Welcome to the Data Center Infrastructure Podcast.
Every data center starts as a piece of dirt with a power line and a dream. Eric Sonner (Data Airflow) and Lance Teel (Atlas Energy) launch the Data Center Infrastructure Podcast and walk you through the part of the AI buildout almost nobody explains, the mechanical systems that keep billions of dollars of compute alive. New episodes every Monday. The Data Center Infrastructure Podcast is brought to you by Data Airflow, mechanical engineering, procurement, and commissioning for hyperscale AI and HPC data centers.
Data Center Infrastructure Podcast - Ep 10 - AI Pods and Internet Exchanges with Bryan Lubin of Moonshot
Training AI happens in giant campuses. Inference, the next wave, needs compute close to the people using it, and many states don’t have the network to support it.
Recorded in Austin, Eric and Lance sit down with Bryan Lubin of Moonshot Energy, a former private banker and chief credit officer who now underwrites power, land, and compute. Bryan explains the infranet. Moonshot and Connected Nation Internet Exchange Points are deploying modular AI pods next to internet exchange points at university campuses, starting at 25 sites and scaling to 125. In states without a local exchange, traffic travels hundreds of miles before it’s answered. For self-driving trucks and robotics, that delay is a serious problem.
Plus what modular should mean (precast concrete pods, not metal boxes), closed loop cooling built with Data Airflow, sites under five megawatts, a six to eight month timeline from dirt to data, and why OEMs now want proof a site is ready before they ship servers.
Bryan’s advice closes the show. Be who you are, stay focused, and expect to fail. That’s how you learn.
If you use your phone, you use a data center. Get to know what’s good and what’s bad.
Watch on YouTube. https://youtu.be/zArAps8I-y4 (https://youtu.be/zArAps8I-y4)
More at https://dcipodcast.com (https://dcipodcast.com)
5 Oct 2026
Data Center Infrastructure Podcast - Ep 9 - Dell's David Holmes on the Data Center-Aware Grid
AI data centers swing their power draw by tens of megawatts in seconds, and the grid wasn't built for it. David Holmes, Global Industries CTO for Energy at Dell Technologies, sits down with Eric Sonner and Lance Teel in Austin to talk about what it takes to fix that.
David covers why AI loads are so hard on generators and transformers, how long-duration flow batteries buffer a data center from the grid, and where stranded power is hiding at substations and in half-empty buildings. He lays out his nine-box framework for deciding where AI workloads should run, explains sovereign AI, and makes the case that PUE is only half the scorecard. Tokens per watt is the other half.
Then he gets into Concept Astro, Dell's proof of concept for a grid-aware AI factory, and the bigger idea behind it, a grid that's aware of its data centers. The conversation closes on ERCOT's Batch Zero process, what makes a good grid citizen, and why physical AI is the next shift to watch.
Concept Astro white paper https://www.delltechnologies.com/asset/en-us/solutions/business-solutions/industry-market/concept-astro-whitepaper.pdf
David Holmes on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/energygm/
Hosted by Eric Sonner, CEO of Data Airflow, and Lance Teel of Atlas Energy.
28 Sept 2026
Data Center Infrastructure Podcast - Ep 8 - The Battery That Turns Data Centers Into Grid Assets
A normal data center battery buys you 10 minutes. This one runs for 10 hours, can't catch fire, and can turn a data center into a power plant for its neighbors.
Recording in Dallas, Eric and Lance sit down with Jeff Goldberg, Chief Development Officer and co-founder of TerraFlow Energy, maker of vanadium flow batteries that work as a power hub. Every source a site has flows through the battery, the data center draws from the battery, and the chemistry absorbs AI load volatility in milliseconds while protecting equipment on both sides.
Jeff breaks down the numbers. 250 megawatt hours on under an acre, an electrolyte that's 75 percent water with no lithium fire risk, a 20 to 30 year life filled once, and simultaneous charge and discharge. With 10 plus hours of storage, a data center can carry itself through peak hours and push power back to the grid. In Jeff's words, you turn a data center into a peaker plant. The vampire becomes a blood donor.
Plus the origin story, a real estate developer, his metal fabricator tenant Jon Parrella, and two words that started it all. I'm in. Five founders, 59 employees in two years, and a factory opening in Katy, Texas. Jeff's advice closes the show. Get an internship. The industry needs you.
If you use your phone, you use a data center. Get to know what's good and what's bad.
Watch on YouTube. https://youtu.be/DV-diphbD98 (https://youtu.be/DV-diphbD98)
More at https://dcipodcast.com (https://dcipodcast.com)
21 Sept 2026
Data Center Infrastructure Podcast - Ep 7 - Sovereign AI and Europe's Data Center Wave
When Gary Wojtaszek got into data centers, 10 megawatts was enormous. Now he builds gigawatt digital factories.
