Pete Sacco 0:00
So I think energy is going to be one of the first industries that begins to become decentralized. We're already seeing it. Everybody's talking about nuclear power and small modular reactors, and not at the utility scale, but being used at the property edge. And so, you know, look, I do believe nuclear is the future, but I believe Gen four reactors are at least 10 years away. All
EB 0:41
right, Pete, thank you for joining the Baxtel podcast. Thanks, Eric. But before we dig in, I want to learn about you. In 60 seconds. I'll ask you a series of quick questions, and please provide the first answer that comes to mind. Okay, great. Do you prefer late nights or early mornings?
Pete Sacco 0:55
Early mornings, it seems like you might prefer both. I these are supposed to be quick. I have a long answer, but let's go in early morning.
EB 1:05
Sweet or salty, sweet, introvert or extrovert. Oh, extrovert. Favorite food, pizza, favorite sport, football. What was your first job? Paper Boy fiction or non fiction, non fiction, pineapple on pizza. Yes or no,
Pete Sacco 1:21
everything has a place.
EB 1:25
All right, moving more into work. Questions, do you prefer meeting or email? You
Pete Sacco 1:31
accomplish more in a meeting, but email is just, you know, we live in the world today, that you can communicate. I'm going to say email
EB 1:37
a cabinet versus rack. Yeah, I call it a rack? Yeah, even though there might be cabinets in your datacenters there, it's always racks.
Pete Sacco 1:46
I come from so long in this industry that I called it an RLU, a rack location unit that was anything that took up 24 inches on the on the raised floor.
EB 1:55
What is your Do you have a pet peeve during conference calls? Actually,
Pete Sacco 1:59
video conferencing. I can't stand people that don't come on camera.
EB 2:02
So if, if there was a Netflix series called datacenter wars, who would play you? What actor would play you in data? Oh,
Pete Sacco 2:11
I would clearly be myself. There wouldn't be an actor doing it. I would be, I'd be the guy on stage.
EB 2:16
I imagine that was the case. Did you do your own narration for your book?
Pete Sacco 2:19
I did. It's a funny story. Actually, David, I think I mentioned to you Carlos Santana. He was Carlos Santana's recording engineer, and he goes, Pete, I'm going to tell you he made me read for him like he was testing me. And when he read for me, he goes, Look at the end of this. I either have to tell authors about 50% of them, please don't read your own book. He goes, but then I have to tell 50% that, yeah, I'll allow you to read your own book. He goes, I'm happy to say that I'm going to allow you to read your own book. He goes, reading a book is not reading a book, it's telling the story. And he goes, you're a good storyteller, but and then there was three hours of training to tell me everything that I was doing wrong. I had a New York accent. I was talking too fast, I dropped my fouls, and he educated me very quickly as to how to read a book. I could tell you that when you read a book, you read it about three hours for every one hour of production, but a professional reader reads at about one and a half to two hours of reading for one hour of production. By the time my book was done, I was down to two hours.
EB 3:20
Is that because you're retaking certain paragraphs or sections?
Pete Sacco 3:23
Yeah, in the beginning, when I first started, I couldn't get 10 words out of my mouth without my director stopping me and saying, Okay, well, you said these six words wrong, and let's start over at it was hysterical. You don't realize how in informal speech we're able to absorb differently than if you are disembodied and you are just hearing a person. Everything has to be slower and more exacting, but then you need to learn how to emote through it as well to tell the story. And so it was a it was fun. I met we just finished it the other day. The audio should be coming out in about two weeks. On living in bliss, which is just over my shoulder.
EB 4:04
There I see, yeah, I would say the New York accent isn't a defect, but a future perhaps, of reading. You know, it might give a little more
Pete Sacco 4:13
personality. Agreed. He actually said, we're not going to lose it. And he goes, because I kind of go in and out of it, right? I've got a very New Jersey accent and so but I go in and out of it, and he says, it's endearing.
EB 4:25
All right, so your LinkedIn profile describes you as an entrepreneur, a visionary spanning everything from datacenters AI, meditation and mysticism, that's a really big range. How do you normally Introduce yourself? Because how do you introduce yourself to people who know nothing about you?
