Not Your Father’s Data Center - The AI Boom, Power Crunch and the Rise of Data Ecosystems

Episode Date: September 9, 2025

In this episode, Raymond Hawkins welcomes back Bill (Vitaly) Kleyman—CEO and founder of Apolo, industry thought leader, and data center prognosticator extraordinaire. Bill shares his personal journey, from immigrating to the U.S. as a Ukrainian refugee fleeing the Soviet Union, to becoming a leading voice in tech innovation and AI. The conversation opens with reflections on Ukraine’s ongoing conflict and its impact on Bill’s family.The discussion pivots to the explosive growth and renaissance in the data center sector, driven by surging AI demand. Raymond and Bill cover topics such as power constraints, rack density, the rise of liquid cooling, and the shift toward AI-powered solutions for enterprise and public sector challenges. Bill also explores practical AI use cases Apollo is delivering, from improved municipal services and sentiment analysis to cutting-edge applications in agriculture and finance. The episode offers an energetic, forward-looking perspective on the future of data center infrastructure and AI.Note: This conversation was recorded in June; references to the Ukraine–Russia conflict reflect the situation at that time and may not fully reflect the present moment.Timestamped Overview00:00 Intro & Bill’s Background07:10 Ukraine/Russia: Defending Against Constant Assaults12:54 Honor Ukraine's Security Guarantees14:02 Ukraine Conflict Outcome Scenarios22:23 Military Concerns Over Peace Deal25:14 Untapped Potential of Generative AI26:38 Exploring AI's Practical Applications31:26 AI & Data Centers' Power Demand33:27 Powerful Shift in Data Centers36:45 Leveling the Corporate Tech Playing Field42:09 Reaching Next-Level Data Center Efficiency45:12 AI Usecases 54:55 Scalable, Meaningful Infrastructure Partnership56:21 Democratizing AI: Expanding Possibilities

How do I start this conversation? The data center industry, we're having a moment. Yeah. We're being noticed. It's both good. We're on the news. I know. NPR Foxx.

Every day. Across the board. Welcome to another edition of Not Your Father's Data Center. I am your host, Raymond Hawkins. Everyone that listens to my podcast knows Bill, the C. and founder of Apollo, but also data center prognosticator extraordinaire. So, Bill, thank you for joining us again. It's always a pleasure, Raymond, and it's a highlight of my day to spend a little bit of time with my friends here at Compass. And there's never a dull moment

with you, Raymond, because you're absolutely right. This is not your father's podcast, and certainly out your father's data center podcast, because you, you throw out some really fun questions. So that said, I'm, I'm grateful and slightly nervous to be here. All right. We like it. We like you a little bit uneasy. We get you a little bit off center because you're always on brand and always on message. So we kind of like that.

I tell you, both of my children struggle with the title of the podcast. They go, but dad, it is my father's data center podcast. And I'm like, stop. It is. All right. So, so many people in our audience know you and know you, know about you, but we're going to dive in with some things that they don't know. So for the rest of the podcast, you are, if you're willing to accept this, can I just call you Vitale

your given name? Yeah, yeah. And just to know, Vitali, it's actually if you want to go super formal. It's a Vitaly Urivich. Oh, yeah. So help you, come on. I'm from South Alabama. You don't have to go those. Vitale is a formal name, but amongst friends, it's Vitalik, with a k uh so if you whichever one you whichever one you prefer all right vitalik tell our audience how you got from vitalic to bill because that's not you know for those of us you know from the the deep south you know that's a head scratcher so help us out it's it's interesting uh i came to the united states in the early 90s and almost immediately i became a part of a linguistic immersion program. And it was specifically designed for refugees. We were we were political silent

refugees fleeing the former Soviet Union, specifically from Ukraine. But when we, when we landed, we got this really brilliant teacher that, and I promise there's there, you'll know why, why my name's changed. She taught us accents, right? So this accent that you're hearing is a natural Midwestern Chicago accent for the purpose that I don't have to translate. in my head. Interestingly enough, a lot of my, I'm on my team from Apollo are in Eastern Europe and, you know, we're Russian, Slavic speaking. So if I speak in Russian, for example, for like an hour and then I transfer over to you, Raymond, like, it takes a few minutes for my accent this one to kind of, kind of settle in. And you might hear me say like,

did he say a word strangely? I don't know what it is. But going back to, going back to your question, my entire family had really easy names. Anna, Yuri, David, Claire, Eugene, surge of Lena. It was fairly simple. And then you got me, Vitale, right? And when we came to America, if I say my name to you, Vitali, you will say it just fine right back at me, right? But if I write

it down, people read vitally or like Vitalian. It was just really consistent. And my mom eventually, when I was like early teens, she got really, really sick of it. And because she's like, they make you sound like an herbal supplement. So that's enough.

