Cool Vector

Demand for nuclear power within the digital infrastructure industry is so great that the director of America's most important nuclear research complex has to remind people that he doesn't actually sell reactors. Cool Vector's David Snow caught up with Brian Smith, Chief Technology Officer of Nuclear Science and Technology at Idaho National Laboratory, at the recent Yotta conference in Las Vegas. S...

A planned two-gigawatt data center campus in West Texas will rely on behind-the-meter generation powered by abundant local natural gas, according to the CEOs of PowerBridge and Liberty Energy, the two companies partnering on the project. In an extensive interview with Cool Vector, Alex Hernandez, CEO of PowerBridge, and Ron Gusek, CEO of Liberty Energy, explained the scope of the project and the n...

A two-day charity golf tournament - the Nomad Ho'ohui Invitational - will now kick off the annual Pacific Telecommunications Council, according to Brian Moon, CEO of PTC, and Nabeel Mahmood, co-founder of the non-profit Nomad Futurist Foundation. The Nomad Ho'ohui, an invitation-only Ryder Cup-style matched play competition, will take place January 15 and 16 at the Kapolei Golf Club, blending indu...

The data center industry has been caught off-guard by public backlash, and must respond with transparency and much deeper community engagement, three communications veterans tell Cool Vector.  The Cool Vector episode, "Data Centers Have a Community Engagement Problem," includes Megan Baker, founder and principal of Tuli Public Affairs, Ilissa Miller, founder and CEO of iMiller Public Relations, an...

A boom in off-balance-sheet data center development is made possible by the good credit of hyperscaler customers, says Harold Chen, Senior Director in Fitch's Complex Credit Group. In a conversation with Cool Vector, Chen says he expects courts to enforce the guarantees made to these special-purpose vehicles, and to their underlying bondholders, should hyperscalers find it necessary to walk away f...

The growing implementation of liquid cooling technologies is forcing data center MEP engineers to rethink their fundamental design assumptions, says Chris Sutton, founder of Sutton Engineering which specializes in data center design. Sutton tells Cool Vector that, while the electrical side of data center infrastructure reached a level of maturity some time ago, the mechanical side is now in the mi...

Emerging and developing markets remain significantly underinvested in digital infrastructure, says Obinna Isiadinso, the global sector lead for data centers and cloud services investments at the International Finance Corporation (IFC). "India today has something like 1.7 gigawatts of capacity, compared to Northern Virginia that has 3 or 4 gigawatts," Isiadinso tells Cool Vector, citing the country...

Building AI infrastructure at gigawatt scale means "developing city-sized machines,'" says Craig Deering, senior construction manager at Oracle.  Drawing on decades of experience — from dismantling AT&T and building the Baby Bells to leading cloud and now AI data center projects — Deering tells Cool Vector: "The challenges of developing a city-sized machine have been known for at least a centu...

Data centers have access to plenty of power, but it's often stranded rather than put to use, says Ken Sullivan, co-founder and CEO of Bay Compute. "Power is the bottleneck to AI growth," Sullivan says. "A lot of the 'colos' and data centers are operating at 30, 40, 50% average power utilization." Sullivan lays out how the shift toward AI inference is intensifying the power problem, why colocation...

The biggest constraint facing data centers is finding the people capable of operating those data centers, says Brent Burnett, Managing Director and Head of Infrastructure and Real Assets at Hamilton Lane. Burnett tells Cool Vector that as capital floods into digital infrastructure, the pool of management teams equipped to run complex, cap-ex-heavy platforms remains small, and the price of accessin...

The digital infrastructure industry is incredibly diverse and needs talent of all types, says Harris Hamid, a computer science student at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and a student advocate for non-profit Nomad Futurist Foundation.  "No matter what you're doing, you can find a spot here," Hamid tells Cool Vector.  Hamid emphasizes how the industry welcomes people from al...

Walter Cannon helped create and implement LinkNYC, the project that brought free public Wi-Fi to all five boroughs of New York City. Cannon tells Cool Vector about how the project came to be under the Bloomberg Administration, as well as the logistical and political hurdles of rolling out thousands of Wi-Fi kiosks. Looking ahead, Cannon - a self-described "all-around technology guy" — discusses th...