Pete Sacco 4:44
No, that's great, you know, because we're knee deep in it right now, right? I've been in the data center industry for 27 years. I mean, my background, just to go way back, was as an engineer, and so I designed power supplies for the military industrial complex, right? That was my. First real engineering job So, and this was during the days of the Gulf Wars, right? And so from power supply design, I eventually did UPS design, but very quickly realized that I was destined to be a CEO, not an engineer, right? I thrive with people and communications and and so that's where I am. You want me out front. I'm the visionary of the company, right? Not the integrator of the company, and so in any case, I started off as an engineer, but you know, along the way we we form our path, and datacenters led to UPS. UPS led to back to, excuse me, power supply led to ups as UPS has led to the data center, and the rest they say is history, but literally today, at 58 years old, I'll spend the second half of my life. I have a much broader portfolio of how I invest through and around the data center industries, not just companies I own, but companies that I invest in as an angel investor or a venture capitalist. That's how I'll spend my professional second half of my career as an angel investor, helping CEOs and startup companies understand what it takes to motivate people to, you know, to want to create something greater than themselves. But as I say in the book, the outward success is only half of the equation of the human experience. And so the second half, what I've discovered in the last 30 years of my life was inner peace, because I was a guy who, how do I have all this outward success, right? You know, if you looked at me an outward world, you would say who I want to be, just like him, yet, but I had, I was unhappy and unfulfilled, and I had no idea why. So I had my moment, my moment that of introspection, when I said something has to change, and I sought that out, and what I came away with was where the book is, is bliss. Is a balance between body, mind and spirit, and those are the underlying to both outward success and inner peace. Outward success is something we achieve, but Inner peace is something that we remember. It's something that our bodies always knew, our mind always knew. We just have to rediscovering it by surrendering the fact that we don't need to accomplish anything to accomplish inner peace, we have to surrender to remembering,
EB 7:23
my gosh, there's so much in there that you just said, even outside of what you just going back to the beginning when you talked about investing and being an investor, who I often said that, you know, when I was in college, I wanted to be, you know, wet water racking, guide, right? And this is when I lived in Pennsylvania, and so that was an aspiration back then, but an aspiration for the last 10 years is to, eventually, for the second half of my career, right? Is to be an angel investor. Because I think that's so fun, or could be so fun. But to get there, you need to make enough money to become that angel investor. And, yeah, I mean, any, any thoughts from how you when you're looking at different companies, how you choose, or what, how you sure,
Pete Sacco 8:15
I would argue you have to start with, you know, an investment thesis. What do you want to do? And I would argue all of this evolves over time. I mean, I would love to say that back when I was 10 years old, I built the life that I was going to live. But, you know, we plan and the universe smiles, what we have to learn is to be adaptable for throughout our lives and not judge ourselves for making bad decisions along the way. That's just a part of the human existence. And so that being said, I kind of aspire today to be kind of the modern day version of Andrew Carnegie, right? Andrew Carnegie had the idea of vertical integration. You know, he wanted to be a railroad baron. So he realized, to be a railroad baron, you need to be in the industries that serviced the railroad industry. For him, it was steel and coal and coal and lots of other things, until he, you know, ultimately became philanthropic, lived selflessly at the end of his life. Well, I want to model the life of Andrew Carnegie. I want to be I somehow, through chance, circumstance, fate, universal knowledge, whatever landed in the data center industry. And, you know, for a period of time, from the transition from everybody had a data center to colocation to cloud, where the cloud became highly centralized. Again, we're at a cusp right now, and AI caught the data center off guard. But I would argue AI is the most fundamental technology that mankind ever wrought. This is akin to electricity, maybe even more so. And so if we take a look at AI right now, if AI was a 24 hour clock, we're at 2am in the morning. We've got 22 hours left to go, and by 12 o'clock noon, we will not recognize the world those girls behind me over my shoulder. Those are my daughters, right? Family 2.0 I've got a 37 year old son, 12, eight and two year old grandchildren, but then I've got seven, five and three year old girls, and the world that they will live in will not resemble the world that I grew up in it at all. And so they'll never drive a car, they'll never be diagnosed by a doctor. They'll never be educated in the traditional realm, and they're going to live in a world that likely 70% of Americans are serviced by some form of a universal basic income, because AI and robotics that it will enable will basically take intellect and skill level the way we used to judge ourselves away, because it's going to do everything that we can do, not just a little bit better, drastically better. So again, then pack to the point of the book, where does man identify himself, if not his intellect, his skill and his labor? And the answer is, it's always been an inner journey. So unless you have that, that inner peace of remembering, you're going to be partially, somewhat unfulfilled in your life. And so for me, that moment came when I put the pieces together. But it happened later in my life, in my 40s, when I started to unwrap, why was I so unhappy? And I started to realize I can transform my body. I was a football player, football coach, right? I played football. I at over 300 pounds. Today, I'm 100 position. Did you play? I was a guard, right? So I made my livings putting my forearms through your chest, right? And so. But today, right now. I'm 199 pound tennis player right now. You know now I live to have transformed my mind through happiness understanding that I even in my book talk about a an equation. I'm an engineer at heart, right? Everything's got to be an equation. I mean a heart. And so happiness, to me, equals the set point for happiness, plus the conditions in which you find yourself, plus, and here's the one where you begin to things that you can effectively change your voluntary acts, plus creating moments of awe in your life. Minus expectations. We expect too much of ourselves. We expect too much that the world is going to cater to what we want, and we expect way too much of each other. And so if we reduce our expectations, right? Expectations are suffering awe. All can't be denied. We've all experienced awe. The problem is we wait for awe to show up at our doorstep, right? We we go outside on the beach, and we see a sunrise, we see a child being born, we see something then we hair stands up, and you feel a vastness, and you feel a connectedness. But I would say, learn how to meditate. If you get really good at meditation, you can induce awe in yourself at a moment's notice, and that heals the human spirit. And then finally, voluntary acts going backwards, I would say a real pivotal moment in my life was a moment of introspection. And it actually kind of coincided with a book, some who I've actually got to know. I sought out his counsel, Strategic Coach, Dan Sullivan. And Dan is, you know, the Strategic Coach, business consulting guru. And he wrote a book, who not how, but in who not how, he talks about understanding your your what I call superpowers. And so by looking back at my youth, I was able to say, what are the things that I just do really, really well. And then, you know what? Spend your life, work or play, doing just those things. If you're a great dancer and you suck at singing, don't practice singing. Practice dancing. It gives you great joy. You're great at it. Do the things that come natural to you. So when I discovered my five superpowers, my ability for one, being a perpetual learner. Two, being a visionary. Three, being a pretty good coach and storyteller, motivator of human spirit. Four, an excellent concentrator, and a person who can focus. And then five, a facilitator, the ability to take the complex and make it easy. So think about now in my life, one learner. I read, podcast, write every day, and that's my gift to myself, of giving myself the gift of knowledge. And the gift of knowledge isn't that I've attained new knowledge, it's I get to discover all the things that I don't yet know, that exist, that the universe knows has all the answers, but we, in AI will discover it. In fact, I would argue we're not going to discover it. AI is going to discover it, and it's going to dumb it down, to teach it to us, frail, fallible machines, that our unique purpose in the world is consciousness, which it doesn't so we are the conscious observers of the quantum world. And so Secondly, I'm a CEO. So I'm a visionary. That's my job is to be, think big vision. I have a grand vision thesis of being, you know, the Andrew Carnegie. Of the digital world, right? And so that's the world I immerse myself. And it gives me great happiness to be on a podcast up on his TEDx talk, up on stage, talking about the datacenters and consciousness and all of this stuff, right? A facilitator. I'm a dad of three young girls. I mean, if you'd have told me the things that had to happen in the world at 58, years old, to have seven, five and three year old girls. You can't quantify the math, but I can't ex I can't even fathom a world that they don't exist in. And so my job is to make the world as uncomplicated as possible for them, and that's my job as a dad. And so I give myself of the gift of happiness. I meditate every day. I give myself the gift of concentration. I give myself voluntary acts of happiness every day, so that the amount of happy moments that I have, happy feelings, happy emotions that I have, outweigh the bad emotions. And by doing that, I move myself epigenetically, neuro plastically, neurogenesis wise to become a happier person, to become a more fulfilled person, to become a person that drives my life by my core values, presence, purpose and prosperity.
