Not Your Father’s Data Center - Hydrogen: The Future Green Alternative?

Episode Date: May 30, 2023

The increasing power consumption of data centers and the subsequent challenges of powering and cooling them have emerged as significant concerns for industry professionals. The quest for sustainability in the field is increasingly urgent, given that data centers are estimated to consume about 50 times more power than traditional offices, and the reliance on fossil fuels and hydrocarbons is unsustainable in the long term.On this episode of Not Your Father’s Data Center, host Raymond Hawkins welcomes Steven Hill, an independent datacenter analyst and writer, for an insightful discussion on this pressing issue. They delved into Hill's unique journey, from a professional photographer photographing ore carriers, cranes, and Packers games, to a leading voice in the datacenter industry. They also explored hydrogen as a potential solution to these challenges, despite its high reactivity and flammability and its low energy volume.Their discussion further unfolded into…Hill's transition from professional photography to datacenter analysisThe burgeoning focus on data center sustainabilityThe role of hydrogen as a potential fuel source in the datacenter industryThe challenges posed by increasing demand for computing power and growing data center densityDifferent types of hydrogen and their potential uses in the industryThe increasing adoption of multicore processors and virtualization in data centersThe criticism faced by the data center industry for high power consumption and the increasing demand for sustainable electricitySteven Hill is an independent datacenter analyst and writer. He has charted an unconventional career path, transitioning from professional photography to the datacenter industry, where he now applies his analytical skills to examine and write about the pressing issues facing the industry.

Welcome to another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center. I am your host, Raymond Hawkins, Chief Revenue Officer here at Compass in Dallas, Texas. Today, Stephen Hill joins us from the great state of Wisconsin. He is an independent analyst with our friends at Tone Curve. Stephen, how are you today? I'm great. Yourself? I'm doing awesome. Thank you for joining us and having a talk about data center and hydrogen and all things technology.

If you're willing, I'm going to drive us a little bit off the data center ranch and talk football with you for a few minutes. But before we get into football, because it's hard not to talk to a guy who lives in green bay about the packers um tell us a little bit about where you grew up where you went to school and how you got interested in tech actually i i uh i went to high school the little city called algoma wisconsin which is you've got you go drive north to green bay you make a right and go all the way to lake Michigan, and that's where Algoma is. Wow, right on the lake. Right on the lake. So I grew up listening to the foghorn on many nights.

And ultimately, that led to a career in professional photography, which evolved into a career in digital imaging technology in the 90s. So I had like a 30-year experience in professional photography, yet digitalization changed everything in photography. So I was involved in a lot of projects to completely change workflows, to choose hardware and software for a production environment. The studio that I was running at the end created about 16,000 commercial photographs a year. And all of those went straight to print. We printed probably, it was a retail store. We did about between 8 and 12 million press run every week. And we did about 60 circulars a year. So it was great. And that kind of led me into once I got tired of the fun of retail, I decided to move into writing because I covered so much technology over the years. I was

a hobbyist. I ran BBSs in the 80s. I built systems probably for a 30 year period because I love having control over that. But anyway, so that led to writing and then led to being an analyst with a couple of different firms covering storage, servers, data center technology, heating, cooling, data management, data governance, and archiving. It was all over the place. So it's been a blast being a generalist in a business that really calls for it. So been in Wisconsin your whole life?

You haven't gotten too far from the lake, have you? No, no. In fact, the weird thing was I was born further down the lake in Chicago. And then slowly but surely, my dad moved us up north. And the last thing I said, I went to my high school in that little city of Algoma. It's a great little town. Still is. So I've had the good fortune of staying on the lake. And if I understand it right,

folks back before we had air conditioning, they put their houses right up close to the lake so that the cool breeze would blow off the lake in the summer. The land would heat up, the crust of the earth would heat up, that would suck the air in off the lake, and cool air would blow through your house to cool the home in the summer, right? Right on. It was amazing. Literally, when you drive into town from Green Bay, say, for example, you could have your hand out the window, and you could feel the temperature drop maybe 8 to 10 degrees as you get closer to the city. So yeah, living less than a half mile off the lake, it was always really pretty comfortable. And I prefer being cool, right? You can only take off so many clothes and not get arrested.

