The New Modular Data Center by Redivider w/ Tom Frazier - BRT S04 EP31 (194) 8-6-2023

This is Business Roundtable with Matt Vitale, the place where entrepreneurs, top business leaders, the best ideas, and the biggest stories in business meet. Let's get started.

You are on the Business Roundtable. We are weekly business shows. We cover a multitude of topics. This week's topic, the theme is tech. Specifically, we're going to be talking about data centers, but not the typical data center you would think of, the warehouse style, huge data center. This is somewhat of a different touch on it. Maybe call it a little bit more personalized. Our guest this week, his name is Tom Frazier and the company is called Redivider. How are you today, Tom?

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Well, appreciate you coming on. Talk to me about— start with first traditional data centers. How old are they? And I think of the giant warehouse. So like how many companies are using one data center?

Yeah, that's a broad question to start with. I mean, the data center industry is absolutely enormous. We rely on computing power for so many things in our life today. And the majority of that computation whether it's sharing a photo on Instagram or powering the cloud computing apps you use every day like Gmail, those are typically done in these very large facilities that are spread all across the world. And that ranges from, I'd say, early in the life of data centers, back in the '70s and '80s, you're talking about enterprise data centers. And companies now specialize in providing data centers to other people. So even somebody like Google, you know, they don't do all of their own facilities. They will contract that out to the data center industry itself. So those facilities are, you know, you might have 100,000 servers, you might have 500,000 servers, but they're, they're typically these really, really large buildings, uh, all throughout the world. And collectively, this industry consumes about 2 to 3% of all the power that's generated, which is, you know, quite substantial.

The rise of data, it's obviously not going to be a smaller industry. So, you know, you're specializing. Take us now to Redivider, or if— excuse me, Redivider, if I'm pronouncing that right, and how you're specializing in. We've gone from massive data to now something of almost like a micro facility that you're putting together.

Yeah. So the data growth is the core problem the industry is solving for. Absolutely. And I'll just give you a little, little analysis of that. Out of the entire amount of data ever generated since the beginning of mankind, about 90% of that has been in the past 2 years. So that should give you a sense of how fast it's growing. And by, you know, 2025 or so, we'll probably be another 5 times higher than we are today. So the growth of data is just absolutely huge, and the industry cannot keep up. And so the idea of Redivider, when it was born a few years ago, was this idea of edge computing, where instead of having these huge facilities that take 2 years to come online, we would make smaller facilities that are roughly the size of a tractor-trailer or a shipping container. And by making them smaller, we can make them faster, and by making them faster, we can get them online in more places where computing has traditionally not been available. So we don't need 50 or 100 acres of land, we just need a much smaller footprint. So that allows us to go in more places. It also allows us to focus on the sustainability of computing in a much more focused way. And ideally we can put these in locations where we can also drive tremendous social impact.

How does it work then power-wise versus obviously a huge data center? You just said it, going to take a lot of power. How does this compare in that regard?

Well, the power consumption for the computing is really the driver. But by making our facilities smaller, we can find power in more locations. So for example, a large data center facility might consume 200 or 300 megawatts of power, whereas our facility might consume 1 megawatt of power. And so we can find— we can more easily find 1 megawatt of power than finding 200 or 300 megawatts. The bigger vision that we're working towards is also not being tied to the grid. You know, the, quote, grid is actually thousands and thousands of interconnected systems, which is very complex to upgrade and very high legacy cost today. And by focusing on what's called prime on-site power, where we have our own power generation, we can be more nimble. And again, we can focus on more sustainable solutions for power. And we think that that's going to be a great addition to the fabric of the internet as it is today.

What does it look like in practicality then? So sort of an example, a case study of a client you're working with and you put one of these how do I call it? I don't want to say mini data center. It's a data center. You put a more modular data center on site. What does it kind of look like? And then how are they pulling the power for it?

