If you have watched this channel, you know that I am a bit of a Data Center nerd. I also love technology that reduces the environmental impact of these facilities, and with the growth of edge computing, the world needs innovation now.
Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt, here with another FUTR podcast.
Today, we are talking with Tom Frazier, co-founder and CEO of Redivider, a company that builds modular, self-contained datacenter facilities that are designed to provide powerful computing at the edge. By using innovative power solutions, they are disrupting the industry while saving the planet. So let's talk with Tom about what they are doing
Welcome Tom
Redivider
Click Here to Subscribe
FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts featuring Chris Brandt and Sandesh Patel talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.
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If you have watched this channel, you know that I am a bit of a Data Center nerd. I also love technology that reduces the environmental impact of these facilities, and with the growth of edge computing, the world needs innovation now.
Hey everybody, this is Chris Brandt, here with another FUTR podcast.
Today, we are talking with Tom Frazier, co-founder and CEO of Redivider, a company that builds modular, self-contained datacenter facilities that are designed to provide powerful computing at the edge. By using innovative power solutions, they are disrupting the industry while saving the planet. So let's talk with Tom about what they are doing
Welcome Tom
Redivider
Click Here to Subscribe
FUTR.tv focuses on startups, innovation, culture and the business of emerging tech with weekly podcasts featuring Chris Brandt and Sandesh Patel talking with Industry leaders and deep thinkers.
Occasionally we share links to products we use. As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases on Amazon.
If you watch this channel, you know that I'm a bit of a data center nerd. And I also love technology that reduces the environmental impact of these facilities. And with the growth of edge computing, the world needs innovation now. Hey, everybody, this is Chris Brandt here. Welcome to another FUTR Podcast. Today, we're talking with Tom Frazier, co-founder and CEO of Redivider, a company that builds modular, self-contained data center facility to provide powerful By using innovative power solutions, they are disrupting the industry while saving the planet. So let's talk with Tom about what they're doing. Welcome, Tom. Thanks for having me on the show. Excited to be here. Excited to have you. You know, like I mentioned, I'm a bit of a data center aficionado. I don't know if that's something one should admit, but I do find data centers fascinating. I find infrastructure in general fascinating. Me too. Things that people don't always think about, you know, or worry about. But so you're building modular data center facilities. And like the big push right now that we keep hearing from Everybody's talking about edge computing. Can you tell us a little bit about what edge computing is? Why does it matter? And what, why it's so big a part of what you're doing right now? Yeah, so look, I think the human brain really groks, you know, the idea of an analogy. So let me give you one, you know, 10 years ago, you would, you would think of a million square foot building with to a massive downtown building full of people, right. And so the internet was really designed to deal with these And then when you go home at night, you've got a little tiny internet connection, and that was fine, right? Now, the world works remote, and it's not going back. You know, there's high resistance latest this week from Starbucks and Google and Amazon of people not wanting to go back to the office. And what that means is the entire fabric of the internet finally has And so what edge computing is, is simply a smaller data center that pushes the computing closer to the source of where that data is generated, right? So instead of taking your cell phone to a tower to and run a little Instagram picture and putting it back, it can now do it right next to the cell phone tower. Or if you're a factory with all these sensors, the data can stay near the factory instead of going So edge is like a spectrum of computing, right? So some things might be like what we're doing around, you know, purpose built buildings. But the edge also includes things like a cell phone tower, cell phone tower is an edge on its own, because it does have computing resources up there. There's a lot of talk about ESG. And I don't, I don't know if people really understand what ESG is. But you know, you're playing into this environmentally forward looking you know, the the impact of these facilities on the environment, right? Could you talk about how what you're doing really To put it in context, there's been more data, more raw data created in the past, maybe 18 months than the entire history of mankind. And that is going to be completely dwarfed in the next five years So as data continues to increase, the consumption of data, that movement of data continues to increase, the amount of energy that's required also increases, which is pretty logical. But the creation of all the compute power also increases, which is also logical, you throw AI on top of that, and it goes, you know, bonkers out the window. And so, right, the data center industry at large consumes about two to 3% of the So it's a big number. And in context, it's about equivalent to the airline industry, from an emissions perspective, right? So