Cool Vector

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...

A widening gap is developing between the data center industry's stated sustainability ambitions and the harsh operational reality of an AI-driven power grab, say four digital infrastructure veterans. This episode of Cool Vector includes commentary from Miranda Gardiner, Executive Director of the iMasons Climate Accord, Wannie Park, CEO of PADO (an LG Nova-backed company), Nabeel Mahmood, data cent...

Two recent MIT graduations have launched “the S&P 500 for compute” in order to allow digital infrastructure market participants to better hedge against price fluctuations.  Having graduated last year, Kush Bavaria, Co-Founder and CEO, and Wayne Nelms, Co-Founder and CTO, launched ORNN as an index fund for components necessary for compute fed into the infrastructure. Nelms spoke with Cool Vecto...

Suffice it to say that Richard Lukaj has been busy - the Co-Founder of digital-infrastructure focused investment bank Bank Street has advised on a torrent of transcations accross data centers and fiber networks, and says the deal pace and complexity is such that "most of 2026 is spoken for." Speaking at a Bank Street networking event in Honolulu, Hawaii, during PTC 2026, Lukaj shares with Cool Vec...

Is a zero-emission, gigawatt data center possible? The CEO of EdgeCloudLink says yes, but only if developers are capable of substituting hydrogen for natural gas as a source of energy. Speaking on the sidelines of the DCD New York event in March, Bachar tells Cool Vector his company already runs a zero-emission data center in Mountain View, California. The success gave ECL and partners the ambitio...

Hyperscalers increasingly will realize they don’t need mega data centers, which, by the way,  are becoming targets in military conflicts, according to industry veteran Tony Grayson. As the former President of Compass Datacenters and then Northstar Enterprise and defense, Grayson has long been at the forefront of modular data centers that serve the edge compute needs of the digital infrastructure l...

When a self-proclaimed data center developer claims to have a gigawatt of power secured, the proper response in far too many cases is, "No, you don't," says Mark McComiskey, Founding Partner of AVAIO Digital. Speaking with Cool Vector on the sidelines of the PTC 2026 event in Honolulu, McComiskey gives an overview of the resource and talent advantages possessed by AVAIO, and explains how the elect...

The Cool Vector editorial team welcomes Ted Manvitz, Managing Director and Head of International Investments at Grain Management, for a wide ranging conversation about digital infrastructure investing in non-US markets, as well as Manvitz’s professional history of investing in asset around the world. Also gathered for the episode are Hadassa Lutz, a Partner at Cloud2Ground, Phillip Koblence, CEO o...

Hunter Newby is making a big bet on internet exchange points in underserved mid-sized American cities. In a wide-ranging interview with Cool Vector, the founder of Newby Ventures says he predicts the same infrastructure model that proved highly profitable in tier-one markets over the past 25 years will generate recurring, high-margin returns in lower-tiered regions when they finally come online. K...

The case for Spain as an emerging AI infrastructure hub is made by Gabriel Nebreda Molinero, CEO of Nostrum Group, on the sidelines of the 2026 Pacific Telecommunications Council in Honolulu. Spain is uniquely positioned at the intersection of continents, Nebreda tells Cool Vector. The market has abundant renewable energy, extensive fiber coverage, and 30 submarine cables connecting it to the Amer...

The largest data center projects have a huge debt advantage, as well as a potential exti disadvantage, says John Day, Chief Commercial Officer of CleanArc Data Centers. Speaking with Cool Vector on the sidelines of the 2026 Pacific Telecommunications Council in Honolulu, Day shares front-line market intelligence about the debt “hiccup” in the digital infrastructure market favoring projects with in...

Data center batteries are no longer simply "backup insurance" for power disruptions, and are now a core part of digital infrastructure allowing efficient use of energy as well as unbroken uptime, say Brandon Smith, VP of Global Sales and Product at ZincFive and Nabeel Mahmood, a longtime data center operator and now the co-founder of Nomad Futurist Institute.  This episode of Cool Vector dives dee...