So our approach is to be kind of two novel factors, two primary novel factors. The first is that they're modular. If the requirements for one location are small, we can put a small facility, or if they're larger, we can just add more modules to make it a larger capacity facility. And we think that's the right approach going forward is modularity. And to achieve that modularity, we are focusing on prefabricating them. So traditional data centers, as you would think of them, you close your eyes and imagine these football field-sized buildings, They're 2-year construction projects. And in order to attain the modularity, we're prefabricating our facilities in a factory. And so now we can use all the benefits that every industry has had around factory build of technologies, the automobile or anything you can think of, and we're applying that to data centers. And that allows us to scale out pretty quickly. And in terms of connecting to the grid, if we can find the power on the grid, great. And if not, we can also prefabricate our on-site power generation. So the assembly line, just a super easy example, a data center comes off the line about the size of a shipping container. There's another line that produces the power generation equipment. And those can go on a truck or a train and get installed anywhere that we can find property where customers have demand. And that allows us, ultimately, my goal is to make sure Redivider is in a place where we are able to go from buying dirt to have a live data center in 30 days, when the average right now is about 2 years.

On site? Clients you're working with, would they have the land already or is it a situation where you try to put the prefabricated data center near their office or does it not even matter?

Both of those cases are true. So, you know, if you think of the data center industry, it's at capacity. There's just no capacity at data center space today, pretty much universally around the globe. So we can put our facilities where we are strategically locating them, you know, throughout the United States in areas called opportunity zones. But also if a customer, let's say they have a very special type of workload, and I'll use the example of an animated film. You know, there might be a big production company, you know, Disney or Netflix or anybody that wants to animate a film and they need computing power for a year. We could take one of our data centers, drop it at their doorstep, they could use it for a year, and then a truck can pick it up and move it somewhere else. So this gives us the most flexibility around ensuring that we can put compute power very close to where it gets used.

Just to understand that, because I do not understand that, is there a, you know, obviously I'm using all sorts of apps and SaaS programs online on a daily basis. No idea whether I'm close to wherever they're doing the computing or the data center. What's the advantage or disadvantage depending on how far you are from your data center?

Yeah, you know, I think we are at the layer which is kind of hidden to the average consumer, but the, the one that is very visible is your cell phone. You know, everyone has been promised the speed of 5G. 5G and how amazing it can be, but the reality is the number of antenna that are required to deliver on that throughput, that speed and performance is much higher than previous generations. And so you need to move the computing power closer to those antenna. So that's where you would see, as a consumer, you would see a noticeable gain as edge data centers get closer to where the cell phone towers are. The other major drivers is not to change how you would use something like the cloud, but to actually be an edge program for cloud providers, right? The Googles and Amazons of the world, they have their major data centers and they may say, hey, we've got a lot of people down in Florida that we need to increase their performance or add security for IoT and manufacturing. And so we can put our facility there. These cloud vendors would be the customer, and the users in that area would see a performance improvement.

Okay. Okay. For people just tuning in, you're listening to the Business Roundtable. That voice is Tom Frazier of Redivider. And as he was just discussing, they are looking to adjust and modernize, for lack of a better word, data centers. So smaller data centers, module data centers, and it seems like potentially more flexibility in data centers and what we have going forward as we try to modernize the grid. Website is redivider.co for more information. We're going to take a quick break. This is the Business Roundtable. I am Matt Vitale. Whether you're tuned into the weekly radio show, in Phoenix, Arizona on 1100 KFNX or the podcast. Please like and subscribe. We always appreciate you tuning in. We'll be right back, talk to Tom about his bio and the sustainability of the Redivider Project. Don't go anywhere.

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We're back on the Business Roundtable. I am Matt Battaglia. We are talking data centers. The guest today is Tom Frazier of Redivider. Let's jump back in. Tom, let's step back for a minute. Tell me about your background. You've been working in tech 2 decades plus. How did you wind up in data centers? Is this by accident or was there sort of a, a growth towards this because you had been working in other areas and an overlap?

