What Data Centers Are Like from the Inside - DTNS WEEKEND

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2:38Welcome to the Daily Tech News Show weekend edition, gratefully provided to you and thanks for your support of this show. And this weekend, we're going to talk data centers. Now, I know we've done that before, where I went through some of the things to know about a data center, if you're a person who is interested in them and come in your communities. So to kind of follow up on that, and some people asked us to do this, Craig Porter has agreed to join us and talk a little bit about what life is like inside a data center. because you may know Craig as the guy who worked in Antarctica. He's no longer in Antarctica, but he has worked in data centers multiple times throughout his career.

3:21So, Craig, thank you for joining us and sharing some of your insight with us. Yeah, it's great to be here, Tom. And, you know, I'm happy to talk about this topic. You know, there's a lot of, I think, you know, misinformation out there, you know, on both sides, I think. You know, I think that giving people a clear, a clear picture of like, you know, what's actually going on will help people make decisions as to, you know, what they want to do in their communities. Yeah. And then it's not just, well, I kind of trust Tom to do some decent research. It's Craig actually put his hand on this sort of situation.

3:57So let's start there. We're not presenting you as the world's foremost expert on data centers. This is more of a like, hey, Craig has worked at these places and can tell us a little bit about what goes on there. What is your experience with data centers? Yeah. So for people who may not remember, you know, I spent 12 and a half years in the Navy as a nuclear reactor operator. And then I got out of the Navy and I worked at Google for four years at the data centers in Iowa. And it's a very relatively easy transition for ex-nuclear people from the Navy to go into the data center world because it's very, it's called, you know, it's mission critical.

4:37If the equipment goes down, then you have procedures that you have to follow step by step in order to rectify the situation and things like that. So, you know, it was a natural transition. I was at Google for about four years. and you know due to circumstances moved up to portland oregon and worked at you know had worked in electrical equipment installation and then i went back into data centers worked for a couple different companies um for about about a six six month period up there in portland um i left those kind of moved around with my career went to antarctica for eight months and uh ended up moving here to vegas and uh my previous company that i that i just left last week was doing data center commissionings uh for the big uh switch facilities down here in vegas so what commissioning is uh it's not just data center specific but uh in regards to data centers it's making sure that the electrical switch gear works correctly, making sure that equipment is installed correctly, that it operates by itself correctly, and then it operates as a combined integrated facility all correctly and everything responds as it should and things like that.

5:56So that's kind of my data center background. As you said, I'm not a design engineer. I'm not the guy who creates you know these designs from scratch or anything but i've certainly had input into how things should be built and how things you know if it's not working correctly what are the ways to rectify that and and and things you know of that nature so yeah and i think for most people listening uh it will be interesting to just hear what it's like you know uh unless there's somebody who already works inside of a data center in which case they're just going to want to compare notes They're going to be nodding along with you.

6:34And I'd imagine in the DTNS audience, there's quite a few data center engineers out there. Indeed. But for those who don't know, what is it like generally inside of a data center? Because I imagine there's all kinds of conceptions if someone has never been to one. You know, whirring fans and smoke and spouting plumes of water. Who knows what people imagine? What's it really like? Yeah, well, hopefully neither of those last few. I mean, something's going catastrophically wrong. I will say, you know, for kind of more in-depth, you know, Google does a pretty good job of, like, giving a, you know, overview of their data center facilities on their website.

7:19I don't remember the website off the top of my head, but, you know, if you kind of want to, you know, have visuals and they have video walkthroughs, I think. But in general, a data center is a big warehouse. in most cases instead of having crates or boxes or packages or things like that. Yeah, and I think this is it. So yeah, it's essentially a big warehouse, but instead of boxes and material handling equipment, you have computers, you have servers. And basically what a server is, it's just a computer that's optimized for processing a lot of requests and storing data and things of that nature.

8:03Not like your laptop. These computers are in racks. There's not monitors. There's not keyboards or anything like that. It's all operated remotely for the most part. Some server racks, you can plug in a KVM, which is a keyboard, monitor, and mouse. But most of the hyperscale data centers that I've been at, you don't have that capability. it's all operated remotely by a uh by a networking team or uh sre team or or people like that they're usually not on site um the people who are on site are usually electricians um hvac specialists uh you know a lot of trade related um personnel not not as many of the the uh you know like because that's operation and so there's kind of two types of operations you know you have facilities operations which makes sure that the power and the cooling keeps going then you have network operations uh which controls all of the all of the the servers and things like that so and you're seeing on the screen kind of in general what uh what you know what google has going on in the data centers.

