Analysis and engineering notes on AI data center infrastructure — power, cooling, racks and the build-out of compute capacity worldwide.
A tour of the eight product families US carriers now sell to AI compute campuses - dark fiber, managed wavelengths, Carrier Ethernet, transit, NaaS on demand, private AI fabric, cloud on-ramps and managed services - with what Lumen, Zayo, AT&T, Verizon ...
Read article →A selection method for US AI compute centers: classify the traffic, pick the right rung of the carrier ladder, compute the break-even dark fiber lease rate, demand a diversity exhibit instead of a carrier count, and price MTTR rather than nines. With worked...
Read article →At 800G a passive copper cable reaches 1-2 m and at 1.6T barely one metre - less than one rack. The six reasons fiber owns the scale-out network, where copper still wins, and the loss budget that decides whether the link trains.
Read article →Schneider Electric's RapidScale Reference Design 115 turns NVIDIA Vera Rubin AI halls into factory-built white-space modules: RD113 specs at 227 kW/rack, Motivair MCDU-70 cooling at 45°C TCS, and the real math behind the 80% installation-time cut.
Read article →DSX POD fixes a standard 800 VDC input at the container boundary. We break down the three staged options — sidecar power racks, 2 MW row power centers, 4.8 MW DC blocks with SSTs — with computed efficiency chains, backup sizing, and the DC protection gap bu...
Read article →NVIDIA’s DSX POD reference design packs a complete Vera Rubin AI factory — 7 NVL72 racks, 504 GPUs, 800 VDC, dry-cooled liquid loops — into factory-integrated containers, cutting deployment at a prepared site from six months to as little as 14 days.
Read article →A 100 MW bitcoin mine and a 100 MW AI campus share a substation and nothing else. We compute both 10-year futures line by line: mining nets $0.11-0.59M per MW-year and decays through the 2028 halving, conversion costs $9M per MW and pays a contracted $1.28M...
Read article →Desert sites look like a cooling problem and are actually a water problem. Four deployed architectures — air-cooled chillers, DLC plus dry coolers, hybrid adiabatic, open towers — computed side by side on a 1 MW IT pod: PUE, WUE, water per MW-year and annua...
Read article →A bare 40-ft steel shell absorbs 13.5 kW at a 16 K design difference. The insulation math, the frame geometry that triples the U-value, the condensation thresholds, fire class and solar load - all computed.
Read article →PJM capacity prices up 11x, five-year queues, turbine backlogs past 2031. What the numbers say, and the five playbooks: siting for speed, selling flexibility, owning generation, long-dated nuclear PPAs, and building grid-friendly loads.
Read article →Tier is a topology promise, not a percentage. The four levels from the standard's own text, the thermal-battery math behind continuous cooling, and a line-item Tier III to Tier IV upgrade cost for a 2 MW hall.
Read article →UPS losses are three terms, not one percentage. Fit no-load, proportional and square-law coefficients from any datasheet, price 2N vs N+1 vs eco mode, add the cooling bill, and learn what field meters can actually prove.
Read article →