Yeah, great question. So I started my professional career in the mid-'90s. I actually went to university and ended up taking a job as faculty staff when I was about 18 at my university. And this was when the internet was being built, you know, mid-'90s. Everyone's pulling cable to every part of the planet, and I was part of that. And, you know, it's kind of stuck with me since then that I've been involved, involved in the industry. And for a large portion of my career, it was actually in the security side of things. So, you know, I was hired to build defensive security systems, and, and sometimes that entailed breaking into data centers. Finding the vulnerabilities and weak spots in them to make sure that they were more robust. I would say I've been in the IT space my entire career and my entire adult life.

Past stuff. What was the level security-wise? Had you been on site? How well did you understand data centers prior to getting involved in Redivider or creating Redivider?

Yeah, I mean, like I said, since the mid-'90s I've been involved in data centers, you know, understanding the designs, understanding how data gets moved, how data gets computed and stored and secured. And the idea of Redivider came about, you know, a few years ago when everyone now starts working from home. And when you think about the way the internet used to work, you would have a really big data center with a really big network connection to a downtown building where everyone worked. And so people would go home and use the internet, but the, the volume of data was largely in the workday, right? And when everyone started working from home more permanently for years now, and it seems that it's going to stick at least, um, much higher ratios than it was in the past, The idea of the structure of the internet is completely different now. You know, the demands of computing power and performance and security are more like a fabric now where we need to have a lot of computing capability in different places. And so we took that opportunity to get into this edge data center market, these smaller facilities, in our case, prefabricated and modular, to help build that next layer of the internet that's going to persist for the next 10 to 20 years.

Do you think it's even 10 to 20 years if things move so fast? You know, will you need the redivider 2.0 in 5 or 10 years?

Absolutely right. I mean, but if you look at the pace of the data center growth versus the pace of the data consumption, that's a huge gap. And that's the opportunity for us. Is if data is gonna be 5 times higher, which by the way has its own environmental issues about the impact of data, but if the use is gonna be 5 times higher, but the forecast of traditional data centers is gonna miss that use by many orders of magnitude, that's where edge computing is gonna work. And we think the only way to satisfy that demand, The only way is to prefabricate them in this modular way to pump out hundreds or thousands of these small data centers as quickly as possible.

Your company, you're working US only right now, or are you already abroad with people looking for these data centers?

We know the demand is global. We have those calls every day or every week, but we're staying solely focused on the United States. You know, at the end of the day, Redivider is still a very young company before we, you know, we don't want to go over our skis, so to speak, right? We want to just stay home here in the United States, focus on having a great base to build from, and, you know, we can expand internationally in the future.

And the actual data center, the physical data center, power-wise, I've read different stuff, again, following some, not following some. Are there rechargeable things? How does it kind of look long-term? On the sustainability part?

Yeah, I think first maybe we'll talk about the problem that we're trying to solve for, and then we can get into the solution. The issue with data centers that are almost exclusively tied to the grid today is your ability to influence the impact that it has on the planet is very low because the power is all coming from the grid, the power operator. And that is an even slower industry than the data center because it's so complex. Right. So someone might add a solar field to their grid, but that only adds, you know, 1 or 2 percentage points of renewable energy. When we kind of took a look at this saying, hey, our opportunity is it's a blank sheet of paper. So how do we design a future that can focus on sustainability? And that comes down to two things. One, Ensuring we have high transparency on our carbon accounting, for example, you know, make sure we understand the impact of a cable or a power cord or the steel that's used in the building. And because we're making them in a factory, we have high repeatability on that carbon accounting. So that's the first part is understanding the problem. And then on the solution, That's where we really think Prime on-site power is going to be a major differentiator to improve that sustainability. You know, we can focus on cleaner technologies out of the gate. We can focus on things like natural gas or hydrogen that allow us to do industrial-scale energy and do on-site batteries that allow us to, again, decouple from the grid a little bit, which allows us to deploy faster in a sustainable framework that makes more sense.

