Ten years ago, each data center was custom-built, slow and expensive. By standardizing designs and building identical modular units, the company cut costs, secured predictable supply chains, and gained enough buying power with vendors like Schneider and Cummins to reshape global production schedules.
The way this has all been enabled is the fact that people are building a lot. If you look back 10 years, people were building data centers one at a time, one per generation, one per career, one per business unit. It was a craft industry. You'd start out, you'd do some requirements gathering, you'd hire a professional services firm, you'd go through a design phase, you'd argue forever inside your company about what you needed to build. Then you'd eventually go get a piece of land and build a data center. So that process was very, very long. When we came to the business, we started trying to build repeatable processes. So by building many small units, we forced ourselves into thinking about this repeatability. We gained a bunch of advantage that we didn't think about because that was the state of the industry. Everybody thought, well, this is the right way to build a data center. By picking a couple key architectural features and repeating them, we've actually gained a huge amount of advantage in the industry. Our costs have come down. Our supply chain is more durable and repeatable. Remember 4 or 5 years ago, people couldn't get generators in time. I have such a big buying power now by repeating my processes that all those risks have gone away. But it wasn't the kind of thing that was going to happen until someone like a Digital or this industry matured that we were going to start building these repeatable processes. The supply chain piece is probably the most important piece for us. We're a top 5 customer of Schneider. We're MGE's largest customer. We're one of the few global accounts at Cummins. We have the ability to pick up the phone and adjust production schedules globally for certain types of products. The only way we can do that is because we buy the same thing over and over again. If I have a boutique where my Singapore generators are 2,000 kilowatts, but the ones that we put in Australia are 2,100 kilowatts, I can't do that. These repeatable processes, if you think of manufacturing, specifically automotive manufacturing, and some of those metaphors that they've used, those are the types of techniques we're adopting in order to build these modular facilities.
2 people, infinite agents, 1 billion dollar idea #AIAgents #Startup #Productivity