9:20And if you're listening, as I know most of you are, you can go to datacenters.google and then press play on the video and then you'll see it on the screen too. Yeah. And, you know, like I said, Google is but one data center company out there. You think of your big, you know, tech companies, you have Google, you have Meta, you know, X. Yeah, Microsoft. Yeah, Microsoft. Yeah, of course, Microsoft. How can I forget about that? Amazon. So those are your big ones. But then you also have smaller companies like Switch, Stream, Aligned, companies like that. They're smaller and they can have all different kinds of customers from your local municipal law enforcement.

10:07Like one of the data centers I worked at in Oregon, uh, they had like this, the, the it infrastructure for the local, um, law enforcement, you know, or, uh, you know, like automotive companies, you know, they, they don't want to maintain all that infrastructure. So they co-locate, that's what it's called. Um, they basically build all this infrastructure and then they rent it out to people. And a lot of the big, you know, hyperscale tech companies, they also rent out space too, because in addition to building these huge data centers, you know, they still need capacity to kind of hold them over until these big facilities are built.

10:46So they'll, you know, contract out with the smaller companies to co-locate, co-locate, or, you know, in the case of switch, you know, they might just, you know, buy out a whole data center and have switch build and operate it. But then the, the, you know, they're called the resident or the client, you know, they have everything inside Yeah, there's so many industries like that. And I think it's funny that we all understand that our own industry has those kinds of interrelationships, but we forget what we think of others. So I think most people think, well, Microsoft has its data centers and Amazon has its data centers and Google has its data centers.

11:25But of course, like you say, capacity isn't always exactly, as we very well know these days, meeting what you need. And you might go to some of these smaller places to find capacity. in Los Angeles, the immediate thing that comes to mind is movie studios, right? Sure. Sony and Warner Brothers and Comcast all have their own lots, but every once in a while, they use each other's lots to shoot things because they don't have an available studio to shoot at, right? And I'm sure if you're in insurance or in medicine or any other industry, you can think of an example where like, oh, right, our hospital has its own stuff, But occasionally we contract with someone else or a smaller lab or something for things like that.

12:08So that is an interesting aspect of this to keep in mind is it's not monolithic. There's just a lot of installations out there that can be moved around. The other thing I want to hear from you is what's the – not exactly a day in the life, but what's it like to walk into a data center when you go there? What does it feel like on the inside? If you look at that Google data center website, you see a lot of pipes and industrial looking stuff and server racks and everything. Is that just the impressive looking part of the data center? Yeah. I mean, in a lot of ways, a data center is a lot like any other industrial facility, like a wastewater treatment plant or a processing plant or things like that.

12:58You know, there's equipment kind of going everywhere. And it's always a battle between the design engineers and operations because the design engineers want to package everything in as small a footprint as possible. But that doesn't make it easy to operate and maintain the equipment because there still has to be space in order to get in to, you know, service the circulation fan or to, you know, access the switchgear. And a lot of times the designers, they have not actually been inside of one of the facilities to see, you know, hey, you put this cable tray in the way of this fan. So once this building is commissioned, nobody's ever going to be able to get up there to fix that fan if it breaks.

13:46Now, it turns into operations problem because like you're not just going to leave a broken fan like somebody is going to have to go up there and fix it. and then it's on the operations people to figure out how to make it happen um so there's there's a little back and forth uh in regards to that but yeah in in many ways uh you know google makes it you know googly if you will you know have the color coded pipes and it's bright and everything like that um other you know each company kind of has its brand identity so that's google's you know you know primary colors and brightly lit and things like that um switch uh that i was just at you know in my opinion they're aiming to to kind of be like the uh like the death star in a lot of ways like you walk in the switch facility and it's almost like walking in and see like oh there's the kyber crystals for the super lasers you know so not not in the sense of blowing up planets but in the sense of uh being you know sleek and and dark and yeah sleek and dark and kind of imposing you know yeah yeah uh you know you talked about walking into a data center there's a lot of security you know when you go into these facilities because you know you're dealing with hundreds of customers data you know you might have government data on some of these servers you know those have their own security requirements um you know one of the things i found most fascinating when i was at Google was that, uh, you know, the hard drives, you know, you swap them out occasionally when they fail and everything like that, they don't sell them.