So the batteries are on site, batteries could recharge. Is that kind of what it looks like?

Yeah, data centers use this technology called UPS or uninterruptible power, right? So you would have batteries a lot of times as a backup. So if your power generation dies, you have some period of time that you can still operate. So yeah, everything that we have in a data center is just like the very large facilities, only we do it in a slightly different way. We have more control over that whole ecosystem. And because we have more control over it and we're designing it in a factory, we also have the ability to make it more sustainable ongoing.

Is this a situation too where if it's outside, it's in some sort of facility that's the size of a shipping container or something, Could you also add solar panels or something to it? Or is that kind of way out of bounds?

It's not out of bounds, it's just not practical. So I'll give an example. If your data center has 1 megawatt of power requirement for all the computers inside of it, the amount of solar panels you would need would be enormous. You're talking acres of land worth of solar panels. And so the impact on the planet to do land clearing for all of those solar panels is bad. The actual embodied carbon inside of a solar panel is also not really yet at a level that's useful for industrial scale. And on top of it, edge in general is about putting computing closer to the use case, right, the consumers. So it doesn't— you couldn't put an edge data center next to a populated area and then at the same time have the need to clear out a huge portion of land for solar panels. So we don't think solar is a great option for the data center industry. Wind is an OK option if you're near somewhere that has wind power as a generation, but that's where we really think the idea of hydrogen and natural gas for onsite power, along with anything we can work with grid operators on. We really think that's the strategic way to solve the, the major issue, which is ensuring that there is computing available for the data consumption of these, the decentralized population.

Do you have the larger conversation about the grid? Because that seems to— now we're hitting call it a tipping point to a degree, because it seems like it just affects so many things. And we're going to have more computers tomorrow. So, you know, the more data, more computers, more whatever, cell towers.

Yeah, well, exactly. And little statistics for you. In 2016, the data center industry used about 286 terawatt-hours of energy. By 2030, that's going to reach 1,000 terawatt-hours, so roughly 4 times the amount of power in roughly 15 years. And if you look at the rate of growth in the grid at the same time that they're trying to pivot and be more renewable energy, they're just— the grid operators around the world are just unable to meet the demand of data centers.

It's kind of— I mean, that's kind of depressing and daunting in the fact that doesn't seem like they're even going to remotely going to be able to meet that demand. Here, I'll hold the thought just for a second.

For—

you're listening to the Business Roundtable. I'm Matt Battaglia. That voice you're hearing, his name is Tom Frazier. He is with ReDivider. We're talking about the electrical grid, sustainable power, and specifically data centers. So you have your traditional data centers that might be the size of a factory, huge data centers with a lot of computing power inside them. And now Redivider is redefining the data center, making it a smaller data center, more module unit, able to have more versatility with where and when you can use it. We will take a break for a moment, then come back and talk more with Tom about his clients and the redivider business model. Business Roundtable, don't go anywhere. During these uncertain times, St. Vincent de Paul has pivoted services to keep serving individuals and families experiencing homelessness and poverty in Arizona. We're working daily to feed, clothe, house, and heal to heal our most vulnerable neighbors. So please give what you can in these trying times. Every little bit helps. If your family is struggling, contact St. Vincent de Paul for help at stvincentdepaul.net/covid19. That's stvincentdepaul.net/covid19.

Welcome back.

You're listening to the Business Welcome to this roundtable. I am Matt Battaglia. We're talking technology, specifically data centers and the new design modular data center that Redivider has created. Our guest is Tom Frazier. You talked about somewhat of a mobile unit. So somebody needs a data center for a set period of time. Is that your average client or is your average client someone who is looking to build it on-site or close by?