it's a big baseload consumer. So the for me, I've been in technology and data my entire career, I was literally hired right after my 18th birthday to work as and I've been doing it ever since. The core that is Redivider's mission, or my personal mission, is I know about this space. And I know that there's a lot that can be done. And now with edge computing being something that can finally take off because the change in kind of work and workload, we have a we humanity have an opportunity to think How do you incorporate sustainability? And from that perspective, it comes down to power, but it also comes down to transparency, like how much carbon is being used at a data center, right? Right. That's not very transparent today in the market. And we're building that in from the very basic of what we started with you know, we can tell you the embodied carbon of a single cable in a facility that just the transparency alone is great for, you know, large customers who say, well, I'm aligning my business with these social like sustainability development goals from or net zero or whatever, at least we can offer some transparency on the compute side. And, you know, so that's, that's really where we're going is, you know, transparency on that, and then the social impact. So operating our facilities and communities where we and defined by health, wealth and education. So there's a lot of interesting things that can happen in And, you know, it starts with with a blank sheet of paper, by putting compute resources at the edge, you know, you're not just reducing, you know, the footprint, because you're, you're closer to the generation of the data, but you're also what you're building affords people the opportunity to actually to move the data to the people as well. I mean, it kind of cuts both ways for these underserved communities that don't have the kind of facilities that you know, they need to support their infrastructure, you're you can provide some of that there is not one major data And the reason for that is, environmental, right? There's hurricanes, and you know, all kinds of crazy stuff and salt, salt water, and, you know, the air and the humidity, like it's not a great environment for a data center. So if you're building a traditional facility, you're talking about hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars which is a very big risk. But with edge, you can put 100 edge facilities and mitigate your risk because you're You're also quarantining that risk. So if one facility, you know, gets wiped out, well, that sucks, but it's 1% it's not 100%. So right, you know, edge just opens up new opportunities. You know, like, like you alluded to that brings it closer to people that that kind of distributed model really aligns well with the way right? I mean, back in the past, we had these big monolithic, you know, mainframe systems. And then, you know, we kind of shifted that paradigm, but now, you know, the applications that we're building are containerized or not. They're built to be, you know, distributed. And so that if a piece fails, another piece takes over. So you don't need to have these super high availability, you know, solutions necessarily, you could distribute these data centers and still, you know, use them in a, in a fashion that if one goes down, everything still works fine, right? If you think of it from that perspective, you know, customers, data customers regularly overpay, because they're over serviced, right? They're getting what they paid for, but they don't need what they pay for, they need something a lot less. And because the the unit of measure is the data center, well, you get that, or you get, that's the only option, right? But now with like edge, you, you can make a facility that is exactly what you need it to be, and do it at a price point that, you know, when you prefabricate it in factory, you're talking about driving out a lot of cost, because you're not putting in generic 10 foot power cables, this cable needs to be three feet, this one's five feet, right? So you instantly start cutting out huge amounts of cost. And, you know, customers reap the benefit of that. You mentioned your prefab, I mean, so tell me a little bit about, you know, what a reDivider facility is, because there's, it's modular, right? And you can put in different modules based on the you need, right? So reDivider is an edge data center company. And, you know, our focus is on sustainability and social impact. But to achieve those goals, we really thought deeply about the problem of, well, what are the considerations of edge, right? It means going closer to a community of people. So, well, if you're going to do that, you have to do this at scale. So the only way to do this at scale is prefabricate. You know, for example, a classic data center is a construction crew, and it takes them two years to build one of these things. As things go through our supply chain, you know, our goal, 36 months from this month, our goal is to be able to go from buying dirt to a live Right? And we just think that that is a game changer in terms of the which is there's only 2% capacity, folks. Like, there is no capacity globally for data centers right now. And so we think we're changing the unit economics. And the way we can do that is modularity, right? We can say, well, this one needs to be seven modules. So it might be fit on a truck. It might be seven trucks that goes to that site. Right. But this other site might need to be one module. And like our smallest one is about 10 feet square that So if you own, like, let's say a manufacturing facility, you're