15:21They don't repurpose them. They have a giant crusher and it's a disc shredder and it just polarizes. They just stick entire hard drives in there and it just like bashes them up into the fine little, you know, pieces, you know? Yeah. And that may, that makes sure nobody ever gets whatever data was on there or makes pretty, pretty sure anyway yeah uh what and that so it sounds to me like a data center from what you're describing and what we've seen in the in that website is part factory part laboratory uh you know but with a lot more computers than than you might have in a typical factory that's making widgets or wheels or something like that is that fair yeah i'd say yeah it's definitely i think it's more on the factory side um you know the whole purpose of having a data center is to store data to you know to make money you know that's what these companies are for so they want to have their production you know infrastructure working as much as possible now they might have like you know a couple of rows or like a corner of the data center where they have like some experimental stuff that they're wanting on um uh so yeah one of my favorite things was when i was at google i don't know if this was a long time ago but do you remember uh alpha go you know where it it it the first time it beat like an actual master at go like that server was in one of the data centers that i was in and you know they put a little plaque on it you know this server housed alpha go where i beat the first you know go master and stuff like that so yeah that was really cool but you know that's not taking up all of the all of the floor space here yeah and and i'm guessing you couldn't unless you knew which server it was you might not be able to figure it out immediately oh absolutely because nothing's labeled you know it says oh netflix lives on this it doesn't have a big go board sitting in no it doesn't you know it was only after that, you know, the, uh, that the AlphaGo team told us like, Hey, it was server IA63.

17:28Oh, interesting. You didn't even know what was going on. Yeah. We had no idea. So let's get to some of the things that I am glad we talked about the security of the data. Cause I think that's probably something people wonder about. And the fact that it is, is heavily secured for entry, uh, and, and that there are procedures to make sure that when that hard drive is done, that the data that's on it is no longer accessible to anybody anymore. You only want the data accessible within the data center. Let's start with things that you've heard people say about data centers that you're like, well, that's not exactly how it works.

18:04And I don't just mean the things about water consumption and electrical, although I'd like to talk about those as well, but maybe some other things you've heard that are like, oh yeah, data centers are great at this. and you're like, man, that's not actually what they do. Yeah. So the biggest misconceptions that I've heard are around power and water usage. You know, if we could start there, I think that would be easiest because that's kind of the big one. Those are the big topics that I think are hot button issues.

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21:24So in regards to in regards to water consumption, um you know it i i think what a lot of people think of when they think of like oh you're they're using hundreds of thousands of gallons a day and and you know that's a big deal especially here in vegas you know there's sure the lake mead is at historical lows and you know water consumption is a big deal but the the type of cooling that uses a lot of water it's called evaporative cooling and so you have a big cooling tower and there's a big fan inside and it it sucks in air and water sprays in and the you know basically um the the latent heat or i'm sorry the heat from that from that water is absorbed and it's it's basically exhausted out the top you know and And then that water is then recirculated into the data center.

22:21That is very highly water intensive. And older facilities definitely use evaporative cooling in that way. But so do a lot of other types of industries. So it's not just the data center industry that's using that. Now, in locations where water usage is more of a concern, like here in Vegas, it's much more like a uh like a rooftop unit where it's you know it's got a chiller outside and it's a closed loop system and it's a lot like think of a scaled up version of the cooling system on your car where you have a big radiator and a fan and it's got water and glycol inside of there as the coolant and that's what removes the heat from your engine that's what a lot of these sites use now is is more of a closed loop um kind of chiller type uh cooling system so you you have your initial fill requirements where you have the you know the deionized water that you initially put into the system to fill it up with your glycol but then after that it's a closed loop so if if they're you know unless something catastrophic happens like a leak or you know a pipe failure or something like that you're actually not using a lot of water and so um that's what a lot of of companies and facilities are going towards because of the water concerns because you know obviously for the communities at large like all of this water usage is a big deal but also water is expensive and like i said before like these are companies who are looking to make a profit so if they can reduce their costs by reducing water consumption then that's what they're going to do um so i think that's a that's a big misconception of the ones you've worked at how many used evaporative versus closed loop so the ones that i worked at at google use a use the evaporative cooling and that was about you know 10 years ago or so the ones that i've been working on more recently and you know like in portland and here use the use the more radiator based cooling systems.