So the majority of the footprint that, that, uh, that we're rolling out is around solving the problems for the industry. Uh, so I would say we're skewing more towards the enterprise customers, more towards the— they're called hyperscalers. Those are like the cloud vendors of Google and Microsoft and Amazon. And you know that we're skewing more towards those because their demand is extremely high. For all the products and services consumers use today, whether it's Facebook or TikTok, any sort of general consumer application, the demand is already growing. So we think that those— the solutions we're building for that is going to be significantly more in volume than a bespoke application like the example I gave of an animated film needing more rendering equipment. Right. But the design that we've come up with on purpose is to cater for all these different use cases, which gives us the most flexibility to grow and expand.

Tell me about ReDivider. How big of a company is— are you guys producing your module units or do you outsource that? What is the mechanical process look like?

Yeah, great question. So ReDivider again was started back in 2021, and, you know, we had this vision of how do we take a blank piece of paper and help build the next layer of computing for the world. And, you know, the solution we came up with is reDivider, and ultimately what we found in our research is we want to focus on sustainability and social impact. And the reason for that is the environmental impact of humanity requiring more computing in our daily lives is something that should not be— shouldn't just be washed over. And that's kind of validated by all of these large enterprises making, and governments making public statements around a focus on Vision Zero or net zero emissions. Zero or dramatically reduced carbon footprint. And so we think we're, we're really aligning on not the computing needs. We're aligning with the needs more at the level of humanity as well as these corporate directives. And, you know, so far that's been, been pretty spot on. And we think we're leading the market in that regard. And I think it's going to be a very big macro trend for the whole industry. So in terms of how we do that, to your question about, you know, how do we make these things? My business partner, Eric, you know, his expertise is in supply chain. I'm the tech data center guy, he's the supply chain guy. And this business is very much a supply chain driven business, ensuring that we are ordering all the components to build a facility at the right schedule and cadence to ensure that we're able to assembly line manufacture them. And early on, we were looking to build our own facility, and the way the math works out for us, instead it was better to work with partners who had the same sort of vision that we did. And, you know, who is operating in Opportunity Zones to drive the right social impact, who has the right focus, what partners do we have that have the right focus on sustainability, And so we ended up partnering with like a contract manufacturer that is making our facilities here in the United States. So they're all made in the USA.

Was that what I was reading about? NZero, was that— is that who you're working with?

NZero is a software platform that we use for carbon accounting. So that's not related to the manufacturing of the buildings, but that's the— we did a press release on that, I don't know, 2 months ago or so, a month ago. So nZero is our, the platform that allows us to understand all of the kind of embodied carbon in our facility as well as, as we're operating our facilities, knowing what that carbon emission looks like. And that way we can offer that to our customers. So a quick example, large companies, it's called enterprise IT, they have a carbon footprint that is about twice as bad as these very large-scale data operators, data center operators. So for us to have a highly sustainable platform and high transparency, offering that to enterprise customers to say, hey, you have the same computing requirements, they're actually growing, your board directive says we need to reduce our carbon footprint, that an easy way for you to do that is to start using Redivider, put your computing requirements into Redivider facilities. Now you have a lower carbon footprint, but you also have a baseline because you now have exact information about how your computing went from a high value to a low value. So N-zero helps us do that, but they're not related to the manufacturing.

Okay, playing devil's advocate though, Tom, I hear corporate boards sometimes are concerned with profit and costs. That's just a rumor through the history of capitalism. So I'm not trying to downplay the mission because the grid is overtaxed. Clearly you've established for 20-plus minutes here the viability and the need for it. How do the costs compare? I imagine the cost to run some football-sized data center are enormous besides the power that they need. You know, what are we looking at with costs? Because you're talking batteries, natural gas, renewables, that alone, you know, I can see it in my head. It's going to be less cost. But what does it look like in the overall?