And so, and so, and so we go to court. Before that, before that, we asked an American friend, like, what does, what does Vitaly sound like? And he's like, I don't know. It sounds like William, I guess. And my mom's like, he's good name. We go change. Right. And so we go to court. And lo and behold, I get William, by official documents, right? And so now, now everybody who is like Slavic speaking or from, from that part of the world, and, you know, who know me, they'll call me Battali or Vitalik. But then everybody else on my American side will call me Bill. And some brave souls, one of them named Raven Hawking's, we'll go ahead and use my birth name, Batali, which is always a pleasure.

And in a case, you know, Batali that you go is the person that usually people reference, he's a boxer and he's the mayor of Kiev right now. Yeah. And my name is spelled just like his. Big fella too. He's a big fella. He's a big guy. And his brother, too. They're both giants.

My brother had a chance to meet him and spend some time with him while he was over in Ukraine, working with the military. He lives in Los Angeles, but he volunteers, flies over there for a few months, does some work with drones. I can't get into it like too many details, but I'm super, super proud of it. He just recently received, actually, Raymond, he's actually received his second medal for his services. is one was a government one and the other one was specifically for like air defense and really proud of his work. And he's, I was going to say he's back safe in L.A. But that's, that's a dicey question right now or statement. But he's, he's safe where he is in Los Angeles. So, so Francis and the team get mad at me if I give dates. So I'm not going to give dates.

But when you and I spoke previously, Ukraine and the Russian war was front and center. Sure. And we spent a good bit of time talking about it. But will you just take a few minutes with your brother going and your family's history there and you're you being part of that you know post um soviet union breakup as part of your life story will you just take a few minutes and tell us what's going on in ukraine and and you again we can say publicly thank you to your brother for his service and helping to defend your nation i i'm i'm thank you for that i'm going to i'm going to make sure i pass it off to uh to him i'm trying to find uh an image that my brother had sent me recently there there it is uh i found it i'll i'll i'll i'll i'll i'll

put it up to the screen here in just a second. You know, one of the biggest aspects, remarkably, you know, people joke around the whole thing of thoughts and prayers. This is one of those few times where that really does help one of the paramount fears that, you know, my friends and family who are still fighting have is just, is just being forgotten. Honestly, the support is coming. It ebbs and flows. I get it. But just being forgotten. And obviously that the fight's not lost. And I don't know if you saw this or not Raymond. Today was the numbers released by the Institute of War as well as Ukrainian military, as well as the EU, Russia has just officially surpassed 1 million in dead or wounded, tens of thousands

of equipment lost, airplanes, ships now. But that's just, that's an extraordinary amount. Back on on the front, it's a very challenging situation to have to fight a completely different type of war, right? One where you're trained by European. Western style, right? And the other one, which is quite literally still a meat grinder. And the challenge there and what all of us here in the Western world are experiencing is that it's really, really, really, really difficult to defend the land. Even if you've got great tools and weapons against just waves and waves and waves and waves of people, sometimes from North Korea, unfortunately, sometimes even like from China and other places, but mainly from Russia,

you know, just coming in in waves. And obviously, you've seen some of the latest assault and bombardments on Kyiv and friendly infrastructure. I want to bring this point home and Raymond, I have a four-month-old Anika, and it was about a month and a half ago. It was three o'clock

in the morning, as it is with a newborn. I'm changing, I'm a jihika diaper, I'm holding her, and my phone starts going off. And it's my brother. And I check the text messages and he says, which means they They hit our house.

They literally, they literally, um, hit the eighth floor here. I'll, I'll see if I can share this with you. I don't know if you can see this or not. Yeah, yeah. There we go. Holy cow. That's the eighth floor. That's my apartment building.

My, we lived, we lived on the fourth floor. The apartment's still there. Um, and this is, this is sort of like, uh, the day, the day after a little bit. Um, I know if you can see that or not. I, I'll, for whatever it's worth, I can send this to you. But that's my house, man. We still have neighbors. In fact, the neighbor that lived, I think, across the hall from us, sent us this image on a hill across the street, not a hill, a little field across the street where there's like a park.