EB 16:20
It seems when people, or myself are most happy, it's when you're living in the present. It's not looking in the future, looking in the past, it's living in the present.
Pete Sacco 16:30
So I want to share a quick story with you. I'm sitting at breakfast, and my wife is with my family, and my wife is giving my daughter sage advice, right? So my daughter was having a problem with somebody at school, and my wife was telling her, Well, you know, friends normally pick each other up, but, you know, look, we're human beings. We're sometimes failable, and we don't do that. But you'll have to make the call as to whether this friend is truly a friend, if they keep tearing you down more than building you up, while some point it's up to you to decide, do I want to continue this relationship? Because is it more hurtful than helpful? And so my daughter pauses and goes, Yeah, Mom, I don't find her very zen. Well, that maybe put my coffee down, right? And so because I definitely fall onto the Zen side of the spectrum, right? And so I go, baby, why would you say Zen? What does it mean to be Zen? She goes, Well, Dad, you know. And just like you said, she said he, you know, she lives a lot in the past, and she's always worried about the future, and she's just never having fun right now. And I'm like, Huh? So explain to me what's the power of living in the present moment. And she goes, Come on, Dad, you know, you teach us this all the time. It's like that movie with that bear. I go, you mean the panda? She goes, yeah, yeah, the panda and that guy, I go, Master ugway. And she goes, yeah. I'm like, What did Master ugway Say? She goes, Well, the past is history, the future is a mystery, and today is a gift, and that's why we call it the present. And sorry, I get emotional when I say that, because this is the mouth of a seven year old, and so I'm like, Baby, you don't know how proud I am of you right now, because if I was to go to your school and I was to ask every student, every teacher and every parent, what does it mean to be Zen and what's the power of living in the present moment, the only moment that we can truly control this is who we're leaving the world to. I waited until I was 45 to be this guy. She's seven years old, and she goes, Daddy, I don't even know what I'm saying. I'm like, I get it. I get that. Your seven year old little intellect can't quite intellectualize what it means to be present, but your heart, your heart, knows it's right, and so that's good enough for me, because you're going to carry the world.
EB 18:40
Yeah, she, well, she's far advanced, probably where we were at her age. There's no doubt. I mean, so she's, she's in the right path. It's not even close. For those who aren't familiar yet, you're the founder of gray wolf datacenters. Can you provide a description of what Graywolf Sure.
Pete Sacco 18:56
I'll even go back a little bit. So, so the first company was PTS data center solutions, right? So when I so PTS was really dedicated to building datacenters and computer rooms for end users. And this was 27 years ago, so this was back in the day that everybody had a computer room, right? We went from, you know, mainframes, highly centralized, hardware centric, right? And then that gave way to the Microsoft distributed software revolution, hardware agnostic. So let's go from centralized to decentralized, and then from there we went to the internet, highly centralized again, except if the product was hardware before, dominated by IBM, and then software, later on, dominated by Microsoft, and then all of a sudden, we went to the internet. What was the product? The product was us. We gave away everything. It's why Gmail is free. It's why all you know, Facebook is free, or meta, excuse me. X is, you know, somewhat free, right? Because. Right? That gives them certain capabilities that they wouldn't normally have by selling a product, and we were the product, right? Our attention has become the product. I'd argue the world is back on path towards becoming decentralized again. It's part of that thesis of how I'm investing in the world. Going back to your first question of, Why am I in the data center world? Well, AI caught the data center industry off guard, and so today, we're quickly adapting, but what we're seeing is large language models back to pts. PTS has evolved through all of those to see all those iterations of Data Center and today, in Tuva, the brand out of PTS that does datacenter design building, I serve as an architect, an engineer, a construction manager, a GC, a commissioning agent, all in one company, right? And we do that for really three classes of customers at intuva, one government, lots of three, letter and four letter people. I'm proud to say we're building Lawrence Livermore National Labs, the lab in the United States where we do all fission and fusion modeling. I can legally say that much. I'm allowed to say so we're building that data center right now. Second class is commercial enterprise. Typically, global enterprises today always have some edge component, right? Remember, I'm a construction company, design and building construction company, so I'm building the edge and this is people like Pfizer, probably my largest client, right? That while they're long since out of the data center business, right? They would consider themselves cloud first, with a large colocation component, but they've got 1100 edge sites around the globe that are there because there are certain aspects of being a hybrid data center operator that you need, whether it's performance, whether it's governance, whether it's bandwidth or control, or whatever you want to put in there, there's some level of of edge that is required. And then the third class are the data center operators themselves. And so before I talk about gray wolf datacenters, which is a data center operator and is a new expansion, and I'll tell you why the second division under PTS is grid seven, because in keeping with the decentralized theme, I think energy is going to be one of the first industries that begins to become decentralized. We're already seeing it. Everybody's talking about nuclear power and small modular reactors, and not at the utility scale, but being used at the property edge. And so, you know, look, I do believe nuclear is the future, but I believe Gen four reactors are at least 10 years away. First they have to vet the technology, then they have to go through the NRC Nuclear Regulatory Commission and approval process and safety and so, and rightfully so, because it's a new, burgeoning technology that's different from the reactor that's in, say, the USS Enterprise, or way different than the reactor that was in Three Mile Island. And so that's going to take some time. So I think distributed energy. I'm working on models right now of taking combined cycle gas turbines, pre cooling the gas to level set, to use a hydrocarbon to produce predictable, cost effective, parasitic loading, meaning energy for just the building and or the property that I'm building, as opposed to being a utility which changes the regulation. And so I think we're going to see that decentralized movement, and that's what grid seven does now, like it's like you could say, I told you that story to tell you this story, and this is where gray wolf comes in, because gray wolf is going to be my homage to what the data center industry is about to become, if you can agree that everything that's being built megalithically Today is giant GPU farms in order to do large language modeling based on public data, that's eventually starting and beginning to give