The best way to think of it is it's cost neutral with the added benefit of strategic alignment. So if you're spending X dollars, again, if your company has growing computing needs, you don't have a home for some of the computing needs in the future because there's no capacity. So part of this is we're offering capacity but we're doing it in a way that's sustainable and high social impact, and it has all the benefits of edge computing, lower latency or improved security, whatever, all the things. So your options today are you can delay these projects until there's more capacity that comes online, or for roughly the same cost, again, it depends on the location, for roughly the same cost, you get all these added benefits of, that I just spoke about. So this is very much about aligning incentives, and the incentive for a company is to make profit and have low cost, but making profit means they have to hit their targets that are these growth programs on computing. So, I mean, just read any article online today and every single company is investing in AI. Well, where is that computing power coming from? If they're investing dollars in AI, they need a return on that investment, but they don't have the, the data capacity or the computing capacity to achieve those goals. So that's where we can come in, offer computing that they need, and do it in a way that also helps their board-level initiatives.

Are there any other programs? I mean, AI is everything. It's almost become a buzzword, but are there other things that people are working on just for sort of a novice like me that are other things, it needs just as much maybe data?

Sure.

Yeah.

I mean, I'll give you two good examples. The first being IoT and the second being smart cities. So, on the IoT front, what the people who make goods and products, they're adding sensors to everything, right? Amazon is adding it not only in their warehouses to manage packages, for example, but you're also seeing IoT get put into the manufacturing of cars. You're seeing IoT get put into everything, and all of those are sensors that produce enormous amounts of data. And so where does that data go? How secure is that data? Some people don't want it to leave the location because of security reasons around what their competitors might be able to do. Others are focused on governance, like they don't want their data to be over this carrier and this partner, and then it goes to Google and they have this whole legal surface area around their data that's huge, and they can reduce that surface area by having an edge facility next door or even on site. So IoT is a big one, and smart cities is another one. We see a lot of cities introducing new technologies to make living in that city better. So for example, to ease traffic congestion, a city might be installing thousands of cameras on top of every streetlight, and they use computer vision to map out the traffic flows and where there's problems to adjust traffic lights. And so if they can improve the traffic, they they can make the people who live there happier, which will let them grow their, their city. And all of that requires data that gets computed very close to the source. And again, that's where Redivider and our edge facilities can help.

You're listening to the Business Roundtable. I'm Matt Battaglia. That is Tom Frazier of Redivider, spelled just like it sounds. redivider.co is the website. If you want to get more information. Tom, do you have a few more minutes just for a couple of quick bonus questions?

Sure. Absolutely.

Very good news indeed. All right. We'll take a quick break. You're listening to the Business Roundtable. I'm Matt Battaglia. When we come back, we're going to delve deeper into the grid, some of the environmental questions, especially how the Redivider data centers get power. We'll be right back.

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You're back on the Business Roundtable, whether it's the radio show weekly, 1100 KFNX, or the podcast. Please like and subscribe. We always appreciate you tuning in. We are talking data centers, specifically the size of data centers. Versus our guest today, Tom Frazier and Redivider, and these smaller data centers that they are putting together, as well as the fact that it has less environmental impact and obviously uses less power. But we're going to jump back into the conversation, discuss the power more, and of course, the grid. Okay. Let's stick with the smart city because that, that's a fascinating topic. In regards to the smart city, first off, they're on the grid. So do you have an overlap where you can maybe help them with the data part of it, but aren't they still somewhat stuck with the grid? How do you kind of parse that difference?

Well, our data center facilities need power. And so if you have available power on the grid, and you are a city that has a massive initiative for smart city enablement, great. We can take one of our data centers and put it in your city and connect it to the grid. No problem. That works just fine. We think the opportunity for us strategically as a company is to stay focused on sustainability and stay focused on social impact. And that just means it's a little adjustment on the grid versus doing on-site power.

How would it actually look within a city? 'Cause there could be a need for, in theory, multiple of these redivider data centers. Where could they actually go? Or does that not really matter as much because you do, typically you're gonna have more land options anyway within a city?