And I don't know how to express this to the people listening. Like, that's where I played, man. That's where I grew up as a kid. That's where I walked up and down that field with my brother in a suburb called Bittiesnaki. So if you look at the Nipere River going this, we were on. on the on the on the on the right side but if you it goes by the flow but since it's going south you say you're on the left on the left side but if you're looking at a map it's it's on the right it's just a little looking at the flow of the river you say you're saying you're on the left

side and i i can i can tell you that you know there there were no there were no weapons in that it was it was a drone a shah had drone that that hit and it killed an 80 year old woman on the eight floor and uh it's it's a person that lived there i didn't know who she was i only knew the people on the third and the fifth floor they were our friends and And it killed her, unfortunately, right? And so now, now there's this house that, you know, we still have friends that live there that I'd love to visit. And unfortunately, you know, it's damage and it was in flame.

So, you know, it hit home. It really hit home. The overall situation obviously is very challenging. It continues to be challenging. I'm hoping for more support, both from the United States in the sense that this is not a political statement whatsoever. It's just making sure that, that, you know, our country continues to. to be a leader in freedom of democracy, but also obviously Europe needs to step up a little

bit. And obviously we're seeing that from folks like Germany who have increased their spending budget. But it's challenging. There's, there's sad, sad stories every single day. You know, one of my dears friends lost her cousin. And that's, that's, it just literally almost in a daily basis we we get stores like that um but hope uh is extraordinary right it and there's there's a really great saying hope is like the sun right uh unless you believe in it all the time you won't last the night and that's from princess lay huh and and there's there's a lot of that right now um where where there's continued hope or continued perseverance and i know i think I said this last time on our conversation. If Russia stops fighting the war ends. If Ukraine

stops fighting Ukraine ends. So it continues to be an existential struggle. And obviously the peace terms that are being put forward are basically a the end sentence. 20 plus percent of the country to be given up. Can't join NATO. Can't get any weapons. Nothing like that. So it's just a non-starter. And I don't ultimately know what piece is going to look like, but I'm certainly hoping for it. Well, so a couple of things. Vitali. I know we're just a little data center podcast, but talking about the reality that your country is at war is a real thing, right? And because it's not the evening news every night doesn't mean that it's not real and that human life is not precious and then it's not a major issue. You know, countries at war are a horrible thing. You know, I remember my first platoon sergeant in the Marine Corps, he said, anybody, any Marine that tells you he's not afraid to go to war will lie to you about other things too. War is awful. It's a terrible thing. Loss of human life, awful, the most precious gift we have. Why? So telling the story and having it real and your hometown and the building you lived in, making it real, making it real for me, for the folks that listen to us that want to hear us talk about data centers and maybe mention GPUs and AI. We'll get to that. But the loss of human life is far more important. The sovereignty of your nation, the aggressive acts of the Russian government got to be stopped. I do want to ask. one question about peace. You said, hey, not being part of NATO and losing 20% of our country.

You and I don't get to negotiate this piece. Is the NATO part more important, the territory more important? What does, as a Ukrainian, what does the right end to this? Obviously, your nation to continue. What would be the right way to end this? I feel strongly that the right way to end this would be to honor many of the security guarantees that were offered to Ukraine during the nuclear deal. in 1991, 1992, when Ukraine was asked to surrender their nuclear weapons, which they did, in return or, you know, security across the board for the entire nation. I strongly feel that there needs to be pathways to NATO and potentially EU membership. But, you know, if anything, it's hard to play, you know, armchair quarterback,

especially in this situation. and a big part of me, right, the Ukrainian part of me, refuses to give up any land, right? We can't, right? Especially all of this. But then what does an ultimate peace deal look like? You withdraw from mainland Ukraine, but you keep Crimea, right? Or NATO can't be there for like 10, 50 years or something. But it's very difficult for all those folks that have already, you know, shed so much and given so much to accept anything other than a free and sovereign Ukrainian nation that has security guarantees behind.

behind it. There's two truths to it. I think there's like the worst case scenario where Russia gets pretty much everything it wants because of a buckling, you know, support system for the country, um, where, you know, where they just, they just commit everything and try and push into Ukraine. I think there's a middle ground where, uh, uh, president Zelensky might have to accept some territory concessions, but there's guarantees, there's, you know, security guarantees, a pathway to membership in the EU, potentially NATO as well. And there's, uh, there's obviously the best case scenario where potentially Europe and even the United States really step up, support, put pressure on Russians, and have a way to sort of push them out

or at least start to push them out to get them to a negotiating point, then where they realize that unless we start using non-conventional weaponry, which is a completely different conversation. And it is a fear, by the way, tactical nukes. Yeah. Scary proposition. It is. And here's the reality. It's an escalation at a whole never level.