not a data center company, you need someone to just like solve that for you. So you can go on to and just like click buy this data center. And you know, it just shows up and goes somewhere in your factory. So we think that modularity is the key unlock to doing And once you get to scale, and you go to these communities, then you can start delivering, we can start delivering on that sustainability and You mentioned that these can go into building. I mean, this is not just purely for edge out in the country. You know, you see all the time that companies have needs for data you know, their offices, and they may not be big enough to require a huge data center, but they're big enough that they kind of need something more than And you know, one of the challenges always been like, you know, you get into class a real estate, and you want to put a data center in and you need a generator, right? You got to put a generator on the roof, you got to get permission to put a day tank up there, you got to get the EPA and you got to know how to, you know, manage those power generation facilities and all that. What you're doing is kind of a different model, you have, you know, the way you have, you know, kind of a pre built module, it can kind of go in, there's no big retrofit that needs to happen, you know, you're kind of bringing in all this stuff. And the power generation approach that you're taking is a little Could you talk a little bit about how that all works? It's the same basic idea around modularity. So instead of thinking of tying into the grid, which has its own set of problems in terms of cost control, and you know, what inflation is going to do to the price of the gap between GDP growth and power capacity, that gap increases, buckle up folks, power prices are going to go through the roof. So to desensitize that, but more from the sustainability side, we want to do on site prime power wherever we can. And that means creating, not to get too technical, but creating what's called a micro grid island. So our own little mini grid that hooks up only to our facilities, and can do all the kind of magic for conditioned And all of that gets baked into a module in the factory. So literally, you would have, again, just a simple example. One truck delivers the data center, one truck delivers power generation, one truck delivers it kind of fuel storage tank. And now we have a data center that can be used for animating you know, for a year, and then we take it away and put it somewhere else, or emergency response after a disaster, or a really remote location, or, you know, the use cases unlock when you focus on the power generation And we'll still plug into the grid, but you know, again, if you go to an area and the grid is 70% coal, well, that's not necessarily aligned with our customer base. So wherever we can, we want to do our own onsite power. And you mentioned fuel tanks, and I know that you've got a couple things going here. So I know that, you know, natural gas is an interesting piece that you use. Natural gas is interesting because it doesn't rely So if there's a failure of the electric grid, it's a pressurized system. So you still have, you know, gas flowing to your generators, but you're also doing a lot with hydrogen in some locations. And I think that's a really interesting mixture of things. Can you talk about the benefits of onsite power I'm very hopeful about the entire industry of hydrogen. And, you know, I think the interesting part when you think of a data center is which just means it's always on 24/7, 365, right? So some of the other renewable energy technologies You know, solar only works when it's sunny outside, wind only works here. It's kind of like a non-dispatch system. And we think for us to be ubiquitous as an edge, we need solutions that are ubiquitous. And, you know, the cleanest option would be hydrogen. So that would be our preference. We do have some pretty amazing things happening but in mass, I think the budget is probably 30 to 50% hydrogen and then 70 to 50% on the natural gas where we are doing the onsite power. You mentioned one facility that you guys built near a river and Could you talk about how that all works? The first hydrogen powered facility is, yeah, it's next to a river. So that water gets pulled off to be used as the kind of stock And then that power generation drives our data center. So it's effectively an absolute zero emission data center. That's pretty cool. And that model is beautiful to replicate over and because when you couple that innovation with some of the other like immersion cooling, you've now removed the noise pollution. And you couple that with other innovations around And now you've really increased that time to power for the And now you layer in going into communities that are And you've now got a higher social impact envelope. And, and, and, and, right. So as you put all these things together, it's, it's a coalescence of like many technologies and my entire career and multiple years of many people's lives to kind of deploy this stuff in a way that we think is unshakably the future. Onsite power generation is always the big problem for everything. And, and, and you know, like getting power to remote locations is difficult. And I know, you know, like when you talk about some edge solutions where you would build you know, power grid with, you know, multiple, multiple, uh, re-divider facilities, potentially, um, it opens up a lot of interesting use cases. And I, and I, you know, we, we talked earlier, uh, about, you know, the, the emergence of 5g, for example, and, and the ability to bring, you know, telecommunications out to more remote areas and, you know, the ability to view, to put in a facility that can service these areas. Um, you know, there's some really interesting technologies that are um, create opportunities for really interesting things to be done. I think.