I'll tell you, changing the temperature of that big body of water is hard to do. So that's why it stays always cool, I tell people. So the reason it's cool is because all that water is hard to heat up. All right. So you'd already dropped one acronym that I'm sure we're going to lose people on, BBS. So for our listeners, the tech is a 10-year obsession unlike a 40-year obsession for you and me. Folks, that's a bulletin board service. This was how we messaged each other before we had the Internet.

That's how we would electronic. Exactly right. I don't think you mentioned it, but I know earlier you me right 1200 baud modems i mean the days of of literally waiting for the phone to dial the line and uh get us a connection uh those were the days so if you wanted to download one megabyte it would take you know pretty much the rest of the night as long as somebody didn't pick up another phone i was just saying drop your connection you would just connection. You would just start it and go to bed, and then you would get up in the morning, and your download would be done. Yeah.

If you were lucky. Right, right. Those were the days. Well, you mentioned a little bit of being, you know, you've done lots of technology, and just for some perspective, I'd like folks to hear a little bit about your history. Let's just take storage for a minute. Let's go back to, my kids don't believe this. I tell my kids, I was like, you know, when I started working in technology, we used to have

these slogans that said, someday there'll be a computer on every desk. And my kids are like, what do you mean, dad? And I'm like, well, you know, not everybody had computers and most businesses did everything on paper. Then my kids can't comprehend that things weren't done. Now there's more compute in my iPhone than launched a rocket back in the 60s, right? And I think folks don't get, you know, what I think what we got the first personal computers in the early 80s, the first really commercially viable one, I guess, would be 84 with the Mac Lisa. Remember, we're barely getting, you know, rolling in the 80s.

And, you know, you and I were joking earlier about storage. Tell us about some early storage days. What was it? How big was it? How fast was it? And compare it. I think my phone I'm holding here has – let me look. I'm going to see.

I was going to say it's, I think, a couple. I'm going to look. You start down the path. I want to see how many. Yeah. My phone, I think, a couple. I'm going to look. You start down the path. I want to see how many. Yeah. My phone, I have 250 gig in. I was going to say, I think this is a 250 gig phone, but I'm going to check real quick. Right.

Yeah, 256 gigabytes. Right, exactly. And I look back, and I remember somewhere I have an 8 1⁄2-inch floppy disk drive. It's big, and it held 800 octets. That was what was labeled. Eight hundred octets. That's how old it was, right? Yeah.

But, you know, I mean, we went through and like I say, my early days, I love the Commodore 64. That's where you're running the BBS on. And literally, I had probably seven or eight floppy drives daisy-chained with about a megabyte of control each. On megabyte? A megabyte per. And then I got really advanced in like 1989. I bought a device called the Lieutenant Colonel. It was the only hard drive for a Commodore 64. And it was a 10 megabyte, which meant you had to set it up in 10, one megabyte partitions

so that you could pretend that you actually had 10 floppy drives connected to the computer. It was great. It was a nice piece of technology. And it got rid of, I mean, some of these drives where you could like warm your dinner on the top of them. They were so hot. So your Commodoreore 64 i want to say i had one wired to a television did you actually have a monitor oh yeah okay the weird

thing is that you know commodore it's it's uh it was a semi hobbyist computer but they had a pretty full collection of of different uh floppy drives different input devices, a full 80-line monitor, a full color monitor. That was one thing about the Commodore systems, whether it was the C64 or Amiga, they were able to color way before anybody else does. And they were doing things that even the Macintosh couldn't do at the time. So that's where I first got my taste of digital imaging, and that just carried on from there. So, Stephen, with your experience in the storage business and us joking about early days, things measured in megabytes and kilobytes, I get asked this a bunch. People will ask me, analysts will ask, hey, don't you think that