Artificial intelligence tools are being adopted across construction, including digital infrastructure construction, says Indigo Pinto, Co-Founder IBB Solutions, a management firm for digital infrastructure construction projects. Pinto is also an ambassador for Nomad Futurist, and she reflects on discovering Nomad Futurist and how the phrase "the future is now" resonated with her view of the indust...

The data center industry is leaving enormous value on the table by failing to apply chip-level simulation techniques to the full infrastructure stack, argues Sherman Ikemoto of Cadence. Closing the “chip-to-chiller” design gap is now an existential requirement, given the pace of AI compute density growth. In an in-depth Cool Vector interview, Cadence’s Group Director of Business Development descri...

Stan Hanks invented a commodities market for broadband while at Enron, and has well informed views on the need for a similar market for compute. The main challenge: units of compute are proving difficult to standardize.  In this episode of Cool Vector, Stan Hanks of Kreneon, Wayne Nelms of Ornn, Hadassa Lutz of Cloud2Ground and host David Snow join Cool Vector to examine whether compute can be tur...

The AI boom will be fueled by connectivity — and the companies that win will be the ones that can build fast enough to keep up with it, says LightRiver CEO Mike Jonas. The hyperscalers, telcos, and utilities driving this buildout are well-funded and highly motivated, but years of consolidation have left them understaffed for the scale of deployment they now need to execute, Jonas tells Cool Vector...

Data center owners are turning to the infrastructure secondaries market for capital, and getting pushback over unrealistic valuations, says Eddie Keith, Partner and Head of Infrastructure Secondaries in the Ares Secondaries Group.  In a fascinating conversation, Keith tells sister channel Liquid Courage how digital infrastructure has rapidly evolved from a fringe asset class into one of the most a...

The data center industry is sitting on a large reserve of underutilized compute capacity, says Phil Flaherty, Chief Revenue Officer of PADO AI.  The capacity existing facilities, and unlocking it — rather than waiting for new gigawatt-scale builds — is both faster and more practical.  Flaherty tells Cool Vector the real opportunity lies in coordinating what happens inside a data center's walls wit...

From his perch as an executive recruiter into the data center and overlapping asset management industry, Patrick Reyes says he is seeing a proliferation of opportunities for mid-level executives to move up to the C-suite, and to move from smaller platforms to larger, private equity-backed growth platforms. Reyes, a Partner at Nu Advisory Group who oversees executive recruiting in the digital infra...

Felix Seda of NJFX explains how a cable landing station differs from a conventional data center — its core value proposition being latency reduction and the elimination of routing inefficiencies, connecting the US, Europe, and Latin America across four subsea systems within a single co-location facility. He frames NJFX's moment as directly tied to the industry's shift from AI training to inference...

When hyperscalers dominate supply chains by buying out available inventory and capacity, mid-market data center builders are left scrambling, says Kristen Sanderson, SVP at Duos Technologies Group. Sanderson is head of Duos Technologies' newly formed Infrastructure Solutions Group, which operates as a more flexible, nimble alternative to traditional big-box distribution, taking a strategic, projec...

Hawaii is embarking on a major upgrade of its digital infrastructure, intended to make the Aloha State more competitive as a digital hub, according to Garret Yoshimi, VP for Information Technology and CIO of the University of Hawaii. "This is a really big investment for the state," Yoshimi tells Cool Vector. "It's public funds going into this space, really intending to lift all boats in terms of i...

Rosa White, CFO and Co-founder of DR Fortress, Hawaii’s largest data center company, says Hawaii's position as a tier-three market allows her company to see what unfolds on the mainland and globally first. DR Fortress owns a 65,000-square-foot data center in Honolulu, and is now pursuing a three-megawatt expansion, paced deliberately to stay one step ahead of incoming demand from the hyperscalers...

Demand for co-location from local enterprises remains strong in second-tier US cities, says Kevin Bostik, CFO of DartPoints, in an interview with Cool Vector. Speaking on the sidelines of the 2026 Pacific Telecommunications Council, Bostik says smaller cities will remain in play as enterprise customers need to push workloads closer to the edge. Bostik also describes the unique role that a CFO play...

From his vantage point advising 15,000 Oracle enterprise customers, Scott Charter sees AI being rapidly integrated into the operating systems of modern business. Speaking on the sidelines of the DCD New York event in March, Charter, Director of AI Strategy for North America at Oracle, tells Cool Vector how AI is reshaping everything from hiring and benefits management to quarterly financial closes...