Data Center Infrastructure Podcast - Ep 3 - Why AI Data Centers Are Leaving the Grid w/ Jake Corley
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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Website: https://dcipodcast.com
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The Data Center Infrastructure Podcast is presented by Data Airflow, mechanical engineering, procurement, and commissioning for hyperscale AI and HPC data centers.