as the data center technology continues to shrink, that we're going to need fewer data centers. We're going to need less data center space. And I always ask them, I said, hey, can you talk me through the three biggest technology changes that allowed for the miniaturization of a data center? And to me, one of them is going from spinning platters to flash drives. To me, that was the biggest, right? Because even in a three and a half inch drive world, it took racks and racks and racks and tons and tons and tons of weight, all kinds of electricity. You made the joke earlier about being able to was the biggest change in the data center, right? That made a heat change, a power usage change, a square footage needed change. That one was huge. And if you look back, you always hear the term technology that really revolutionizes something. If I look back on it, because again, having been in the data center following it for the last two decades, it was virtualization and multi-core systems.

When you stole my thunder, Steve, those were the next two, but yes. If you think about it, because, you know, back when I was writing for Network Computing Magazine, I did a bunch of tours where we're called the data center expert tour. Now, I'm no expert at anything. I just love lots of technology. But I was at that point speaking about Intel's plans and AMD's plans to build multi-core processors. And I said, you know, at that point, at that point, Intel had created like a 64-core test chip that was able to do, it was like a massive math coprocessor. And it would allow you to do, that's how they came up with all the routing and all the messaging between all of the

cores. But AMD really beat them to it by putting out a dual core system probably two years before Intel really got it together. And then my point was that, you know, I was speaking on data centers. I said, you will see systems that have 1632 cores on a single socket. And the only way to take advantage of all of that computing power is to do virtualization. Because prior to that, it was one application, one server, end of story. And all of a sudden, you could be hosting dozens of applications on a single or a dual socket server. But again, this is what happens. And I agree with you. People say, though, isn't this going to just diminish to nothing? Well, no, because demand continues to build back out as you go along. So

ultimately, I see data centers getting tighter, but they're getting more dense. And then you start adding things like AI and other highly computational technologies. And all of a sudden, you're right back to where you were originally. You're really pushing the technology to the limit. And along with all that high performance action and the AI capabilities, you're generating a lot more heat and you're using up a lot more space. Well, you nailed it there, Stephen. So I love that you played perfect straight man, right? When we started to be able to put multiple cores in the same socket, that demanded, I like in the old days, we used to talk about a killer app. Well, we didn't have a killer app that could burn up all

that compute. So now we had to bring virtualization over from the mainframe and say, hey, let's use more of this chip, but we're going to slice it up. And then we're going to take our, what I remember in the old days, average utilization was about 17%. And now that we have virtualization, we run in the mid 80s, most every core does. And so multi-core chips and virtualization really helped each other play together, which allowed us to go to 1U boxes and blade servers and get the servers smaller and smaller and smaller and cram all that technology onto a single core, a single chip socket. And then we still had these huge disk arrays that supported all that. And when we got to make the switch from platters to flash drives, we miniaturized all that. And so I look at

how the data center has changed and those three huge leaps forward, not that there couldn't be something else, but I don't know what we do to get them much smaller than those. And then back to your point, we're now going the other direction with these NVIDIA chips and these chips that are doing special functions at an extremely high rate, running extremely high. I mean, the reason we need to immerse servers is because they're so specialized and running so fast and getting so hot, we got to figure out a better way to cool them. Oh, dear God. And you start looking at things like the DGX series from NVIDIA that they're doing AI, they're doing analytics on. These things are just monsters. I mean, literally, they're a supercomputer in an eight rack unit size. And it's amazing that they've

done incredible things with it. Software is available. You can literally have a supercomputer. You can even get them in a tower version that you can stick onto your desk. But they also have these, and they keep thinking of it in terms of multiple racks of these things, just racked up and then connecting all of the storage via high-speed interconnect so that you can actually keep feeding these things. Because some of these analytics processes or the AI process just tear through the data. I remember we used to joke, we can't change the laws of physics. We can't make the electrons go any faster, right? And that was always our constraint. What could we push through that copper? What could we push through that process? Or what could we push through that soccer to that