24:36So I think it's fair to say that the older the data center, the more likely it might have evaporative cooling. New ones, I don't know that they're 100 % using closed loop, but like you said, there are pressures to make them do it. And that's why I said in the previous special I did on data centers, like that's the thing to ask about if it's coming to your community and you're concerned about that. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I'm just trying to arm people with information yeah yeah you know if you know i i think you know and it goes to credibility you know like and we talked a little bit about this before we started like you know it's important to me to be credible in what i'm talking about and so that's why i don't say oh i'm the end all be all data center expert right so i think it's important when if you go to your town hall meetings or you you are you know even protesting or talking to somebody who might have influence you know it's important to have the correct information for the the site that you're in you know i'm you know i i think that people have a right to you know have informed decisions made for them and not just have these sites railroaded through you know i'm i it's tough because i'm always a see both sides type of person you know on the one hand like yes we i think we really do need data centers but on the other hand i think that the the residents should have a right to know what's going on in their communities.

25:59So providing information, you know, if I can, I think is a good thing. Let's talk a little bit about the electrical use, because I think that is the other main concern. And then maybe we could talk a little bit about noise, but let's start with electrical. Yeah. So most data centers get their electrical you know power from the local utility grid so they buy it from you know whoever the the local electrical provider is like from here in vegas it's envy energy um it comes in on high voltage power lines you know like 13.8 kilovolts or you know 145 or 345 kV um goes into a substation and then you know it comes in goes into a transformer gets stepped down to the voltage that's needed, then goes in through like switch gear, which is basically a bunch of breakers and, you know, different ways to distribute the power to the servers.

27:00Almost every single data center these days also has a diesel generator backup or sometimes natural gas backup power. So kind of in parallel with your utility power coming in, you also have a way to, if that utility power goes away there's usually some type of diesel generator that will start up and provide power to the critical load until the utility power comes back and i think uh the misconception that a lot of people have is that those diesel generators are running 24 7 now don't get me wrong there might be facilities in remote locations where there is no utility power there's one really well-known one that that's abusing that but yeah but in general you know they're for standby backup power um and so they're generally not running all the time usually um usually they're run uh for about you know 15 minutes once a month just to make sure that they start up correctly and that all the equipment still works and then uh you know depending on what company and what site you're at uh usually once a quarter or semi-annually you'll actually put the generator on the bus where it's carrying critical load so it's actually supplying the power to the data center the electrical bus not the uh school yeah not a school bus yeah yeah so um and that's just to verify that that generator can carry the load that it's supposed to um and that's only you know usually only for about an hour or so um you because you want to make sure that this equipment will work when you want it to um so you know you can't just leave it sitting there all the time inactive and then you have a utility outage and then oh no my generator will not start up and then you just lose everything you know that's yeah so it seems to me from from what you're saying uh in general data centers have just talked to the local community, uh, electrical supplier about getting their electrical, that this idea of data centers coming in and providing for their own electrical or providing money for build out is, is kind of a newer thing.

29:19Yeah, it is kind of newer. Um, yeah, it's, you know, the, the data centers providing their own power, that's definitely a newer thing um and especially you hear you hear talk about like you know the smrs you know the small modular reactors you know nuclear power powering these data centers so they don't have to uh you know be a strain on the grid and maybe in some instances maybe even provide power back to the grid if there's excess generation i mean that's a very interesting concept um of course you run into the nimbyism that's kind of plagued the nuclear industry it's in time you know almost existence so um yeah the the it's you know there's there's a lot of there's a lot of situations going on you know like nb energy has done some questionable things here in nevada in regards to data centers especially up in northern nevada um in the reno and lake tahoe area um you know, that a lot of people are not, not happy about.

30:25Um, so, you know, again, this is one of those things where I think that if you have the knowledge and then when you go to your, you know, your council meetings or whatever, then you, you're much more credible because you've done your research and know what you're talking about. And I think it's a really interesting point that, uh, most people kind of lump water usage and electricity as the two equal concerns. And from where I sit and tell me if you agree with the statement, water usage is mostly solved. You just have to make sure that the data center being built is using the current technology and not the older evaporative cooling technology.