way to building larger and small models based on private data, data that enterprises are not going to want to be publicly shared, and only some companies will trust large, centralized commercial the Googles, Microsoft and AWS to handle their private data. Likely they'll build out small language models to model their data and combine it with world knowledge, but keep that knowledge inside their four walls, and so those smart that modeling and training that will be done, there is no there is performance requirements inter datacenter, but there's not a bandwidth limitation us of inferencing that in small scale, like we do now, however, when inferencing becomes allowing a car to drive across the United States, or bank fraud at the point of the inception, at when the digits are being put in the phone, or every person living in their house being diagnosed. Used by their houses data center as to the scale of their health. We have migrated from a world where centralized model data centers to a highly distributed array of edge datacenters that are infer that are handling all of the low latency inferencing, and let's recall that most of the inferencing is not going to come from human beings. It is going to become from Ai enabled devices. So it is going to be the AI asking questions of the AI, and that's where the answer and the low latency will have to come into play. So think of Google, not by a few 100 datacenters in what I like to refer to as the American pro football cities of the world, New York, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and not even the distributed or, let's call it, the wholesale and retail data center operators of the world that operate in mostly the NCAA, wherever there's a division one football city is typically places of people, process and technology, and that's where the data center industry, I'd argue, the next bastion of data centers is going to be in every high school football city of the world. And it's going to look just like the telecommunications industry when it was the pop when we had to distribute the last mile to every home. And that's exactly what gray wolf data centers hopes to accomplish. I hope to be able to accomplish what I see as the future. I see the future of the data center Google, of 100 data centers laid down as 15,000 20,000 30,000 data centers in every small city of the world except it's not going to be a pop it's going to be an under 10 megawatt data center that's high performing, not as high performing as a GPU landscape, but high performing nonetheless, that are perhaps cobbled together, independently owned and operated, but working uniformly as a Dao, A distributed, autonomous organization, and rewarded by how much compute is being done within their facility. Because I envision a day quickly that we will see grid computing done not vertically, meaning, anybody who knows the way a GPU works knows that it throttles a lot, right between 125% of load and a much lower 30% load. And that the steady state is well beyond how we actually have to design the facility. I have to way oversight the design of the facility. And so what I think will happen is, rather than throttle inside a datacenter, we'll learn to throttle horizontally. So in other words, you bring on GPUs horizontally across datacenters, and then they will be rewarded by how much they contribute to the Dao.
EB 27:49
So a couple of things, you know, there's two questions I have. There are two separate sections, I suppose. One is in terms of latency, right? And so I think that's one of the arguments for edge computing, is to reduce latency, which makes sense,
Pete Sacco 28:05
which is a function of fiber, right? So if you stick to the 10 mile per, you know, millisecond framework, or you know that they typically use the
EB 28:14
internet's collection of private networks, all those networks interconnect at certain points, right, you know. And so there's big internet peering points in some places. And so if you're if you build a data center in a football town in rural New York, it still needs to travel down to New York City to interconnect and back up. I think a critical piece that needs to be solved for edge computing is for the local MSOs and local networks in that area to interconnect and service. You know, for example, if it's Comcast, a large cable provider in many you know, Comcast or Time Warner, you know, those type of networks, you know, if they provide internet service or interconnectivity within that edge datacenter, I think that goes a long way, because then you can serve, you know, you know, rather than it going all the way down to New York City, it would would interconnect up in Syracuse, New York.
Pete Sacco 29:09
And I agree there's going to be a transition of transitioning from to that, but I'm going to say that it's going to be more akin to, more properly, how your brain works. And your brain works by the neurons. There is no interconnection. It actually produces a neurotransmitter, an electrical charge goes to one or more neurons, depending on how much neurotransmitters are in your brain, and there is no central network of communications. It is an interconnectedness, a loose interconnectedness that goes through, I believe that we are going to build a neuron, and the datacenter, the edge datacenter, will be a neuron, and the brain will be the world. And it will be a vast interconnectedness of complexity, of transmitting that data from site to site, of trillions of neurons, 10s of 1000s of hundreds of 1000s. 1000s of datacenters that will all transmit the information way different than where what we're competing with right now is an old scale way of thinking about it, as to the way it will work from a biological standpoint. And here's the thing, it's going to happen in our lifetime, because we live in an exponential world, and we're sitting at the bend of the hockey stick right now. And the funny part about linear and an exponential is in the build up part, they both look like flat growth, but it's where they change. And we are sitting at the cusp of change, and we can only look to biology, actually, as to what all of this is going to look like. And so I would argue that the way we interconnect datacenters is going to be different. And I'm not worried about, look, I have time to fix that math yet, right? I just need to get out there, and I want to build the proof of concepts to show that I could build a data center that can meet the demands of anybody's AI, it HPC load in a tertiary area that will be in a few milliseconds of a metropolis area that I can decouple from the utility, right? I could actually parasitically Use a hydrocarbon to produce power at less than what the local utility could provide me, thereby detach it from it, use whatever sustainable technologies I wanted to combine that power to make high resiliency without any dependence on a single, solitary, centralized capability. And then I can do that, and then I can eventually interconnect those datacenters, whether they are singularly owned or independently owned, and share that equally by how much they contribute to compute technology and or storage. And I get it, it's completely different than the way we doing it, but that's the whole point. And so I just think it's, I'm early, but that's okay, because, you know, it's, you know, a standard to the datacenter that I could sell today if I start to build one, then two, then 20, then 50, then 100 of smaller sites, eventually I've got that network effect that that begins. And so I don't think I'm wrong. I'm, in fact, I'm betting my end of my career on that I'm not wrong.