busway? And now we're pushing the compute so far. Now we're running up against the laws of thermodynamics. What can we cool? How much heat rejection can we put in a space? How can we cool it? Because we're generating so much heat in such a small area. Because I get asked that one a bunch too. Raymond, how dense can you get these racks? Well, it's not how much compute can I put in there, it's how much heat can I reject. Right, exactly. And that's the case. I've seen, I've toured some data centers that they can handle up to 100 kilowatt,

excuse me, forgive me, I'm suddenly having a mental block here, 100 kilowatts per rack, which is, which I guess, well, and that's the thing about data centers. I mean, literally what they do is they use power and turn it into heat because the work comes out as basically just data, which doesn't have any math, doesn't it? So the only work that they do is turning electricity. We tricked rocks into doing math, right? So it's jamming a bunch of electricity into those rocks and then coming up with answers and all the rest of that

gets blasted out as heat. So you're right. And this is where you start seeing challenges from the old traditional, like the old raised floor types where you had a mainframe and you could put, you know, a couple of tiles in front of, couple of tiles with holes in them in front of the racks and you'd be fine. Well, now that's not always the case, especially when you start talking about 50 to 100 kilowatts in a rack. That is a lot of power. Just think of that in terms of 50 to 100 hair dryers blowing at the same time. There's your energy use. Yeah, exactly.

And we've got to reject all that heat. All that heat's got to get rejected somehow. That's right. Exactly. Because again, what you put into it, you also have to take out of it, right? Yeah. So for every kilowatt you put in, you got to be able to absorb that or a little bit more. And so that's what, you know, and looking at data centers, data centers have always been hogs for power, right? And from what I

remember reading about, it's about 50 times more power than a traditional office per square foot. And then you start adding the water use. That's the next article that I'm, that's going to be publishing relatively soon is on water usage, because now I'm really focusing a little bit more in my studies on the challenges of powering and cooling all of this power that we're using because we're addicted to it now. I mean, everybody's pushing AI, everybody's pushing all of these analytics, and it's great, but you still have to be able to provide them with power and cooling. And that's a difficulty. And again, this is where we start looking at alternatives for the

way that we get power, because most of the power we get right now comes from fossil fuels, from hydrocarbon sources. And that's not sustainable. And I think that's a new keyword that everybody is looking at for the Dave Center, sustainability. How can we ensure that we can continue to do this and that we don't wreck the planet in the process? So, Stephen, you nailed it with that one coming as well, right? We get asked a lot, hey, you guys use a lot of power, not Compass, but Compass representing the data center industry, right? And I always ask people, I say, hey, you're right, but let me ask you, what would you like to take off your phone? You want to stop using Instagram? Would you like to stop using TikTok? Would you like to stop buying your plane tickets online?

Would you like to stop having Amazon bring stuff to you? Because it's all these digital apps that enable this thing to be smart that ultimately drive that utilization in our data centers, right? That's what's pushing it and getting people to get that, hey, what you do on your phone ultimately ends up as heat in a data center. That's ultimately where it takes place. And not only heat, but to your point, the sustainable electricity that gets us there. And I'm going to give one.

I'm not going to name the state, but one of the states we develop in, just to give some numbers. They had about 7,000 in their first 50 years of doing generation. They had about 7,000 megawatts for generation. And they've had requests for 7,000 megawatts over the next five years, just for the data center industry. Just for the data center industry. And along with that, and I don't want to harp on it, but along with that is water. I mean, some of the most difficult freshwater use is coming from either power generation or the cooling process in the data center itself. And you think yourself, well, do data centers drink water? Yeah, but it's really water is the easiest way to cool technology, especially highly compressed and dense technology. So ultimately, where electricity goes,