It is. And I just kind of want everyone to hear this. If Ukraine had tactical nukes against the Russians, it will be far more effective because they clump them together. They put all their gear together and then they just stage them. And that multiple strikes have been carried out by American High Mars very strategically on just many, many pieces of equipment or soldiers just standing there. It wouldn't work on the Ukrainians because of Western training. They don't clump together. They do strike and they leave, right? Small units. So you'd have to have not one, but multiple of these, of these, of these tactical nukes to really sort of create a dent or impact these teams because they operate in semi-autonomous, desperate kinds of fashions where they're not necessarily clumped together. But I, and I think, again, the best case scenario is, is obviously Ukraine is capable of pushing them out, getting into negotiating table from a position of power. And there's a likelihood of that happening because of something I've seen. I've seen the Russian government collapse once before in my lifetime. It's what brought you here. Right. And it's not something that might not happen again.

These casualties are real. They're conscripting more and more people. Their economy is hurting. And it's one of those situations where I don't know what the straw is going to be on the camel's back. I don't. I don't ultimately know. Unfortunately, people say, we'll just get rid of Putin. There's a religion is not the right word.

there's an extraordinary following of autocratic despots that will probably somebody similar will take his place, but maybe someone more intelligent. I mean, that's all really, really speculative. And back to your earlier point, you know, we support people here from the United States as well. There's all these teams after we send them some dollars or some equipment, they send us their patches. And I've got so many on my desk. Oh, great. And one of the coolest ones is actually this one off of a medics patch. And this one was where their van, it was a blue van, I think. I can't remember what a color. It was hit by, I think, a mortar round or something. Everyone in the van was fine.

But then me and my brother, we collected $5,000 to, like, get him a new van. And I'm like, well, what do you need? He's like, I need to be able to rip the seats out, drive to a conflict zone, put people in the back, and drive the heck out. And we bought him a new van and they sent us these patches. And I have these on my desk and literally like I've got a couple of handfuls of them. And these are all people that we know that are in these units. I mean, actually this, this one is a former surgeon that sent this over was my brother's schoolmate that left his practice and began, began just basically doing field operations. And then this one is really special because he came from an American vet.

and he was embedded with a unit in the volunteer corps and we supplied Night Vision I think materials some Kevlar gear for them and he was kind enough to take that off and send it back with my brother so now I have that on my desk as well there's there's extraordinary support multinational on the ground

and again that's where I come back with with hope that even though it's not necessarily the new cycle I really do hope at least for that middle ground outcome but obviously you know I pray for for the best Yeah. So I'm going to ask, and, you know, right, I'm the ugly American who, you know, my world history extends almost all the way to the border of Georgia. So I don't know, I don't know much Ukrainian history. Is there a natural, if you had to give up some soil? Is there a part of Ukraine that you go, hey, this part used to be, or they're all Russian speaking first instead of Ukrainian? Is there any natural line that makes sense? Or is it, hey, We need to stick with the borders that we agreed to from the beginning when the USSR broke apart. Kiv existed hundreds of years before Moscow did. And the lines that were drawn up as it stands were made even previous potentially.

Like even in the Soviet Union days, Ukraine was defined as it is. Now, there's a tremendous amount of history there. The land that's currently being occupied, it was never really Russia. It's always been like Ukrainian or Ukrainian territory. So their, their perspective is that, you know, these are, these are Russian nationals. They speak Russian, right? So, so we're going to take this land. Where the reality is like there's, I don't have anything against the Russian people necessarily, or even the language, right?

When I was in Kiev, we spoke Russian for the most part, even at home we do. So does that mean Kiev is a part of, is it part of Russia as well? Because I speak Russian, right? That it's not. it's it's it's it's it's it's by large a you know a russian attempt at a greater land grab uh to potentially disrupt some natal borders donetsk and and new hanksk those regions that were always sort of conflict zones initially even from like 2014 when crimea and and today those are always conflict zones uh and again this is this is you can argue about this but i truly do believe

based on evidence and and what i've seen is is they would inject some insurrection into that area and cause trouble and arm those people. And then all of a sudden, you have these little enclaves, pockets within Ukraine that then Russia would try to annex. And obviously, in this case, they annexed, right, that entire, that entire eastern part of Ukraine. Is there, is there, look, yes, sure. I mean, you could certainly argue that. You could certainly argue that Crimea potentially belongs to, to Russia, because it was gifted, right, during, during the Soviet USSR days. But, you know, there's, there's Crimean Ukrainians. There's Crimean Tatars. There's all sorts of different kinds of people that live there. You know, you could argue that that should be given up to Russia and if that would appease them, right? That's probably likely what might happen because, you know, in that case, at least Russia has control over the Black Sea to some extent. And those ports and Sevastopol, all of those areas, that's a potential. But the mainland part of Ukraine, I do, believe in its entirety needs to remain sovereign and intact as it is.

