Cool Vector

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 industry networking with a mission to g...

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, and Phillip Koblence, CEO of Cri...

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 from data center lease agreements.&n...

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 middle of a significant transformatio...

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 as an example of an emerging marke...

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 century. We just need t...

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 operators are now being forced to o...

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 accessing them keeps growing.

In an in-dept...

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 all backgrounds, recalling ...

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 the growing need for low-latenc...

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 industry's trajectory, particularly when ...

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 describes how “th...

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 turned into a tradable commodity ...

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.

Speaking on the sidelines o...

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 active and compelling corners o...

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 with the broader...

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 infrastructure space, says that as priva...

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, arguing that the network la...

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, project-specific approach to sourcing rat...