water goes as well. And the problem with electricity is that, like I said, most of our electricity is generated using hydrocarbons, fuels. But ultimately, this is where we've been, and I've been looking at, I wrote a piece on hydrogen and why isn't hydrogen being used more? And to me, it's fascinating because really, when I look at a data center, I look at what problem are we trying to solve? Now, is it difficulty at getting power? Not so much. Is it a difficulty of eliminating or decarbonizing the generation of that power? That's what we're trying to accomplish. So if that is a key goal, you have to look at all the reasons and all of the sources of greenhouse gases that come from an energy

production environment. And at this point, carbon is the worst. Right. So we've got net gas as an option. We certainly got hydrogen option. Talk to us a little bit about how would we power a data center with hydrogen? As you studied it and looked into it, talk us through that a little bit, because today, not happening at scale anywhere. So I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. Well, and this, again, because we're in a relatively early stage of this, that the government and around the world, they're paying a lot more attention to hydrogen, purely because of the lack of greenhouse gases. Now, not every application of hydrogen is free from greenhouse gases. So the way that hydrogen would affect the data center would be as a power source. And we've already seen a relatively large 500 megawatt turbine-based

power unit going into, I can't remember the state now, I've got it written somewhere. There's also the potential of using hydrogen eventually for standby generators, because it wasn't available at first, but now there's a potential of utilizing diesel engines using hydrogen instead of fuel. I got you. Instead of running diesel fuel through it. Yeah. Right. Exactly. So there's some direct results there. There's also the ability to build what are called microgrids. And this is where, because again, the thing you have to look about our energy supply is that it's been attacked a couple of times in this last year.

And so is your standby generator enough to last a couple of weeks if there's a major outage? Because literally, these people have realized that they can take a gun and use a couple of dollars worth of bullets to damage or completely destroy a half a million to a million dollars worth of electric infrastructure. So ultimately, it falls on the data center operator to be able to have sufficient backup capabilities to be able to manage an extended outage. And that's where, again, diesel generators do incredibly well, but then they're probably the worst for generating greenhouse gases. And that's, again, what the goal is actually is reducing that greenhouse gas. Stephen, in your studies on this hydrogen option, did you look into our friends at Bloom Energy any?

No, I'm not familiar with that. Run that by me yet. Bloom Energy, B-L-O-O-M, I think their microgrid is hydrogen powered. It could be. There are a couple of facilities that are hydrogen powered right now. I know that there's I think that there is one there. They're actually converting a coal plant in Nebraska to convert 100 megawatt, 125 megawatt coal plant to to hydrogen fuel and like i said there's also uh the load long ridge energy that's uh that's i'm trying to think that's i can't remember where that's but it's located they're producing

485 megawatts using one giant uh gas turbine from ge and oh wow yeah and the powered by hydrogen yeah well it's at this point they're only fractionally powered. But what they're doing is building this up because the problem with hydrogen, and I have to talk a little bit about hydrogen. So you'll have to give me. Yeah, let's do it. There are scientists or engineers out there. Forgive me if I'm wrong. I'm just a computer nerd.

But ultimately, again, I've been fascinated with hydrogen and its capabilities since I grew up in the space program and seeing a Saturn V launching with ice flaking off of it and the massive power that it created. It was like, why is this being used for more? But hydrogen is, I would say, the energy environment's problem child because there's a lot of pros and there's a lot of cons so you know ultimately the problem with hydrogen is that well i mean face it the weird thing is hydrogen is 75 percent of the universe and i did a pie chart and it just showed uh three quarters of the pie chart was hydrogen one about one quarter was helium, and then this little tiny 2% wedge was everything else. It was crazy. Because again, you don't think about it, right? But again, we only associate

with what's on Earth. Well, the problem with hydrogen on Earth is that it's only six parts per million in the atmosphere. So it's not easy to get out of the air itself. Ultimately, the sun, we face it. The sun is our wonderful hydrogen generator. 600 million tons of hydrogen it burns per second, turns it into helium. It's all part of the fusion process, which why fusion would be incredible when it gets down to it, but ultimately the ability to use hydrogen as a replacement for other fuels that produce carbon. And again, if you look at what greenhouse gases are, the majority is carbon dioxide or carbon monoxide, oxides of nitrogen, NOx, as you hear of this when you're using internal combustion engines, and hydrocarbons that are based for all different, like propellants and stuff like that.