Gotcha. And the reason I ask is just back to the first comment. The loss of life's got to stop. Right. We're going to stop killing people on both sides. He's not going to take Ukraine. Okay. So let's stop. I mean, the world stage isn't going to allow that, right? The world community isn't going to allow him to take over Ukraine. So let's quit. Let's get to the negotiating table. Let's come up with a solution that stops it and let's stop loss of life on both thoughts. I couldn't agree with you more, Raymond. I firmly believe that President Zelensky in the Ukrainian delegation, as well as European and Americans, would love to get to the negotiating table, but peace has to be reasonable, right? Right now, all the peace conversations, at least the demands

coming from the Russian side, are impossible. They're a death sentence for Ukraine. I mean, it's literally, I keep everything. Hang on a second. And then some. Like, I also want Kharkiv. I also want these, these other areas that I don't have right now. I want these oblasts, these regions in their entirety, right? So, so what kind of how, how, come on, you, you're former military, right? You understand that. Like, how do you, do you as a leader of a country say, that sounds like a good deal to me, let me give you more than, then you, you know, we already have, and that's, that's going

to be, that's going to. And honestly, you know, there is nothing, nothing stopping him from, if he potentially Labor gets that to just keep on rolling. And it's not just Ukraine. You know, Poland becomes very concerned about that. And, you know, to an extent, I don't think Poland would allow that kind of a peace deal because that brings them substantially closer to, you know, to their border. That brings their border into play. Yeah, yeah. There's, well, let's, you alluded to it earlier. The internet, I and the international committee pray that enough pressure is brought to bear on Putin that he thinks clearly about the direction of it. And let's, let's also, enough caskets come home to

Moscow and he's going to have enough pressure inside his country to stop. But the killing has to stop. Let's get to the table and talk about what makes sense. And let's stop, let's stop shooting each other. I, shooting each other doesn't solve anything. Nope. I agree with 100%. I don't know what that looks like ultimately, but I agree with you. All right. Well, thank you for sharing a little bit of your family and your country and something that like said, not on the evening news right now, but should be let's switch gears. When you and I talk ahead of time, you've been a little bit of traveling. You've been around the world a little. I know I saw you. I wasn't there, but saw that you were at data cloud. So where you've been, what you're doing? And let's get to

talking about the data center business a little bit. Oh my gosh. It's been, how do I start this conversation. The data center industry, we're having a moment. Yeah. We're being noticed. It's both good. We're on the news. I know. NPR box. Every day. Across the board. And where I like it, I like the attention. I'm gregarious. Other people are like shifting in their seats and a little bit uncomfortable. I've been now to multiple events. A data center world was obviously one of one of the biggest ones. I was at the Dice National event more recently. The greener building initiative event, here in Chicago. I do have notes. I've got some notes from my conversation with Kevin O'Leary, my chats with Peter Hopper a little bit, you know, and kind of...

There's a giant in our space. Bill Lawson and Shanks and some of his have some of his conversation. So I've got a whole bunch of stuff here. And I truly believe this. We're no longer in a technology shift. The data center industry is experiencing a renaissance, right? That's how extraordinarily expansive this shift is right now. And to sort of paint the picture on the world of AI, right, and this could start this conversation for us, we live in a world, and some of you folks may have heard me say this already, but we live in a world that's just discovered oil, but hasn't invented the internal combustion engine, right?

Way too much raw material, and no one knows what to do with it. And what's extraordinary about that statement, and this is specifically generative AI, right? imagine we go back to the days when oil was discovered. I'm this land man standing up on stage, holding its black viscous material. And I'm telling you that one day, this stuff is going to power the biggest machines, take us to the moon, and fly us across skies.

You'd laugh at me, right? It's the 1800s. You'd be like, this guy, witchcraft. This guy's snake was... What are you selling? Right, right. But look at where we are now and how oil is quite literally in everything.

Now, pardon the crude analogy. Yes, yes. Take it all the way. The acceleration from when we discovered oil to today took a while, right? But with the air of Chat Chippy T, obviously it's not going to take that long. And in 23 was when Chat Chipiti kind of hit the market officially, late 22, early 23, right? And I think that was the time when South Park did an episode on Chat Chip T. Now, it's very rare that I will reference and recommend a South Park episode in a professional setting like this.