31:03That shouldn't be hard. That's not controversial or new. Electrical is a problem that can be solved, but that's something that is newer and hasn't been tried. And so people are going to make some mistakes in how it's implemented. And so it's a little harder to hold feet to the fire because that's a more difficult problem to solve. Not that it's unsolvable, but that is a newer problem to deal with in providing your own electricity. Yeah, I'd agree with that. And you also have the conflation of, oh, electricity rates are going up across the board. My electrical bill is going to be almost$600 this month.

31:46Is that because of data centers, uh, you know, maybe a small percentage of it is, but I think more of it is that, you know, we're just running our air conditioning a lot more than we do. Or world events, right. Uh, that are, that are driving up energy prices for entirely unrelated reasons. Yeah. So, so I think it's important to, you know, I think it's important to understand that there is nuance, you know, my electricity bill is not going to be significantly higher because of data centers. And I think that's where a lot of the arguments come from is, you know, no situation is ever just black or white.

32:26You know, it's always shades of gray. And I think that's what we're running into here. What about noise? There's a lot of discussion about data centers being located close to residential areas and residents complaining about the noise from them. As someone who's worked in them, what do you make of that? So in my experience, you know, yes, the, you know, the server fans and the cooling fans inside of the facility, they are, they are kind of loud. You do have to wear hearing protection, but I think a lot of that is contained within the facility. For example, the site that I was just at, at Switch, you know, it's right next to a major highway.

33:09so i think that there's more noise for the surrounding you know tenant you know commercial and residential properties i think there's more noise from just the highway than there is from the data center so you know again it's i think uh people are pushing the data center bad button when there's there's other stuff going on so you you haven't heard much about infrasound or any of that, that sort of stuff. Yeah. I mean, of course I've heard about that. Uh, I don't know a lot about it. I, I, me personally, my time at the data centers, you know, I was never really affected, but then I know some people are more sensitive to different frequencies and stuff.

33:52I can only say that I was not affected. Um, you know, what about, uh, let's, let's move from the things that, you know, uh, people have misconceptions about to the things that people might not know at all uh the the things that you're like i don't think people realize this about a data center oh um well so in it's kind of might be surprised to learn so to so to speak yeah i i think that i think that's something that people might be surprised to know it and maybe not but like you really don't you know there's really not a lot of people that you need to operate a data center and maybe that's more on the negative side you know obviously the you know your construction trades and you know your commissioning companies and your general contractors are all engaged during the construction and and fit out and and initial startup of your data center but then once the data center is operating there's not really a lot of people that are required to run it And so, you know, I think that people should be wary when, you know, a company says, oh, we want to build a data center in your town.

35:02It's going to bring 2000 jobs. It's like, really? Like how many of those people are actually number one, I'm going to come from the local community versus like, you know, current employees who are going to be brought in. And number two, how many of those people are, you know, how many of those jobs are construction versus operations? so yeah and things that'll go away yeah it really doesn't require a lot of people to operate a data center how many how many do you do you think for an average size data center um so i would say so when i was at google we actually did a lot of our own maintenance um so we had maybe 30 or 40 facility facilities engineers who you know between electrical mechanical hvac generators stuff like that um other companies or other sites even within google they contracted that work out so you know when i was at the the site in iowa we were all googlers and we all did all that work but other sites like in in oregon or you know uh atlanta like they might contract that work out to a third-party contractor.

36:14And so your actual number of Googlers would actually be smaller because you wouldn't have those people on payroll. You just bring them in to do specific jobs and things like that. So it depends, even within a company, it depends on how the site is set up with its contracts and everything.

36:33This episode is brought to you by Capital One. Capital One's tech team isn't just talking about multi-agentic AI. They already deployed one. It's called Chat Concierge and it's simplifying car shopping. Using self-reflection and layered reasoning with live API checks, it doesn't just help buyers find a car they love. It helps schedule a test drive, get pre-approved for financing, and estimate trade-in value. Advanced, intuitive, and deployed. That's how they stack. That's technology at Capital One. Hey, Pablo Torre here. As a sports journalist, I've covered global sports for many years now. And there is one thing that I can promise you.