That is a great question. And I wanna talk about one of the other limitations of traditional data centers. Now, I don't know if you've ever been to a data center or anyone listening has been to a data center, but they are loud. They are super noisy, like airports. And I have two young kids, and I would not want a data center to be installed next to my kids' school because of the noise pollution alone.

Where are they typically located? Where are they actually located? Like, I'm in Phoenix. Where might the data center be?

Usually they're in the middle of nowhere so no one can hear them. And I think the idea of putting a data center in a city or for a smart city, typically that's been done inside of a traditional building, but then you're limited by whatever that building has to offer. So you can't focus on sustainability because it is what it is. You just have to accept what that is. So by having these purpose-built facilities, facilities, you can really focus on new kind of initiatives. But with the noise pollution, one of the other innovations that we've been pushing is this idea of immersion cooling. So traditionally, when you think of a computer, it's got a fan on it, and it moves the cold air through the computer, and then it's hot air. Well, now the building needs a big air conditioner to cool that hot air and bring cold air back in. The model that we prefer, although we do both, we prefer immersion cooling, which actually submerges this computer into a special fluid, which means you don't have the same noise pollution problem that a classical data center has, and therefore we can put them anywhere. My dream, and this isn't in our roadmap, but this is kind of what I dream about, is when you When you think of a data center, how can you turn every waste product into a benefit for that community? So we can take our fluid that's hot and that has hot water, so now that can become a greenhouse. But now because the data center doesn't need the airflow, I wanna put them underground and put a park on top of it. So now we're increasing the play space for children, we're having more fresh produce, available in that local community that, you know, in a lot of cases, uh, we're going in opportunity zones and there's also a high correlation to food deserts. So, you know, we think that we can positively change the relationship that children have with food by using our model. And, you know, these are all things that, uh, are very site-specific, and that's why this modularity really makes a difference. Difference because we might be able to do 7 of 7 initiatives in one location, but only 3 of 7 in another. And that's still great because they're all better than the options that are available today.

How does it physically look like when you're putting a computer, as you said, in the immersion cooling? You're saying it's quieter by doing this? I'm not entirely following.

Yeah, so instead of using air, to cool the computer, you put it inside of this special fluid, and fluid is a much better conductor of heat. And so that fluid flows through just like a, you know, think of like a bathtub or a water pipe, right? There's just this fluid that's flowing through the computer, and the output is this hot fluid, which you can then cool down in a bunch of different ways and recirculate that fluid over and over again. but there's no fans. There's no noise pollution from the layers and layers of air conditioning units that are required.

That sounds amazing and very sci-fi. What is the computer in so it's not affected by the fluid?

There's a couple different technologies there. The one that we prefer is called dielectric fluid. So, it's a non-conductive fluid. Fluid, meaning you literally, again, just think of a bathtub and think of a rack of computer equipment, like a big, tall, 6-foot-tall rack. You literally would tip it on its side and submerge it into this bathtub of fluid. And so the computers do not interact with the local environment at all. They're only interacting with this fluid, which again, when we're prefabricating them, we've now made a data center that can go anywhere. So it doesn't matter if it's dusty in Texas, it doesn't matter if it's humid in Florida, or there's ice in Alaska, the computers don't know the difference. And so you can have higher portability, you have lower noise pollution, the computers last a lot longer, and we get the other benefits of taking this hot water effectively and using it to, like I said, make greenhouses or, or come up with other nominal use cases to improve the lives of the people in that community.