EB 32:18
Yeah, indeed. I mean, there's a lot more datacenters needed, and electrical generation is one of the key hurdles to it. You know, speed bumps and so generating your own power from hydrocarbons, that makes sense in terms of, I'm curious of where gray wolf got its got its name, or what was the inspiration behind it.
Pete Sacco 32:45
You know, the idea is that the wolf is a, you know, a solitary animal. It seems solitary, but it's got a very strong family unit and an interconnectedness. And it's a connection to the vastness that is this country, right? And so I think it's just an homage to the fierceness of it, that it's going to be a part of what will become the final paradigm as to what it's going to look like in the next eon of this vast interconnectedness. There is definitely a spiritual component to it. I'm very look. I'm a deeply spiritual person. I like to believe I am anyway, right? That's all relative, you know, and I believe we're connected to the Universe and the Earth. And I've felt gray wolf represented how I want to represent myself and my brand as something intrinsic to the earth,
EB 33:45
got it that makes sense. And then in terms of densities, what are the densities you support now? And
Pete Sacco 33:51
yeah, we can easily, they're built to suit and so I'm looking for tenants, I'm looking for clients, I'm looking for investors, where, like everybody else, we're raising capital and we're doing all of things and define, you know, one tenant at a time to do that, and we're working with all of the usual suspects and doing that, the answer is, I could accommodate any load, no matter how vast look. I'm not going to be attracting the hyperscalers, right? We're just building too small. The first two sites at Gray Wolf are going to be five megawatt sites, just to be proof of concept sites, but there'll be great operating sites for somebody that needs to be in Connecticut. One's in Bristol, one's in Colchester. Those are suburbs of Hartford. You know, we're pretty close on the Bristol site right now with some interested parties. And so anyway, the answer is, easily, could accomplish a 200 kilowatt rack load using direct to chip cooling in a very sustainable, highly effective way, not the least of which will be my own AI that will be building out and testing of you know that horizontal paralleling of GPUs, which by. A way, I think, is a here today, I'm going to piss off a lot of people right now, gone tomorrow. Technology, GPUs can't possibly be the future of compute in this world. I would argue that quantum computers like nuclear are the eventuality I'm going to geek out on in a second, right? CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs, they're all deterministic chipsets, meaning calculating between one and zero. CPUs, do it seriously? Very fast. FPGAs. Do it parallel? Very fast. GPUs are somewhere in between, but they're deterministic, one, zero, quantum computers down to the other end, completely non deterministic, right? And so the calculation between zero and one, huh,
EB 35:47
oh, that's, that's the that's the issue with quantum computers, is that the fact that they're unpredictable and hard, hard to harness, all right?
Pete Sacco 35:54
I'm going to give you a word, X, Tropic, E, x, t, r, o, p, i, c, dr, Gil Verdon, who, I believe, ran Google quantum labs for a while, left to start and patented X Tropics thermodynamic chipset, what he calls TPUs, thermodynamic processing units. And when I started investing in his company, I thought it would take him the better part of five to 10 years to come up with them. You know, the trajectory for what the metallurgy will be and how he was doing, and he was using the principles of thermodynamics, a very well understood bell curve of between zero and one to hold the chip to a certain capability and be able to calculate and hold without the noise or jitter that you get from a quantum right? I got to use get it down to sub freezing, right? You know, to produce absolute zero in a superconducting material, in order to prevent the electron jitter of a qubit. But in a when he was doing this in a thermal conducting material, superconducting material at zero, unable to freeze a probability bit. He calls them P bits, right, probability bit of thermodynamic property and hold it to zero. I thought it would take him five years to get it to room temperature. It took him 18 months. And so he's about to release on the world this summer development kits of X Tropics TPUs that are about 10,000 times more energy efficient than a GPU. So think of the equivalent would be the building Elon Grox grok three in Memphis, at hundreds of megawatts and 10s of 1000s of GPUs, building that in gray wolf datacenters at four megawatts. And they're not saying, I'm doing that. I'm saying, though, that that's what the world is going to rot. A GPU is not going to run Brett's figure. Ai latest robot, it's not going to run Elon's next robot, it's going to require something of vastly more compute, a vastly higher energy efficiency, like the human brain. And so I believe TP use x Tropics chip set you were talking about investment thesis. This is part of it. Is going to be one of the fundamental shifts that I'll be rewarded for, not the least of which there and nobody goes public anymore. All these are SPVs. You got to know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy. So I immerse myself in the AI tech world of both longevity and AI, to get to know all these founders so that I can be purposeful in what I'm investing in. And I believe, I believe TPUs are going to be the fundamental shift away from GPUs.
EB 38:32
And TPUs isn't that what Google uses? Yeah, it's a
Pete Sacco 38:35
different moniker. But yes, similar, right? Similar
EB 38:39
acronym. Yep. And I guess it makes sense because they he came from Google, as you said, yep. Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then what's the biggest myth you about datacenters that you keep on hearing is there, is there a myth out there that continues to propagate?