So the thing with hydrogen is that it's a challenge getting it because it's not, you can't draw it out of the atmosphere. You can only get it from other things that have hydrogen in it. Now, hydrogen is great. It's the smallest molecule. It's the lightest atom. It is a part of so many things on Earth because it's so happy to bond with everything. So when you think of hydrocarbons, oil and gas, hydrocarbon, hydrogen is a huge part of it. The carbon is the bad part. And that always ends up getting blasted into the air whenever you burn hydrocarbons. Now, hydrogen by itself creates no hydrocarbons or no carbon in the atmosphere at all. And the only, you know, the only additions to it are when you try and run hydrogen through an internal combustion engine, because when you burn hydrogen with regular air, you end up mixing in oxygen, and that's where the NOx comes out of.

But if you are running just pure hydrogen, the only output is, in the case of a fuel cell, electricity and water, which is, you can't be more efficient than that. The problem is getting all the technology up to a point that you can actually utilize that you can actually utilize that hydrogen in an efficient way. And then there's also type different types of hydrogen because it's not just one type. There's it is there's eight colors. Green comes from water that is electrolysis from anything that is renewable energy. So solar, wind power, any kind of power that you break down water into hydrogen and oxygen, that's green hydrogen. Blue hydrogen comes from fossil fuels, but with carbon capture.

That's something that they could do is separate out the carbon and they sequester it, which means that they could pump it underground or they can turn it into solid carbon. That's coming up. Gray hydrogen is fossil fuels without carbon capture. Black and brown hydrogen is bituminous or lignite coal. Turquoise is thermal splitting of methane plus pyrolysis, and you could turn that into solid carbon. And then pink is electrolysis from a nuke plant, de-electricity from a nuke plant. Red hydrogen is nuke plant catalytic splitting, which is a new way of being able to split water into hydrogen and oxygen using extremely high heat

within the existing nuclear plants facility. And then the last, and this is more interesting, is white hydrogen, which is naturally occurring hydrogen. They just started to find pockets of this. And this is one of my favorite hydrogen stories is that in 2012, they found a hydrogen pocket in Mali when they were drilling for a water well. They went down 300 meters, didn't find any water, but they pulled their drill out and they found there's something blowing out of the hole. And so one of the drillers went and looked down the hole with a lit cigarette and went,

oh, no, it went off in his face and it burned for weeks. It didn't kill him, but ultimately it burned for weeks. And then to this day, they're using it to generate energy for that city in Mali in Western Africa. So there is a potential to get naturally occurring hydrogen. But the problem with any type of fuel source is that you have to calculate all the carbon that went into it. So if you're drilling it or if you're extracting it, you have to look at all the different factors involved. And the best way is green hydrogen from pure electrolysis of water. But again, that requires electricity. And at this point, it only recovers about 60% of the energy that was used to separate it.

But it's an energy carrier. Hydrogen is not a fuel as such. It's more like battery power. You can use hydrogen to power things, but you have to manufacture it to be able to use it because it's not atmospheric and you have to break it apart out of something else to be able to get use out of it. Steve, I had no idea there were eight different colors. I like the way you characterized them of the different kinds of hydrogen and how we get

to them. That's fascinating stuff. Had no idea. Yeah. And I mean, ultimately, the beauty of hydrogen is you can use it for so many things. Gas turbines, diesel engines now, fuel cell battery combos that you're going to find in a lot of vehicles. Even just recently, they were trying powering a plane with hydrogen. In fact, there's talk about actually using hydrogen and standard jet engines. The problem with it is that hydrogen, it's incredibly light,