>> Totally right. And, you know, whether you're talking about remote facilities the challenges can often be the same in the sense there may not be, you know, a megawatt of power, like, you know, the middle of a town, right? Unless there's a bakery that is defunct or something, you know, it's going to be hard to find that capacity. Uh, but at the same time, the noise pollution kind of rules out a lot of the classical right? You're not going to put an airport next to a kid's school. I mean, so it, it is an, it's enabling on the smart city front. It's enabling on the very rural front of things as well. And, you know, when you specifically about 5g, if you think of the way 5g works different from 4g, the antenna density is, uh, I forgot the exact number, but it's like seven times higher, uh, to deliver on the promise of the speed of 5g. Well, you're not going to get there unless the computing is really you know, and, uh, but again, that's just another benefit of what edge can do. And a lot of those antenna locations are not in places I've run into situations where I've been, you know, looking at sites for, to build data centers and the power reserve from a large utility um, commercial real estate parks, you know, because just there's so much consumption and to build to deliver it to some of these facilities is for the utility. And I think it comes down to alignment of incentives as well. You know, utility companies are generally, uh, motivated to build capacity, not consumption. And so if they build out capacity in one area, and then for whatever reason, the planning went a different direction. Well, you've got all this capacity over here, but you have none over here. And so that, that, that's a race condition that, uh, you know, needs to be solved for. But I think as edge, one of the major benefits of edge, right, is people don't want an edge of one location, right? They want like a sliver of a hundred. And to your point before, like if you start routing your workflow and you can optimize it across an entire edge of facilities, like all a network of facilities, excuse me, you know, now your, your workload rules can change dramatically. I want this to be the cheapest compute. I want this workload to be the fastest compute. I want to route this one based on the carbon footprint of this job. You know, now the idea of, uh, workflow routing with edge becomes whatever the They can decide what they want that to be. And you can't really do that today. You know, you can get, you get Google's cloud or Amazon's cloud. And that's it. Thinking about this, I can imagine so many different use cases. I mean, even, even for companies that have, you know, a data center facility, but they need to have, you know, a, uh, a facility that they can do active, active, you know, data replication with nearby, but not so close that if one goes down, the other does, or, you know, like if the power goes down in one, you don't want to have it too close. Cause it may be on the same grid, but what you're building, you've got its own, you know, power onsite generation. So it's not something you have to worry about. So there's a lot of different ways that this can be used. I, I got to imagine you, you've thought of a lot of interesting scenarios for these. Definitely a lot of interesting scenarios. And, you know, some of them, the whole point of being modular is there's no way we can So by someone coming and saying, well, I have this other scenario. Okay, cool. Well, we can have the design team design a new module or a different version of a module to then accommodate that one thing. And, you know, we now have a campus with five facilities and, oh, this brand new sixth one for that new use case you know, and that's hard to do in a classical data center. Tell me like, what are all the modules that you offer now? The base way to think about it is a one megawatt facility, right? Some of them are smaller. That's a lot of, a lot of power for a small footprint. Yeah. So like a one megawatt facility depends on the rack density. So, you know, if it's a, let's say, medium density location, that might be 10 modules, right? Data halls, and you've got a, you know, closet for this, closet for that, workspace, storage, whatever. But generally our approach is kind of two form factors. We've got a hub location where in the United States, we're building out a network of six different hub locations. Okay. And that's where people will work. And then each of those hubs will support any number of lights out right? So you might have a spoke that is a geographic density solution, whereas another spoke is, you know, like, you know, one that's full of GPUs that's training AI models for rent. And another one might be, well, this one's our, our carbon negative platform where we've taken circular de-scope from a hyperscaler, we put it back in service, and now that's carbon negative, right? So the hub is really where the staff will work. And then the spokes are, are smaller. So, you know, the, the modules are there to support each and every one of those And even the, where we're really starting is this idea of specialty computing. So it is the AI, computer vision, machine learning, Bitcoin mining, like all these cases where the incumbency is low, and therefore the flexibility is high. And going, taking