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37:48Yeah, and I think the other thing to keep in mind is that when companies are talking about jobs, they could be talking about construction. They could be talking about the 30 to 50 people that might be on site. They also could be talking about the after effects, right? Like if we have this data center, it gives us more capacity to provide more products that will then allow more people to start businesses and employ people. And that's valid. I think that's a valid stat. But it is important to keep that in mind when a data center says, we'll bring this many jobs. Like, okay, great. What are those jobs?

38:22Yeah, it's like, you know, you might have, you know, in the middle of nowhere and then somebody builds a gas station and then you start having businesses branch. They built a fast food place, somebody built a Walmart, you know, and then all of a sudden you have a hub, you know, and, you know, I don't know if they, you know, take into account those types of jobs, but it's definitely something that, that I think people should, should ask. Have you run into people with, because a lot of what we've talked about so far are the more typical like objections. Have you run into people who think like, oh, yeah, data centers can solve this.

38:57All I need is a new data center and I can make this happen. And you're like, yeah, I don't know the data centers can do that. Yeah, you know, and this is just my personal opinion. But a lot of that is the much more higher ups within a company. yeah you know they're they're much more idealistic about that kind of stuff um from from who about who i've run into and everything like that uh most of the people that i work worked with uh you know in the operations and commissioning are more like hey i mean this is great you know um you know it it'll keep keep the bills paid and everything like that but i i don't really run into a ton of the super idealistic people all the time.

39:39The data center optimist. Is there anything in your day-to-day work? And obviously, I don't want you to speak out of school about anything proprietary that you shouldn't talk about for any of the people you've worked at. But are there any examples of things where you ran into an oddity in the way data centers are managed where you're like, we always have to fix this or this is always an issue or something like that that gives people a little vignette example of of life working inside of one oh um man that that's a tough one i hadn't i didn't prep for that um i would say that um i would say that a lot of these data centers are you know you have a design and you know the design engineers come up with it and then you kind of think you know how things are supposed to work yeah yeah but then you know once a facility goes into operation you know things don't work the way that they're that they thought that they would or and so you have to modify your your plan so like you know for example um like yeah when i was uh you know you might you might think okay we're going to like we have this certain switch gear that powers these four you know server rows or something like that and if we need to power down one of the rows you know we'll just contact the networking people to like move all the traffic away from a particular row so that we can then shut it down and it turns out that's a lot harder than than you would think because you know and even this was you know 10 years ago when i was at google you know you have people processing tasks and they're not easily you know movable from one you know server road to another server road just because the processing that's going on and so you know what what what had to happen was we had to install another set of switch gear that could provide power to that server row while we turned off the stuff that we needed to work on and so you're fixing the plane in flight as they yeah pretty much i mean that's essentially what it was um and nobody had really anticipated needing to be able to do that because they thought oh yeah it'll be easy to drain that row and then it's like oh no like you know people have work that they're doing and you can't just you know put in a drain request and it's done very quickly people people are accessing their google docs right now on that videos man yeah yeah how much do you how much percentage of any data centers cat videos do you think i i don't know off the top of my head but i always thought it was fun when i was working on a server rack that you know hey this you know this might have some a bunch of cat videos on it or it was fun to imagine like oh this could have you know this could have some of my google docs on it or something yeah you never know like we talked about before like you have no idea what's on these computers.

42:49So, uh, it makes it fun to think about like, Oh, you know, meeting, meeting my Google photos are on this one or on this very machine that you're working on. Yeah. Um, how do you feel about working at data centers these days? I imagine it's changed over the years. Yeah. Like how, how do you personally think about that issue? You know, it's, it's, it's hard. Um, Because obviously, you know, data centers are very important. You know, it's cloud infrastructure and this and that. And, you know, in a lot of ways, you know, we have a, you know, my wife and I have a friend who does IT for one of the big casino companies over here in Vegas.