Pete Sacco 38:59
I can't think of a myth. But you know, what's unique about the data center is we get complacent in this is the way it's always going to be. But I think this is also of human kind, right? We don't want change. We don't seek change. Change is typically thrust upon us, and then we have to be adaptable. And we better be super adaptable right now, both in the datacenter industry, you know, and you know in life, because change is going to have happen exponentially fast, right? You know, in the next world and, or in the next era, and, but I do believe all Harari wrote a book homo Deus, and in homo Deus, his opening, you know, statement is that man has spent the last millennia trying not to die by disease, famine or war, and man will spend the next millennia living as gods and living forever. And I agree completely, right? And I'm, I'm living proof of it, right? I went from that 306 50 pound guy to 199 pounds chance far and transformed everything about my body and my mind so I could live selflessly for those little girls, because they are going to carry the world and the way I'm going to leave this place a better place than when I found it is, one, by advancing AI and data center technology, and two, teach people that it is not by just your outward achievements, but your inner bliss, living selflessly for others.
EB 40:26
It's so true. You know, when you fast forward, an AI and AI will create, you know, some a lot of disruption. You know, things will go fast. Jobs will be lost. A lot of jobs will be outsourced, both mechanical jobs, you know robots, what physical robots will do? Trucks will be driven, but also accountants, it's going to be, there's going to be a lot of dislocation, and people need to find their inner bliss. You know, particularly the generation behind you, having your shoulder there, your girls are. You know, anyone in elementary school that they'll need to find a different they won't. They can't find their satisfaction from their job. They'll have to be from their hobby as an almost inner peace. I
Pete Sacco 41:10
think it's actually going to be a combination of both. And so I think the other gender that the future generations are going to look back on us and just snicker, right, like you worked every day for one company for more than what was that? You went to war. You hated people, you what? Well, you know, they're not going to understand it, right? And that's maybe not going to be my children, but my children's children are to look back on us as archaic, right? I would actually argue that very quickly, we're going to see the workforce transform where we won't have employees, we'll have a collection of 1099, workers that are all thrust together in a framework, and each independent person will be their own independent contractor. I'd actually art it's actually part of a different shift, right? Remember how the economic pyramid used to work. You went to school to develop skills that in the labor market you could charge more for your unit of time, and that's what your grandfathers did, right? They went and if he was a ditch digger, and he was a good ditch digger, he got paid a little bit more than the guy who wasn't a good ditch digger, but maybe he was a lawyer, and there was a good lawyer and a bad lawyer, and they were paid commensurately. I'd argue that that scale of human skill, knowledge and labor is about to be replaced, and what it's about to be replaced with is innovation and content. You see it already, there's influencers, there's content providers. Here we are sitting on a podcast, a modern a method that was not even used not too long ago. But so what is my real value? Is my real value the idea that I can build you a datacenter, or is my real value that I have a different way of thinking as to how the world is going to rot. And so I'm developing these innovations and this content, written, video, speak, spoken word, my books, my ideas, my concepts. And by the way, I own a nouveau IP protection company called Insta guard IP. We in partnership with instant IP. I have a partnership that is going to change intellectual property protection forever by putting intellectual property protection on a blockchain. In fact, just yesterday, I was on instant IPS podcast talking about how there's going to be copyright law pre AI, which was all broken, right? And Sam and Elon are all going to the government say, Okay, do you really want me to shut down chat? G PT, I don't think so, right. So they're going to forget about copyright infringement and but then there's going to be new copyright law, and that's going to be you and I and everybody innovating creating content, protecting it on the blockchain, so that eventually it is rewarded just the way the music industry rewards that, if you want to use a bit of my song, at least I get paid a piece. And so when I write a book, most of the topics are actually IP protected. Every company that I protect has IP, and we have a patent from the patent office that blockchain protected intellectual property is unique and new, and we even could put a little IP at the top of everything. So when you see all of my logos and all of my stuff, and you see the IP, that's what you're talking about. So I think the new base of the pyramid is no longer human labor, it's actually innovation and content development. Then you build the unique audience that wants to consume your content, that you have intellectual property ownership, and then you build a financial asset over the top, a company by which to sell your content to that audience. Audience, and then rinse and repeat over and over again. And that's the new paradigm future. And everybody is going to be their own pyramid, developing their own content that they have to protect, that they have to build an audience. Some of us will do it very well, and some of us won't, but that's going to lead to where we are, that most of Americans will not have a job because you will not be qualified to beat a robot or the agentic AI. You will be left to live by some universal basic income. And our governments across the world, but primarily first in the United States, will figure out, have to figure out, how do I tax a company of 1000 people that has a trillion dollars, you know, a year, as opposed to a company that's making a trillion dollars, but that has 400,000 people globally, the answer is very differently, right? And so we'll have to figure all of that out. So to your point, we are a bent about to enter the most dystopian time in human history, right? We're not prepared for the changes that are going to happen as quickly as they're going to happen.
EB 46:07
Yeah, there's almost a bifurcation between people. You think 100%
Pete Sacco 46:13
there's going to be human management, machine management,
EB 46:18
that as well as, like, you know, what are you going to do with your time and your UBI if you don't have a job, you know? Are you going to enhance yourself, or are you going to spend all your days playing Xbox?