Yeah, this is, again, this is really amazing. Though it's also kind of comical. I'm thinking about putting a computer in a bathtub and you're saying this is a great idea. So I'm definitely laughing a little at that thought. But I'm very—

This technology's been around. Oh, sorry. This technology has been around for a long time. The issue has always been cost. So Microsoft did this great— I mean, they're one of the pioneers in this field, and they did a great project a few years back where they made this capsule, this huge capsule, and put it in the ocean. And so these computers were all in this special fluid, but it was not interacting with the ocean at all, you know, and it used to have a very, very high cost, prohibitively high cost. Air was cheaper. But as we have progressed over 20 years, the cost of that technology has come down significantly, making it a much more viable option. And at the same time, the, the sustainability and impact side of humanity has gone up. And so we think it's really a great fit and going to be, you know, a pillar of the data center technology stack over the next, again, 10 to 20 years.

Again, that is just totally amazing. And the idea that you're going to put a data center in a container-type size building and now literally you could be putting it underground or now I'm imagining if people are moving out of the city, you're converting old buildings into these types of buildings. I mean, there's just all sorts of possibilities. It really does seem infinite. Let's close on this then, Tom, for just, just a couple of minutes. Bitcoin has been wracked with the using too much energy. And I personally know some tech people who they were like mining Bitcoin in the corner of their office. So they've got like this really loud room with all that. You know, it's kind of comical when they tell the stories because You're thinking like, well, how are the rest of your people working while, you know, you're mining Bitcoin in the corner, you know, with a hot room and a rack of computers type of thing. So, you know, when you then talk about cryptocurrencies, but really just sticking mainly to Bitcoin, maybe that's a real game changer then.

We think so. We think— I mean, a couple of thoughts on this as long as we're going down the Bitcoin path. The media around Bitcoin mining is extremely negative about how it's consuming all this power. But I think that the mainstream media is largely telling an incomplete story, because all of Bitcoin mining is a fraction of a fraction of the data center industry. It's not a huge component. And so the idea here is that I think the press and their treatment of Bitcoin about consuming too much power, the whole data center industry needs to look at that as the canary in the coal mine. I mean, this has to be a wake-up call about the consumption of power for any type of computing. And again, that's where Redivider thinks we're way ahead of the curve in that regard, because by doing this with a high sustainability component, by focusing on prime on-site power, We can go to market and say, hey, you mine Bitcoin over here with a hydro dam because it's lower cost, but great, it's renewable, cool. The people that'll do it based on coal, well, that's horrible. The fact that it's taking electricity from residential homes, that's a different problem. And our solution allows us to do this with low to no emissions. And at the same time, if whatever town or city that is operating a Bitcoin mining facility with Redivider, if they say, hey, we want you out, well, guess what? We didn't lose hundreds of millions of dollars building a facility there. We pick it up, put it on a truck, and drive it somewhere else. And so we think that for Bitcoin mining, this is the way forward, because it helps align with communities, it helps align with sustainability, yet still can deliver the significant value that Bitcoin will have on humanity in the future.

Tom, this is amazing stuff. I really appreciate it. Lots of good info today. You're listening to the Business Roundtable. I am Matt Battaglia. That's Tom Frazier. The company reDivider, spelled just like it sounds, website is redivider.co. Tom, before we close up, anywhere else people should be going to get info or anything else you want to share on the company upcoming?

No, I think you've got the website correct there. You go there, have a look. You can look me up on LinkedIn. You know, in terms of something to share is the idea of focusing on people and the planet is our directive. And I really hope that the industry at large kind of moves our direction, and we really think it's going to. And, you know, just have a, have a think about when you're going through your daily life and all the computing, you know, take a minute and think about what that looks like for communities around the world. And when you dig at that thread a little bit, you, you might just discover a little change in behavior.

Fair enough. Really appreciate your time today, Tom. Thank you very much for coming on. If anybody has any they wanna search it, like he said, you can look 'em up on LinkedIn or you can just check out the website redivider.co, redivider.co. You've been listening to the Business Roundtable. I am Matt Battaglia. I wanna thank Tom Frazier and redivider for coming on today and certainly wanna thank you for tuning in, whether it's the radio show on KFNX or the podcast rebroadcast. Enjoy the rest of your day.

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