and it's highly reactive. It's probably 10 times more flammable than, say, diesel fuel. And then the problem is it's low energy by volume. So if it's at standard pressure, at standard temperature, it's a very light gas, but it's really high energy by weight. So if you burn a liter or a kilo of hydrogen and a kilo of gasoline, hydrogen would definitely win. Problem is that because it's a gas and it's a fairly light gas, you need to either compress it a lot. The average compression for commercial hydrogen

is 10,000 PSI, which is no small number. Or you can store it as a liquid. And it's an awesome liquid because it compresses down to like 845 to 1. So you could put a lot of hydrogen in liquid form, and it will expand 800 and whatever percent or 800 whatever times. So again, that's a problem the hydrogen itself is well here's a good comparison because i was looking at a space program uh one one gallon of liquid hydrogen weighs one half pound one gallon of liquid oxygen weighs 9.51

pounds so that shows you and, it just doesn't compute because if you have two gallon jugs and one is like a 10th of the weight of the other, it just doesn't calculate in your brain. But again, that's the problem with hydrogen. It's a problem child because it's difficult to get. It requires energy to produce energy, but the big payoff is zero carbon or minimal carbon and minimal other things, too, depending on how it's used. Lifetime Wisconsinite to not give two minutes of this podcast to talk about your Green Bay Packers.

You got to give us your favorite Lifetime love of the Packers. Give us your favorite Packers story. Oh, my God. Well, you know, it was weird because when I started my career, as I said, in professional photography, and then Little City, Algoma had a photographic studio that did everything. So I had the opportunity to photograph the launch of thousand foot ore carriers and massive cranes. And part of it was that they were the official photographer at the time for the Green Bay Packers, which meant we did all the team photographs. And then we showed up at every game.

And so I guess I got to shoot probably several dozen Packer games from the field. And it's a different world down there. When you're working it, it's not the same. But when I learned to love the Packers was when I got back, I headed out east and came back and I got some free tickets because it was easy to get Packer tickets in the 80s. And to just sit in the stands in the warm and have a dollar beer and a dollar hot dog, it was just great. It was like, so this is why people like it, because when you're on your knees on the field, it's snow or sleet or whatever. You don't really enjoy the game. You're busy.

But actually sitting at a game, that was amazing. And, again, going through the Packers, we've had some pretty good luck with major quarterbacks like Brett Favre. You've got to bring Aaron right here. Oh, yeah. Well, I've got it. And I'm from the shit. And again, it's it's one of those things where you go through cycles. You keep hoping it's an interesting year this year.

Put it that way. It was interesting last year. It's really interesting this year because all the talk and the irony of it is that when Brett Favve left green bay he went to the jets and that's that's where he is yeah yeah yeah because i ended up i was i was speaking in new york the day after that was announced and i got up on stage and i said i'm wearing black today because i'm from green bay and everybody knew what I was talking about, that they had stolen Brett Favre away from the Green Bay Packers. So the weird thing about Green Bay is that it is the smallest market in the NFL. It's a publicly owned team.

Literally, if the Packers were to be sold, the proceeds would go to, I believe, an American Legion post. Oh, wow. Yeah, but ultimately, there's literally a million stockholders out there right now. It's not votable stock, but it's a community team that will stay a community team. Love that about the Packers. Love that they're owned by the public and the smallest market fighting it out with the big boys. And I know you love those guys just down the road in Chicago. Stephen, we appreciate you chatting with us.

We appreciate you sharing a little bit about Wisconsin and your beloved Packers and your history in watching our world digitized from front seat digitizing photography all the way through what we talk about in the compute space and data centers and hydrogen. Thank you for joining us. It's been awesome. We look forward to talking again soon. We appreciate you having us, you joining us on Not Your Father's Data Center. Thank you so much. Take care. Thank you very much.