Eric and Lance sit down with Gary "Wojo" Wojtaszek, Executive Chairman of Pure Data Centres Group and former CEO of CyrusOne, which he took public and scaled into one of the largest operators in the world. Wojo traces the industry's whole arc, from finding a data center business hiding inside Cincinnati Bell, to the manufacturing mindset that delivered 30 megawatts in six months, to the retirement that turned into RecNation, America's largest RV and boat storage platform.
The heart of the episode is sovereign AI. Europe watched the AI wave land in America and Southeast Asia, and now nations are racing to build their own infrastructure so their data and national security don't depend on anyone else. Wojo explains why the US and Europe capacity gap has never been wider, and what Pure DC's community first rollout in Seinäjoki, Finland, with university partnerships and a planned AI incubator for local kids, says about how this industry should show up everywhere.
Plus, data centers as shock absorbers for the grid, the trillion dollar capital allocation era, a leadership tree that has produced eight CEOs, and the quote that closes the show. You can never beat a man who doesn't quit.
If you use your phone, you use a data center. Get to know what's good and what's bad.
Watch on YouTube. https://youtu.be/gyBvtEWDdKc (https://youtu.be/gyBvtEWDdKc)
More at https://dcipodcast.com (https://dcipodcast.com)
14 Sept 2026
Data Center Infrastructure Podcast - Ep 6 - Saving Water Via Desalination with Nona Technologies
About a third of the water a traditional cooling tower consumes never cools anything. This episode is about the machine that fixes that.
Recording at the Future Bridge High Density Power Conference in Dallas, Eric and Lance meet their first walk up guest.
Bruce Crawford, CEO and co-founder of Nona Technologies, an MIT spinout that started with briefcase-sized units turning seawater into drinking water for the military and now builds refrigerator-sized units that can cut a data center's water consumption roughly in half, counting both the site and the power plant behind it.
Bruce breaks down cycles of concentration, and the third of tower water sacrificed down the drain, the electrode process that recovers around 90 percent against 65 for comparable reverse osmosis, and the retrofit that installs without shutting the system down.
Plus the dry cooling trap that pushes water consumption over the fence to the power plant, Scope 1 and Scope 2 water accounting, and the brackish groundwater under more than half of America that turns unbuildable land into data center sites. Also, Eric's son blaming him for a naturally dry Arizona riverbed, the Lake Ontario build that touches zero lake water, and Bruce's advice for young people.
Work on something that matters.
If you use your phone, you use a data center.
Get to know what's good and what's bad.
More at https://dcipodcast.com (https://dcipodcast.com/)
7 Sept 2026
Data Center Infrastructure Podcast - Ep 5 - Microreactors and the Future of Data Center Power
A nuclear reactor that fits in a shipping container, built on an assembly line, and sold out through 2035.
Recording on the road at the Future Bridge High Density Power Conference, Eric and Lance sit down with Richard Gaut, CFO of Deployable Energy, maker of a one megawatt microreactor.
Eric discloses up front that he's an angel investor, then Richard explains why nuclear's problem was never the physics, it was the construction. Factory built reactors, the new NRC Part 57 rules written for them, and the Department of Energy race that got their unit critical before July 4th after entering a 400 day challenge on day 250.
Plus what walk away safe means, proven at the Idaho National Lab by draining the coolant at full power and watching the reactor calmly shut itself down. Why the system uses no water. The 60 acre gigawatt, delivered in 200 megawatt phases. And the island nations burning diesel for half their power, where one container of uranium plus waste heat desalination changes everything.
Richard's advice for young people closes the show. The white collar or bust path was dead wrong, and most people have no concept of what enables their lifestyle.
If you use your phone, you use a data center. Get to know what's good and what's bad.
Watch on YouTube. https://youtu.be/Ou-r1Ejr_Qk (https://youtu.be/Ou-r1Ejr_Qk)
More at https://dcipodcast.com (https://dcipodcast.com/)
31 Aug 2026
Data Center Infrastructure Podcast - Ep 4 - SB6, Batch Zero, and Texas Grid Power Explained
Texas hit pause on the biggest data center buildout in history, and this episode explains why.
Lance and Eric welcome their first remote guest, Del Hilber of Atlas Energy Solutions, who brings 25 years in energy markets, from the Constellation trading floor in the Enron era to running one of the largest demand response portfolios in North America. Professor Del, as Lance calls him, breaks down Senate Bill 6 and the Batch Zero process, the new rules deciding which of the hundreds of gigawatts waiting to connect to the Texas grid are real and which are phantom loads, and what the governor's early August pause means for water disclosure, community outreach, and every project in the queue.
Plus, what a negawatt is, the Northern Virginia grid scare that rippled toward Chicago, why bridge power echoes the steel mills of the 1940s, cogeneration and using engine heat for cooling, and the PUE math where five saved megawatts is worth hundreds of millions.