those into a traditional facility is probably over service So that way, by specializing in that, you know, we're, we're kind of unique in the marketplace. We can align with the sustainability and social impact without making an enemy of everybody. You know, we can, we can be an addition to the internet. There was this great migration to the cloud, right? Especially in 2020, we saw a big, big push to move everything to the cloud. But I think what happened is beyond, you know, people kind of lifting and shifting to the cloud and not seeing When their projects sort of got larger and, and, and took up more compute and storage resources, you know, we saw that the, the economics of the cloud can get really hard to justify, especially as you get into scale and you're doing some of these big AI and GPU intensive kinds of things. And so we've seen this big movement to pull a lot of but you know, having all the multiple availability zones is something that people really enjoyed with what Having the ability to kind of drop in, you know, locations, you know, where you need them and, you know, have them all owned by you and operated by you at perhaps maybe, you know, a discount from what, what you're getting in the cloud. I think that could be a really interesting prospect as well, right? Just the trend data transfer costs in and out of the cloud is, you know, it's small when you think about it on a megabyte scale, but when you have success, it becomes a balloon, right? It's just, it's out of control. And so by putting the, an edge facility that goes to almost zero. So even if, you know, I think the big winner out of edge is going to be cloud edge. You know, if you think about it, just very logically, everyone loved, like you said, the flexibility of the cloud, but they don't like the cost profile when you're winning, right? No one cares when you're losing because it's zero, but when you're winning all of a sudden it matters. And so cloud is starting to lose customers. And so all of them have a cloud edge program. And, you know, my, my view on it is it's a way to keep customers. And so by carving out every single edge facility from every you know, in the space, you know, a portion of that will be cloud edge as a way for companies to keep their application stack but not have to pay the same as the cloud. And their performance is good. Cause again, if you do multi C A Z and now cloud is your primary and the Okay. Well, you only pay more when something's broken and that may be fine. Right. But, but the reality is today, if you contrast that with the board initiatives of the sustainability enterprise IT performs less than half as good as hyperscalers do Right. So by saving a couple dollars on it, or maybe a couple million dollars in it, you may be misaligning with the board objectives, which is higher sustainability, higher social impact. And so it's created this real friction. And that's where I think that's because we have an incomplete And that's where, you know, sustainable edge comes into play. Having these independent power generation, onsite power generation capabilities and, and bringing that to, you know, more of a kind of distributed electrical grid that you You know, you could power potentially more than just your edge data center. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of potential for future use cases. Absolutely. You know, how we would do that to power any number of things is you know, we wouldn't size power generation to the consumption right? Because you want to cater for, you know, like if one campus has a tier two facility and a tier three facility, well, the tier three has to be, you know, N plus one and N plus N for this and whatever, whatever. So the power generation will have to support the maximum layer, the maximum tier out that campus, but that means there'll be excess power for a certain, at a certain amount that we can do things with. So I know that you've, you've kind of built a little bit of a who's who in the, in the world of data centers for your board of advisors. You know, you've, you've got some, definitely some heavy hitters and, you know, alternate power generation you know, with, you know, folks like Peter Gross. I've got to imagine, you know, that helps you serve your mission well. You just nailed my answer. I mean, we are a mission-driven company and by being a, you know, we want to uplift humanity through computing and by being you can really attract people who share your same core values. And, you know, we think we've done a really good job of that with some of the you know, our advisors and things like that. So Peter Gross is, you know, he's an amazing guy and he's, he's spent his career building innovative things. And, you know, we added Mark Tercik from the CEO of Nature's Conservancy who's, you know, driving edge initiatives at Intel for, you know, a really long time and Mayor Suarez, what he's doing for City of Miami and, you know, what we're trying to do for communities all around the country, you know, so we're getting people who see the opportunity the way we see it. And we're, you know, putting this in a forum that allows us to express the you know, how we're moving forward with customers, whether they be companies or governments.- So tell me where you go next. What's the next thing for Redivider?