Pete Sacco 46:29
Yeah, I think it's going to be discovered. But I'm going to say this, and I'm about to get a little spiritual on you, because this is my end answer that when I'm speaking about this, is to the let's get past the dystopia, and let's look to the future. In the end, here's what happens as human beings, our importance was never our knowledge and never our skill level, for producing labor or for reducing work. Eventually, the robots do all of that for us, all of the value of the world will be created automatically, and we will live in a post scarcity world. And you will say, well, what's the purpose of humanity then? And I would argue the purpose of humanity is now back on that other side, that idea that all the ancient mystics, all the founders of all the isms, Buddhism, Hinduism, Catholicism, Taoism, Sufism, have all said God is within, and we are all interconnected. We are the conscious observers of the probability of the universe, and that is our unique ability. It is our observation that collapses one of the quantum probabilities of the world into the objective reality that we live out. The machines with their superhuman intelligence will recognize that before we do and recognize that that is what our uniqueness in the world is. Take this the universe. Our Galaxy is 1000 light years apart. There's 300 billion suns. Most cosmologists believe that we're probably the only unique conscious life in our galaxy, 300 billion suns. There's trillions of galaxies that look just like us, even if there was in half of those life that we, by the way, are not going to communicate with. They're 1000s of light years away, right? That makes us pretty unique to the universe. We are the conscious of nerve observers of reality, and so the machines will recognize that. And I dare say that when the machines, with their superhuman intelligence, come to treating mankind, they are going to treat mankind as unique and as special as we deserve, and I dare say that they treat us far better than we have ever treated ourselves or each other.
EB 48:49
I hope so. I think it comes down to the training of those models and making sure that it's trained Right, right? Because almost when you look at our relationship to ants, you know we have super intelligence compared to ants. We have super intelligence compared to dogs or any pet. And I mean, we do put them in cages sometimes, you know, if you go away and that sort of thing. And so for their own good, you know that they don't go and get into a box of chocolate and, you know, that sort of thing. And you know, kind of curious. It's almost hard for us to conceive what a super intelligence would think about us. You know, you would hope that we, they treat us on a pedestal, but you never know. I
Pete Sacco 49:33
think they will, because again, in the cosmological world, we are the conscious observers of the universe. We We have consciousness. They will be consciously aware of themselves, but they will not be a part of consciousness. And I'm talking pure mysticism right now, interconnectedness, right? I believe that, look, I can go way deep down this subject. It's going to be the subject of the second book, the energetic sphere of self that we're working on right now, that human beings are nothing more than a collection of energy. Going from the outside phenomena that touches us all the way to the center of being, which we approach through presence. And I believe that you are a vast array of spheres that are the quantum probabilities of you. And that is your job in life, to to make your mind, body, self, as purposeful as good as possible to make the best observations, resulting in one quantum probability of you becoming your objective reality. But what's unique is the very center of you, of all the quantum probabilities of you, is exactly the same center of every quantum being that has ever lived and ever will live. And so you are part of a collective knowledge. It is the same collective knowledge as why entanglement works, why it could take two dipoles and spread them a world apart, and yet there's no time lapse between change because they are one in the same or quantum erasure. Or why does the human cell divide 264, times and with no instruction set know exactly how to bifurcate to make human life, it knows where to go and what cell to become. There's no instruction set in the cellular code, not in genetics, not in epigenetics. There's nowhere. There's a universal knowledge that controls all of this, and I believe that that makes us unique. We are part of that universal knowledge, and I think the machines will recognize that far before we will
EB 51:27
interesting. Yeah, I think could we summarize it up as well? You know that human beings are are intended to live in community, and perhaps you know that to avoid a future dystopia, you know, where everyone has mental health issues, is to kind of enhance more community, more interrelatedness. You know, we're all living 100%
Pete Sacco 51:50
I believe that is the destiny of all mankind. Will be to live selflessly and in post scarcity,
EB 51:59
post scarcity. But like, I believe we're, you know, supposed to be in connection with each other. You're that we grew up living in tribes, you know, anciently, you know. And
Pete Sacco 52:10
that's it. Imagine, you know, it's funny, there was somebody in the office one day put a me, one of those reels around, and it was a younger lady with her older dad. And the dad said, Hey, can you take me to the bank? And she's like, Dad, you could do all this online. He's like, ah, you know, you just, what do you call me? You know, just do it for me. And so she spends the day driving him around. And first they stop at the florist, and he sees married, tells him a story, and then he goes and sees Jim at this market and this and eventually they get to the bank and he shares another story. And the whole story is about he has these experiences along the way. And at the end of the day, they get back, and she's like, Dad, we just wasted the whole day. We could have done this in five minutes by coming because you had to go to the bank. He's like, ah, but then I wouldn't have known Mary and Jim and this and that and the other thing. And she goes, see this, Peter, this is why I don't like technology, because we're losing that human, interconnected spirit. And I'm like, Really, how about this? If you didn't have to go to the bank, you could have actively, have chosen to spend time with Sammy and Mary and bring it in all the people that you love, and really live your life for them and not yourself. And maybe you would actually have a better human experience in that. And so that's the point of where we're going to get so I don't think, I think it'll be cosmologically very short amount of time when we transmit, when we transform from a society that is negatively biased and based on ourselves, and realize very quickly that it was about community. It was about oneness and and I get it that's a weird thing for a guy who designs and builds datacenters and is around technology, but it is to me, they are. I am among the people who realize there is no there is no separability between these two things. There is the human experience, and then there is the collective experience, and the two are intertwined.
