here we have one of 15 fiber vaults or fiber pits. The idea here is that you can bring fiber from all the different buildings and also from the street and have connectivity without having to go directly through the buildings. What that allows you to do is have more flexibility on how you lay your fiber runs throughout the campus. Here we're in one of these buildings fiber vaults. These are the bundles that you saw outside that come into the building and then can be distributed throughout the data center. The other option of course is that these sites are built out and well ahead of time they're thinking about connectivity. And that's what you have over here. You have fiber coming in that is pre-laid and then can be spliced to individual customer or connectivity needs. I'm now here in the intermediate distribution frame. Now what this is, is you'll see a whole bunch of fiber up above. That fiber can come from those fiber pits outside and then we'll go from here to customer cages, but also there are building to building interconnects. So that way if you just need to go and lay a cross connect between a cage here and another building, you can go through the patch panels here. And just to give you some idea of how many layers of cabling there are in a facility like this. You'll see this yellow tray here. That's our optical raceway or optical tray for really the fiber connections. Then you'll see this copper tray above it, which is for our copper connections. Then we have our AC tray, which are these big black cables. You see those over there. That's AC power. And above there are all the carrier connections that come in from those fiber vaults. And so there are multiple layers of different types of cables above the data center floor. So there are things like these here. These are media converters because there's a wide variety of what runs here. There's even things that are almost ancient by today's standards, like 128K ISDN lines, T1 lines, DS3 lines. All of those things from many years ago that are slower than most folks' home internet and even phones these days. Those all still are running over copper networks and terminate into this facility because there are service providers still providing those services to businesses out there. But a facility like this that has been operating for a quarter century from the early days of the internet to now, it's of course going through lots of retrofits and upgrades. Just the gear these days is much higher power. There's more connectivity and all of the things that go along with having a modern infrastructure. SV1 is just cool because it's one of the facilities that's actually made that transition and it's a guiding light for the industry and really how to do that. And just to give you some idea of the evolution of SV1, you'll see above me that they started with six inch fiber trays because back in the day in like 2000, there just wasn't that much fiber. Then later on, they moved to 12 inch fiber trays, which you can see over here. And then finally, there are now 24 inch fiber trays, four times as wide as the original ones. And sometimes in this building, you'll even see two of these running in parallel. And here's a really fun one. These blue lights were allegedly installed because they were supposed to get the feel of Studio 54 in the data center just to make it a little more fun. I'm just going to say walking around here, it's a little bit crazy to see folks running high end web servers for well known applications and even running these like old things that we had, you know, in the nineties and two thousands running our internet all running into the same facility. It's just like crazy, crazy place to be. In the early days of designing data centers, like with SV1, it was all about maximizing square footage, smaller aisles, compact layouts and dense racks. But as technology has evolved, especially with the rise of AI, the challenge isn't fitting more hardware into a denser space, it's power and cooling it efficiently. That shift is what drives the design of modern facilities like SV11, where energy capacity and thermal management shape how everything is built. Now let's talk a little bit about the security. This entire campus is protected by gates. There's guard houses that we're not out right now, but they're definitely over there. There's also these giant fences all over plus cameras. And there are other things that we're just not going to talk about, but just getting into a building. Well, that's a pretty serious affair because once you've entered the building, the first thing you need to do is go to security. So you'll maybe push a button for assistance or you can go in card and biometrically print in here, which is always a great security thing. But then the next thing is you have to go, especially if you're a visitor to the guardhouse. You're going to see that these facilities are staffed all the time. And so we would have to check in here. If you have a badge, you can continue, but you're being checked here by the security staff. The next thing is you have to go into the man trap. And that man trap over here only allows a single person or a group of people to go in at one time. So only one door on either side of this opens at a time. So that way you just can't have someone tailgate and run straight through. But once you've gone through this and the door on that side is closed, the other side has the doors open. And now we're into the data center facility. Of course, you're going to see a lot of card readers on the way and biometric readers on the way. And that's really to make sure that only the correct people have access to these facilities. All of this is just to get into the common areas of the data center before going into the data halls or customer cages. Each of those has additional access control steps. So at each point along the way, that access is being verified. And by the way, there's cameras everywhere here. Now I'm walking on a bridge between SV10 and SV11. SV11 doesn't have some of the typical things that you see in modern data centers when it comes to having customer areas for like conference rooms, cafeterias, all that. Also, security and building access, they're not done in SV11 where all these AI servers are. Instead, they're done over in SV10. And so one of the benefits of this type of arrangement is that you get to build all the amenities and access controls and a lot of security features in one site, but then leverage them across two different buildings, which just saves time in deployment, but it also saves costs. Next, we're going to go check out the NVIDIA DGX GP200 SuperPod with Charlie from NVIDIA because, my goodness, this thing is super cool and it's right down the way. This is NVIDIA's revolutionary architecture that allows 72 GPUs to act as one large GPU. Scaling to the DGX pod, it brings that from just 72 GPUs to eight racks of that. This is the same system that you often see running things like NVIDIA GTC demos when Jensen's on stage. [00:09:07] Speaker 2: Equinix is our global deployment partner that's had super pods in it everywhere. We wanted to build the exact same thing that our customers were going to get anywhere around the world at an Equinix facility. So once we built it here, we could stamp it out