- Well, now it's all about scale. I mean, we've, we, you know, we started the light bulb idea moment maybe three years ago. And when we factored in our approach, obviously prefabricated library of data center modules, sustainability, social impact, there's a lot to build there in the background. And so we've spent years doing that. And now that we, you know, we've hit this moment of launch. Now we're hitting the moment of scale. And really, the what's next is really putting these things out in as many that align with where our customers want us to go. Because that's the other beauty is, you know, our customer base tells us where to go. Hey, we want to be here, you know, help us solve this thing in Florida. Well, help us do this thing in some rural place that needs broadband, you know, when you're modular, you can do that, and just put it on a truck or a train and deliver it somewhere. So what's next is, it's all about scale, you know, I would like to hit, you know, with Redivider, and it while I'm at the helm, I'd like to hit 1000s of these facilities to be live. And, you know, our next major goal is to have 100. And by the time we hit our 100th, I want to make sure we're going from dirt to you know, days.- Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, being able to deploy a data center in 30 days is unheard of. I mean, I it's, it's, you can't even get into a pre built facility in 30 days. By the time they set up the racks and stuff, you know.- When you think of the model that they were doing, the power generation shows up with the microgrid, with the data center, literally, the onsite work is like a couple days of work. And that's it. The rest is all the the other parts, you know, the zoning and the property and those kinds of things. Hooking everything up is, you know, days, you know, the last the last facility, I think they installed it in two working shifts across two days. So like two eight hour shifts.- I kind of want one in my backyard now. Could we figure that out?- I take credit card.- Yeah. I'm not sure my credit card would cover that, but.- You have a black card.- Yeah, no, I don't. I don't have an Apple card. It's, you know, titanium. That's kind of cool. It doesn't have much of a limit on it, but. Well, that all that stuff is amazing. I love to see innovation in the data center space, because it's such a business that needs it. You know, I mean, so much of the data center world is run by companies that, you know, are living in the world 50 years ago, you know, and doing things. And it's not the most efficient and it's not easy to deploy. And, you know, technologies are difficult to make work together. And like creating this sort of modular thing you know, under a month to me sounds amazing. And, you know, if you're going to scale a business, that's a good way to do it. You know, have something you can deploy very fast. So. Yeah, I mean, it's really a supply chain derivative business. I mean, making sure you have things like some of the lead times on items you know, 75 weeks. So when you think about that from a traditional build we've just got to keep putting orders in for parts, knowing that it comes through the supply chains to make sure and then applying innovations inside of that. So it is tricky, but it's, you know, it's super scalable. We can, they're made in America like that. I think the other major macro trend in our kind of life, we saw globalization happen. And I think we're seeing the pendulum swing the other And, you know, so having these made in America is like an important factor, you know, make sure we're looking after the constituents here. The things in a building of regular, you know, traditional data center, I remember the door doors used to take the longest time, oddly, forever to get the doors, they all had to be kind of custom built. And, you know, they're, you know, heavy duty doors to, you know, prevent people breaking in. So, so just, it's the things you wouldn't necessarily think of that, you know, just consume all your time and money. And that's where, when you, when you kind of scratch that edge, like stay focused on the problem of edge and you come up with And so, you know, like some of the, some of the, the biggest lead time items right now are air conditioning units. And if you accept switching to immersion cooling, well, you don't need the air conditioning units anymore. And you've also removed noise pollution from the equation. And now you have equipment that runs as higher longevity and has a higher meantime between failure as well. And it is nearly silent and you don't have the lead time problem. So like, you just have to constantly interrogate your assumptions. Yeah. There's nothing quite like standing next to some of those with your big headphones on and just feeling them turn on and the air just gets sucked right out of your lungs. I mean, that's not frightening at all. The big plumes of black smoke. Thanks so much for, for, you know, like taking this on and building us some facilities for the future. I really love the innovation and I'm excited to see where Yeah. Well, it's been great chatting. Thanks for having me. And, you know, I look forward to, to the future for Redivider and edge computing in general. And, you know, I think as long as the world stays focused on, you know, the people and planet, you know, and then profit in that order, you know, I'm very hopeful for, for humanity and data centers, youth usefulness in there. Yes, please. If we could get people to focus in that order, that would be fantastic. Well, thanks so much for being on really appreciate it. And like I said, I'm excited to see where you guys go from here. Thank you. Talk to you again. Thanks for watching. I'd love to hear from you in the comments. And if you could, please give us a like, and if you haven't already, why don't you subscribe? And I will see you in the next one.