The episode's called Deep Learning. It's really good. It's scary. I'm going to watch it. It's really good. Not vulgar, nothing bad, right? But you know when chat GPT takes over. And at the very end, it says written by Trey Stone and chat GPT.

Watch it. It's really interesting. But going back to just kind of asking or answering your question a little bit about where I've been, what I've been seeing. we we like I said we live in this world right now where we're trying to figure out what to do with all this raw material and the first human instinct that we always have when we discover anything new is can we light it on fire and the equivalent of that is is chat GPT but what we're learning very quickly and this is I will talk about what we're some of the stuff we're doing in Apollo but we're starting to figure out real use cases like revenue driving

revenue generating use cases for all this AI that we're seeing right now and and what's fascinating about this Raymond and everybody listening to listening, rewind, rewind a little bit, right? For the past 30 years, you and I have been conditioned to interact with data in a very certain manner. Raven goes to his favorite search engine. It could be Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, even. And if he's feeling feisty, maybe Google or Bing. I want to pause on that. I did that bit in front of high school students one time. And they're like, what, what is it asking is this guy asking his butler for information? What is he talking about? Yeah. So I stopped doing it. Did any of them know what Bing was?

No, well, I stopped doing that in front of young people, but we've been conditioned to interact with Blue Link. September of 1998 was the first time we could ask Google a question. And since then, it's been a Blue Link. And God forbid, you end up on page two of Google, you're lost. At this point, just question your life. You're in mortar, throw the ring and run Frodo. You're good. That evolution right now has been so extraordinary. There has been no other piece of technology that has such a widespread adoption as this type of AI, where, If I ask every single person that's watching this, that's listening to this podcast, are you a user of generative AI? Every single person is going to say yes. Because if you've gone on Google or Bing recently, that first response is no longer a blue link is it? That's right. Now, it's creating havoc for some of the new sites, for some of the people who have to monitor, you know, traffic and whatnot and ads. But for us, we're getting conscious answers. I use that word very, very cautiously. But for the first time ever, wholly original conscious answers where it's it's not a blue link but a direct response to

your question of this information that's extraordinary that is so incredibly extraordinary to have this kind of wide adoption from a five-year-old using chat chip pt to like you know an 80 year old asking to write them an email or a letter or whatever it is that that type of of span or or adoption is is crazy now mixed in with all of this power constraint right you it's it's crazy the energy crunch on the grid, the power density explosion, massive shortfalls, basically hearing about how Kevin O'Leary is building a seven and a half gigawatt behind the meter facility in Alberta, Canada, called Wonder Valley, and recently tracked, I think it was that came out and said, we've got a 25 gigawatt, you know, site or plan campus that we're going to be doing out

in Texas, and I feel like no one's getting out of bed for anything under a gigawatt these days. And at data center world for the first time, we saw one of the biggest mixes of investors, real estate professionals, innovations in technology. We had a booth for doorknobs for data centers. Like, legit, just, that's it. That's all he sold was doorknobs for critical facilities and data centers. And it's just been wild, wild. I'll pause here. I want to make sure that you get a thought in, Raymond, but I've been in the industry for just north of 20.

years, 24 years. I'm a geriatric millennial. I don't know why they need to call me that. They can, there's nicer words. It doesn't seem a nice way to say it. It is. I read it on a geriatric moment. Just call me an older millennial. It's fine. I'm lucky. I didn't get adopted into the data center space. I have a network engineering undergrad. I got

an MBA, another master of information security. But right after my network engineering undergrad, I went right into IT data centers, virtualization back then, right? And what I've seen happen in the past 24 months has eclipsed my two decades of being in this industry in terms of just how extraordinarily fast

this industry is expanding and changing the um your your comment about seven and a half gigawatts 25 gigawatts I mean it is it is staggering to think how quickly the power dynamic has changed right I'm gonna I'm gonna pause you I'm gonna pause you for just a second we talk about gigawatts and and I yesterday I spoke at the Illinois Economic Development Conference, and ComEd was there at Exelon. Obviously, they all had conversations around data centers in AI, which I was presenting on.

We don't understand what those numbers mean. So, Raymond, I want you to continue your thought, but please asterisk everybody. One gigawatt is enough to power a city of one million people. 10 gigawatts is enough to power Los Angeles or New York.