anywhere that we wanted. The reason we chose this location here for the system is its closeness to our headquarters, its ability to have liquid cooling, its green power. So as we were developing it, you know, our engineers lived in a conference room next to the system. Now we run it all remotely from headquarters. Our researchers can use it for training. They can do model development on it. They can fine tune a model with new data and we can run production inference all in the same cluster. And that's what any customer around the world wants to do. They want one infrastructure, one center of excellence to be able to run the workloads they have today, but also run the workloads that are going to come next year. We couldn't build the GB200 and our current generation GB300 and beyond without that liquid cooling because the pure density on the system. You know, when we looked in the hot aisle part of the system, you saw that beautiful cable backplane. That's 100% copper. The only way we're able to do that is because we can compress the compute tray height with liquid cooling. So not only is it more efficient for heat transfer, better TCO, better energy efficiency, it gives us a lot better full system density. We're getting the power efficiency, we're getting the cooling efficiency, but we get the signal integrity efficiency to pack that many GPUs in a very small amount of space. The GB200 super pod system, you know, that's a little over a megawatt and change that used to be an entire data center. Now that's eight racks here in the future. That could be one rack in a remote location, but it also serves as the blueprint of how we build large scale AI infrastructure. And then customers can scale that down, whether it's GB200 to a B200 to our latest RTX Pro 6000 Blackwell edition. It all runs the same software. It all runs all the same architecture. So, you know, every year, every generation, the requirements change. They just keep going up because the systems are getting more energy efficient. You know, the amount of tokens you get per watt goes up every year. But that density and what we saw in the system continues to increase. So this is why it's critical that we work with great partners like Equinix, because we work years in advance with our partners. So, you know, you saw the very large, you know, chillers that we have, the heat exchangers that we have that didn't just magically show up. That was years in advance work with our data center team working with the ecosystem, working with Equinix. So that when we're ready to deploy, the ecosystem is ready and our data center partners like Equinix are also ready. [00:11:53] Speaker 1: Okay, so let's talk about the cooling of all of this gear, right? Especially when you have AI servers or just any servers these days, there's a lot of heat that gets generated that we need to remove from the data center floor. On this, we have a hot aisle containment setup. So the flooded floor design, we have cool air. It's actually pretty nice standing here. But inside of this containment area, we have the rear of the racks. The heat goes through the ducts that are in the ceiling and then over here to the megacross. And what they do is they take the hot air, which is on the other side of this, coming down from the ceiling, it goes through these coils. Now, through the coils, you have a loop of fluid that goes from the coil all the way up to chillers that are on the roof. And then the cool fluid comes back down here. On the other side of that, now that the heat has been extracted, we have cool air that then floods the entire data center floor. For high powered AI racks, sometimes you still have gear like those switches and what have you that are still air cooled. And so you have a way to continually cool the data center floor using this air handling method. But for the high end AI chips, well, that fluid can go through large pipes all the way up to the chillers on the roof and then circulated down once that heat has been extracted. So this type of setup gives that flexibility for both air cooled servers as well as liquid cooled AI servers. And one really cool way that the power and cooling interact is right behind me. These PDUs take the 480 volt facility power and convert it to 415, 240 for the customer racks. But these PDUs also because they have transformers in them, they do generate some heat. And to keep the hot aisle and cold aisle containment, there is actually containment even on these PDUs. So that way this cold floor doesn't get any extra heat bleed in. Now these data centers are built on a massive scale and the power for them is also equally massive. On this side, we have inputs from the utility at 21,600 volts. But of course, it needs to be stepped down to more like 480 volts inside the facility. And then all of our switch gear transformers, all the things that you need to have redundant power that's then brought over to the data center floor. And by the way, you may not have seen this from other shots, but this place is absolutely massive. Power density on this campus doesn't just include utility power. There are solar panels for generation. There are diesel generators for backup. UPS is for backup. And they also generate power on site using clean fuel cell technology. The natural gas feeds fuel cells to create cleaner energy for the data center. Fuel cells don't use combustion, meaning they produce fewer emissions, reduce greenhouse gases, and you don't get all of that particulate pollution you get when you burn off fossil fuels. This has three floors of these bloom fuel cells behind me. There's something like 6.4 megawatts of electricity being generated here. And there's another tower that I can see off in the distance that's being built to also augment this. Now, something cool is that these fuel cells are much quieter than traditional generators and they're right next to the data center. So you don't have as much transmission loss if you had like remote generation and then you had to go and bring power all the way to the data center. And to that end, Equinix has been investing in next generation nuclear reactors because they see it as a cleaner power source for future data centers they'll need down the road. I'm excited for where data center power is headed. Hey guys, I hope you like the look at these data centers. This is absolutely awesome. These spaces are huge. There's tons that goes into the power, the cooling. Just the physical infrastructure is awesome. The networking is insane. But there's a lot more that goes on to a data center than just the facilities. For example, there are a ton of folks that make data centers work. You can see some of them that work here behind me. I just want to say thank you to everyone involved. But also if you like what you saw and you want to get involved. Well, Equinix is making more data centers all the time. So this is a growing industry. Now, of course, I want to hear what you guys think about this tour. Let me know down in the comments. But if you did like this video, why don't you share with your friends and colleagues? But also give it a like, click subscribe and turn on those notifications. So you can see whenever we come out with great new videos. As always, thanks for watching and have an awesome day.