43:34and we we talked about this you know because on the one hand you know yes it can feel icky sometimes you know working for these you know big tech companies who you know maybe you don't necessarily agree with you know the the politics of who's in charge or you know kind of what the industry is about but then on the other hand you got to put food on the table too you know and in some ways it's like well if if i don't do this somebody else will you know and you know it's a moral conundrum and you know that's that's one of the reasons why i ended up leaving you know the commissioning job that i had paid really well but you know i couldn't i couldn't square the circle anymore with it um it was kind of you know it was hard it was getting to the point where like i don't i don't feel proud to work on this and and that's my opinion you know obviously you know i don't speak for everybody um you know but that was that was what led me to you know among other things you know of course there's there's always multiple reasons yeah yeah job but um you know i think it's i think that people who work in and on data centers these days have have a real challenge you know you know uh especially from people who may not you know watch shows like daily tech new show and, and, and get, you know, unbiased information about things.

44:56You know, they, they just see what they saw on social media and they're like, oh yeah, all data center bad, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's like, you know, there's, there's always nuance to everything, but you know, so I ended up making the decision for myself to, to get out of it. Yeah. But I think, I think it's hard. Well, before we wrap up anything else that we missed or you, you, uh, thought about along the way that you want to add to the conversation to help people understand all of this? I, I, I just encourage people to actually look, you know, if you have a data center coming, you know, that they're planning in your community and, and, you know, if you're opposed or if you're for it, you know, either way, like educate yourself on it because all of the plans are, you know, they have all of the companies before they build, they have to file for permits.

45:48They have to submit the plans to the, you know, the local jurisdiction for approval. You know, a lot of that stuff is public. And so you can find things and find things out. And, uh, you know, if you want to, you know, go to a council meeting pro or against data centers, you know, it really helps if you have, have the information, you know, it makes your case a lot stronger than just showing up and saying, I hate data centers or I love data centers. It's about data. Yeah. I don't like data. So, um, that I think that's, that's the message that I would really impart on people is like, educate yourselves, uh, and then, and then make your own decisions.

46:31You know, I'm not here to evangelize or, or de-advise the data center industry. Indeed. Well, Craig, thank you very much for spending so much time chatting with us about your inside experience, which I know you're at pains to make sure people don't think you know more than you do, but I think you do know more than you think you do. And that's really helpful for us to hear your side of things. Well, I appreciate that, Tom. And I'm happy to answer any questions people have. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, that's a good reminder, folks. I'm sure you will have thoughts and say, well, you know what? Actually, I want to know more about this point that Craig made, or I'd like to have him answer a question that we didn't talk about on this particular episode.

47:17Craig very kindly has agreed to do a follow-up episode in the future if we get enough of those. So send those questions our way. You can either comment on the Patreon or Substack directly or send them to his feedback at dailytechnewsshow.com, and we'll keep them squirreled away until we have enough of them to revisit. You can ask a real data center employee a question. Yeah. And please, please don't crucify me. I'm, uh, you know, I've, I've done, I've done my best to, to speak in good faith. Yeah. He's here to help. So, so, uh, so keep that in mind, uh, Craig, in the meantime, anything to tell people about it or is there anything that you have going on you want to let people know about?

47:56Yeah. Um, you know, if you're interested in, in kind of what's going on in my life and, you know, I have, I have my own website. It's, djfission.com djfission.com two s's um and yeah that's you know if you want to you know connect or you know linkedin or uh you know tell me how terrible i am or how no no don't do that but yeah that's my look that's actually uh so that that banner picture it's actually you know it reminded i got that picture um when i was in new jersey and it's actually the skyline of new york city but at the top of your website there that yeah that's real yeah that's real yeah it's new york city uh right right after like sunrise and i really like it because it looks like uh if you remember in mass effect it reminded me of like you know some of the some of the skylines in mass effect so that's yeah no it looks it does not look generated uh i'll say that but it looks artistic you know uh it looks like somebody painted it or created it yeah i just took that with uh you know back then i had a pixel 6 pro and just uh yeah it's just a straight photo i don't you know back then i don't think they had a ton of the ai processing that they have now so yeah it's just uh it's just a picture that i took well now you're going to want to go see it folks so you have to go to djfission.com uh again fission like you know with two s's uh to get there craig thank you so much man i appreciate you taking the time to chat with us yeah of course tom and of course thank you everybody for supporting us allowing us to be able to do this at patreon.com slash dtns if you enjoy this episode you would like to have more of them uh and maybe get them ad free uh support us directly patreon.com slash dtns have a great weekend everybody we'll be back with regular episodes on monday talk to you then

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