And 100 gigawatts is approximately 10% of all the lights that are currently on in the entire world. So when we start talking about, you know, the demand just from our industry alone reaching 50 gigawatts by 2030, does that mean we have to build enough power to support five Los Angeles or five New York cities? Like, folks, even if you don't know what these numbers mean, that is an extraordinary

amount of power that we don't necessarily have. So, Vitaly, we've got to do this, what you just did. So I've seen this done when we talk about federal spending or the federal deficit, right? You say that the federal government, you know, spent a billion dollars and people, I don't know what a billion dollars is, right? You know, it's hard to comprehend. We know there are billionaires and we know there are people that are worth lots of, but what's a billion dollars? Well, a billion seconds is over 31 years. So is you can, okay, I got it.

I can understand a billion seconds, seconds is almost 32 years, 30 years. 30 year, 31 years and eight months, right? We're going to have to start, you just did it with it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, in New York City. When we say a gigawatt and, and I'm, I'm floored because I did, I did kilowatt deals, whole contracts for kilowatts. Yeah. And, and, and now it, people are saying, well, I have five gigawatts of demand or I have seven gigawatts. I'm like, wait a bit, dude, do you really, do you have any idea how much that is, and I'm not going to name a name here, but when, when I, when someone says to me, hey, we're going to have, racks that have two megawatts in them.

I'm like, wait a minute. Do you have electrical engineers that work at your shop? How are you going to put two megawatts of power in a 42-U rack? I mean, it's a little bit like you went back to your crude analogy if I've told you this is going to give it a stratosphere flying machines and your abilities to drive across states. Something huge is coming, but we don't have 125 years to assimilate it. it's coming in three to five years.

And it is that kind of shift. It is that magnitude of a shift. We're just going to have to consume it at light speed because it is coming. And to your point, you know, I get such a kick because I get asked by a lot of analysts. Aren't you worried about the future of the data center business? You know, it's going to get smaller. And I'm like, no, no, no, no. It's not getting smaller.

I'm worried about it getting dramatically bigger because of the number of, of economically viable business models that are coming from AI, we can't even comprehend them today. I agree with you 100%. And the growth, there's actually a really great panel over at Dice. It was Lane Anderson, Peter DeBrock from the United States, Department of Energy, Peter Gross, one of my board members in Phil Austin Shanks and Forrest, Sikoski from Eaton. And it was a statement from Lane. I'm actually going to read it. off. He reminded us that data center growth is now measured in, obviously, in gigawatts, requiring deep partnership with utilities, communities, and policymakers. And this is something I want

everyone to think about. We're no longer choosing sites. We're designing ecosystems, which has created a market where primary markets the United States are practically completely out of capacity. Right now, primary markets are under 3% with Northern Virginia basically at zero. So in this came from a real estate panel, secondary markets are not becoming primary, tertiary markets are becoming secondary, and as a result, all new markets are opening up across the United States as more fiber, as more connectivity, as more power, becomes available in some of those secondary and tertiary locations. Raymond, you nailed it. There's no slowdown. The fact that we had Kevin O'Leary, as one of my keynote speakers, I had a really pleasant exchange with him. He was

supposed to kick off our conversation at 9 a.m. And he was going to be there like 8.45 and such he shows up way early, like 8.10. And he sits down behind the stage and me being gregarious. I sat down with him just to have a little bit of a chat. And he, he was so kind. We talked about our love for guitars. I have this beautiful, my very first guitar. I still have it.

An epiphone, Alley Cat, Cherry Burst, a hollow body, dual homebacher pickup. Just my favorite is guitar in the entire world. And he talks about a Gibson that's going to have Mr. Wonderful on the neck. I'm like, of course it is. and he talks about, like, his wine, and then we talked about business, and he's like, Bill, unless you're investing in real estate and data centers right now, you're completely missing this boat, completely missing the chance to do something special. And then he says something profiling. He's like, you know what people misunderstand is that you think that, like, all these giant organizations are going to be consumers of AI, like the Nike's, like the Boeing's, like the Coca-Cola. He's like, no, no, no.