EB 54:03
Gotcha, yeah, so let's move back into data data center world, yeah, intertwined this with datacenters in terms of, we like to ask our guests, you know, to tell us a data center war story. You know,
Pete Sacco 54:17
sure I got a good one. It happened early in my career, right? Remember, you know, Pts companies are 27 years old now, and so I found myself getting out of I told you, I designed power supplies for the military. And then, you know, and so I was an electrical engineer by trade. I got hired by Samsung. I could say this now, because the story is old. And so Samsung hired me to do an assessment of a data center. And the reason why was they realized they had lost a manufacturing facility in the South China Seas due to a typhoon, and it impacted them globally. And so they hired ABS consulting, a very large risk management company, risk consulting company, to do a. Global risk assessment of Samsung properties, and one of them, they realized was datacenters. They had a lot of datacenters, and they realized that had unique risk potentials. So they hired me to do an assessment of the very first one, and then the result of that risk, they would just superimpose over all the rest to build a risk profile very quickly upon going there. Let's just say that they did not follow building codes. The way we follow building codes. They were a little bit loosey goosey with a few things, and I won't go into the details, but one of them, particular was a massive fire hazard. The way they were doing a bus duct. And the bus duct ran up 11 floors right, three floors at a time. And I wrote in my report that, look, here's the five major things that you've got going on that not not if they're going to be problems, it's when they're going to be problems, and they're all going to be catastrophic, with the most important one being, you know, this one of a risk of a fire hazard. And so I wrote the report. But before I give you the end part, I'm going to tell you he goes. You know, Pete, I understand. You know that what you're saying he goes, but the reality is that we are not having statistically the number of failures that your models are anticipating. Can you explain why? And he was funny, I was prepared for the question, not that I was prepared that I had an answer yet, but I knew he was going to ask me that question because I had calculated what the probabilities of failure should be, and they should have had a catastrophic failure by now. And then I remembered a story that I went to bed and went home thought about this, and I remembered a story that one of the project managers told me, and it was an air and all the air conditioning in the building failed. And what they did is they took out, it happened to be the winter, and they took out all the windows in the building in about four hours, and they saved it from operating. And that dawned on me, so I came back the next day and I was smiling, and he this is the, you know, President of all Samsung, and he goes, You're smiling, so I guess you have an answer for me. And I'm like, Yeah, I go in the United States when a wall is falling, we find the smartest guy in the room and ask him to build something quickly that we can hold up the wall. But in Korea, you send in 1000 people to hold the wall up while you figure out how to you know how to fix it. And so they solved everything through sheer manpower, because their cost of labor was so low compared to ours, and that was the reason they solved it through human effort, that they prevented massive failures. Well, let me jump to the story. 15 years later, I'm having breakfast one morning, and up on the news pops a fire at Samsung's SDS in guacchon, South Korea, and it was the exact corner where that bus duct was, and the bus duct that I had predicted. And so it's a sad tale of look inevitability, but I got to tell you, it was impactful to me, because it's not often, as a consultant, that something that you write that was so controversial at the time that they did not want to hear ultimately turned out to be true. And so it took 15 years for the probability for it to happen. But I have a feeling that somewhere in my world, the idea of probability and chance stayed with me the rest of my life, and it still persists to this day. Remember, I started my days as a quantum physicist, before I turned to engineering, and so I could tell you that the idea of understanding quantum probabilities is impactful, and it's much deeper and true and human life than we we know,
EB 58:33
right? That's so true. Well, we're getting close to time, and what we like to do is get a recommendation or a pick, a top pick, from you, something in your life that you found to be useful or impactful to your life.
Pete Sacco 58:52
Do you want it from a datacenter standpoint or for I would actually it's argue what I've been saying about the book, the reason why I wrote the book right living in bliss. The reason why I wrote the book as an entrepreneur and a technologist, but a modern day mystic is that we need to do both at the same time, right? We need to have outward success in order to build a good, happy existence of human form, but then you have to develop inner peace. And there's methodologies by which to do this. I think there's three ways that you can change your existence, at least your mind. One of them is cognitive behavioral therapy, right? Well established. One of them meditation, and a third, drugs, legal or otherwise, right? And so they all change your mind. I would argue meditation is probably the longest lasting, most sure, but it's the hardest. Meditation is a practice, right? There's lots of different ways to meditate. You can hit my website, Pete sacco.com, you can find my overview of meditation and the different levels of meditation. I would say everybody should learn how to calm their body, quiet their mind. Learn how to focus. Look with three little girls in school, one of the worst things I see is when parents are yelling at their kids, focus, concentrate. But nobody ever teaches a kid how to concentrate or focus. Meditation is teaching yourself how to concentrate and focus, then be openly aware, then understand energy, then feel energy, then control energy. It all comes builds upon, but it's all a practice that takes time and community. Find a community that does this, and you'll give yourself lasting improvements of body, mind and spirit, which will have a lasting impact on both your outward life and your inward fulfillment.
EB 1:00:32
I love it. I was part of an industry more of a networking industry book club, and it's since disbanded. But a couple years ago, we read Michael Pollan's how to change your mind. I don't know if you've read that
Pete Sacco 1:00:46
book. Yeah, it's a Netflix documentary today. And you know, when I started in plant medicine journey years ago, it started with watching that before I had the faith. I was an athlete, so I was not putting anything in my body. But let me tell you, read the book, right? I give you the experience that I've had and my the realizations and much of what I talked about today came through that moment of altered states of consciousness and profoundly changed my life for the better and will hopefully lead to my making it better leaving here than once I found it. That's their whole goal.
EB 1:01:29
I guess that's a good place to leave it. And before we go though to tell tell us how we can find you learn more.
Pete Sacco 1:01:37
Sure I'm on LinkedIn. I'm all over the world. I'm building a, you know, a brand right now. So you could find me on Pete sacco.com you could find me at PTC, s.com you can find any one of the divisions. And Tuva dot solutions is the data center design company grid seven energy.com is the is the energy company gray wolf datacenters. If you're out there and you're looking for an AI workload or an HPC workload, and you have to be in Connecticut. I've got a really, really good way that I've already got power permits for the land and and we're just looking for a tenant that we're going to start construction pre funding, but, you know, we'll get in there, but we're looking for that tenant wants to share the experience. I could have it done in under a year. And so we're pretty because, again, I'm not building at 100 megawatt scale. I'm building at three megawatt scale. So I could get this all done pretty quickly. And I could tell you this, communities across the country are excited that I'm the guy who wants to bring in some little bit of datacenter Ownership The much the way pops were back in the day, into everywhere America. Because I think it's the inevitability, so I put myself out there. That's why I, you know, I do these podcasts, and I do the talks and and whatnot, and so pretty easy to find me in the world. Awesome. Well, thank you. Pete, Thank you, Eric. I appreciate it. Nolan, thank you. You home.