Del's advice for the next generation closes the show. Find a mentor, and judge people by the company they keep.
If you use your phone, you use a data center. Get to know what's good and what's bad.
More at https://dcipodcast.com (https://dcipodcast.com/)
25 Aug 2026
Data Center Infrastructure Podcast - Ep 3 - Why AI Data Centers Are Leaving the Grid w/ Jake Corley
The line for grid power in Texas has grown past 400 gigawatts. Jake Corley decided to skip the line entirely.In episode three of the Data Center Infrastructure Podcast, Lance Teel and Eric Sonner sit down with Jake Corley, Marine Corps veteran and founder of Corley Energy, who is building off grid data center infrastructure on a West Texas site so remote he calls it Wile E. Coyote territory. No municipal water. No local rates to affect. No neighbors. And natural gas so abundant that producers were at times paying to get rid of it, now locked up on long term contracts and turned into AI compute.This is the island power episode, and it covers the biggest shift happening in the industry right now. Why connection queues and multi year timelines are pushing builders to generate their own power. How stranded Permian gas became the cheapest energy in America. Why the most worthless land in Texas suddenly became the most valuable, with fiber fast enough to reach Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio in a few milliseconds. And what sovereignty means when the compute inside the building is the bulk of the entire investment.The guys also get into the PUE numbers that separate world class sites from everyone else, and why moving from 1.36 to 1.23 is worth billions. Why air cooling posts great numbers but can't keep up now that racks have jumped from 4 kilowatts to 200 and beyond. The CapEx versus OpEx trade off behind hundreds of billions in annual buildout. Plus the butterfly effect story of how one conference afterparty in the back of a Yukon XL launched Data Airflow into building some of the biggest data centers in the world, and a pitch Eric will never forget, a data center on an Alaskan volcanic island that erupts every 30 years.Jake's path here says as much as the site does. Marine Corps, no college, oil and gas, a media company built as a hobby, and a conference that changed the trajectory of half the people in this industry. His advice for young people closes the show. The world belongs to the curious. You don't need permission. You can just go do things.If you use your phone, you use a data center. This show exists to help you understand what's good, what's bad, and what it takes to build them right.New episodes every couple of weeks. Subscribe and turn on notifications.Website. https://dcipodcast.comApple Podcasts. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/data-center-infrastructure-podcast/id6799820255Spotify. https://open.spotify.com/show/0344qx3SJhse3TFPCHDyJcThe Data Center Infrastructure Podcast is presented by Data Airflow, mechanical engineering, procurement, and commissioning for hyperscale AI and HPC data centers.
17 Aug 2026
From Bitcoin Chicken Coops to Billion Dollar AI Data Centers
Lance and Eric welcome their first guest, Josh Bennett, COO of Data Airflow, fresh off a three week road trip through four data center sites in upstate New York, Kentucky, and the Permian Basin.
Josh shares his path from a warehouse job at 17, no college, to running commissioning operations on billion dollar builds, and explains the least understood job in the industry. His teams try to break data centers on purpose, with load banks and test scripts, proving every backup system works before the servers arrive.
From the road, the guys cover the half gigawatt AI campus rising where an aluminum smelter died 15 years ago, the cleanup nobody else would have done, the Bitcoin mining chicken coop days the industry grew out of, a West Texas town of 900 transformed by its tax base, and the closed loop water misconception almost everyone gets wrong.
Plus the Wyoming fill and flush story that became a cautionary tale for the whole industry, and why the talent shortage in the trades may be a bigger constraint than power.If you use your phone, you use a data center. Get to know what's good and what's bad.
More at https://dcipodcast.com (https://dcipodcast.com/)
10 Aug 2026
From Dirt to Data: Why Cooling Decides Who Wins the AI Race
Somewhere in America, a piece of dirt is about to become a data center.
Eric Sonner (Data Airflow) and Lance Teel (Atlas Energy) kick off the Data Center Infrastructure Podcast with the part of the story nobody tells, the cooling, power, and mechanical systems that stand between raw land and racks of live compute.
Eric explains how his team sizes cooling for a 200 megawatt building the size of two Costcos, why closed loop systems work like the radiator in your car, and how a brackish water project in West Texas turned a better PUE into 15 years of added compute value.
Lance covers the power crunch, secured genset capacity, and why the industry has moved from a server shortage to a power shortage to a fight for public trust.
They also get into thermal storage tanks, chiller lead times stretching past a year, the difference between AI factory and enterprise cloud redundancy, and why the water math on a modern data center looks more like a McDonald's than a reservoir.
The Data Center Infrastructure Podcast is brought to you by Data Airflow, mechanical engineering, procurement, and commissioning for hyperscale AI and HPC data centers.
New episodes every Monday.
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