I'm targeting the mid, the small and mid-market, because what's going to happen is they're going to use these advanced AI tools to compete. against goings, the nighties, and the cold before. That's exactly right. This is not, this is not a revolution for the 100 biggest companies in the world. This is a leveling of the playing field. Yes. You're going to be able, because, and this I got to witness, so being in the IT business for nearly four decades, right? We made a market in the early days of the 30 biggest companies in the world would buy the latest computers from IBM and, you know,

at EMC. And as soon as they became a new iteration, they would get rid of those machines and get the newest latest machines because that difference in compute power and speed mattered to them, allow them to stay ahead of their competitors. So the big financial institutions all ran the biggest mainframes. And there was a whole market to take that M minus one or N minus two technology and go sell it to people who couldn't, companies who couldn't afford the latest iteration. What we're doing is not $50 million capital equipment mainframes, right? What we're doing is building services that any size company can buy by the drink and deploy perfectly for their world, for their customer, for their market, for their story,

to be able to compete against it. The ability to access this technology is radically different than what I saw three decades ago selling mainframes. But access to this technology, that's where it's becoming very, very challenging. We are asking our infrastructure and the hardware that we're putting in to do things that they weren't designed to do. Right. So the AFCOM State of the Data Center report, which by the way, you can drop us the DM right here. I'll get you the report. I've been writing it for nine years. And it's a great report because there's an actual, like an actuarial scientist and a team that gathered the statistics, make sure it's clean and make sure it's market viable before I write anything. So I love having that. And for the past nine years, we've been asking about rack density. First year we asked it, 6.1 KW per rack, which is great. Good, good, good, good, right? Today, just this past...

What year was that? What year was that? Nine years ago. That was nine years ago, okay, yeah. This latest one in 2025, they came out and they said, now it's 16 KW per rack, which, you know, go team. Go get this latest, we're moving in the right direction. We nearly tripled it.

Right, right. But here's the challenge, right? One single Nvidia DGX box right that's 6U I believe

it's got 8 H100 cards in there will take 10.2 KW per rack so what are you

supposed to put one and a half in there in a whole bunch of blanking panels that's not

that's not going to work out very well that's not going to happen back back to your point

the megawatt class rack era is upon us not saying next month but I'm

also not saying more than 36 24 that's right At the GTC conference, NvidiaGC, Jensen Wong stood in front of the NVL 576.

And right now, if you're opening up a Google window, whatever you want to do, and searching for it, it looks like a typical rack with 576 GPUs inside of it, consuming 600 KW per rack. Yeah, right?

And so now if you look at my little inkling of a statistic, right, like 20KW. Well, you're at 16, Vitale, you're good. Yeah, no, let's just pop it by 500 times, right? That's our 50, excuse me, like that's an extraordinary metric. And here's the kicker, right? This is why we had so many people at Data Center world with liquid cooling, new cooling solutions, because physics dictates that we have reached the limit of how much heat can dissipate,

how much air can dissipate heat from mechanical equipment. There we go. And the challenge is like, and I don't want anybody to come out there posting on LinkedIn, Bill claiming went on Raymond Hawking's, you know, podcast and said that airfoals going, it's not. It's not. But to support the future. Hold on. Hold on. Let's stick an asterisk right here because we're both going to get elbowed about it, right? There's a couple trillion dollars globally invested in air-cooled compute. Yeah. Counting the processors all the way through the heat rejection technology. Okay. A couple trillion dollars doesn't get replaced in 24 months. No. It's not going away

tomorrow. Yes. But you can look out and go, you know what, it is going away. It's not going away tomorrow, but we are, the transition has started, right? And I use this analogy with my folks a lot. Hey, 125 years ago, it was really good to be a buggy whip salesman. Everybody needed a buggy whip because everybody had a horse to get around. Everyone, there are buggy whip salesmen still today. For the Amish? There are precious few of them, but the Amish have to whip their horses. and get their buggies to move. I mean, so, so, so the future came and kind of took them over. So, so it's a, it's a tortured analogy, but hey, we're not, it's not going away tomorrow,

but air cooled is where we can't reject the heat that's coming. So the change is going to happen. It has to it. And it comes down to economics and density. Yes, you can put three HGX or DGXs in Iraq, right, or four even. And you can, you can, you can just, just blow a lot of air and get it like. 40. Look, when I was at Switch, we did 55 KW. And we're seeing that possible with airflow, but you will hit a limit of efficiency

and obviously cost, right? You just have to get to a point where it's directed ship. Very soon, you know, it's going to be compatible with immersion, like literally air electric fluid, mineral oils. But what many facilities have we do, like my biggest partner, Scott Data Center, Omaha, Nebraska, traditional co-location managed services provider, operating about 20KW, they're like, Bill. We're going to put the GPUs in. We're going to put Apollo on top because we've got customers that want to run on this stuff. But like, how do we get to this next level?

They put in rear door key exchanges from Motivere. Right now, Schneider electric motor air. It's a step. It's a step. It's a step. You got to do it here in the back of Iraq. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. It's a step. And it's going to be, it's going to be a while ride because the business models for AI are driving right at us. And we're going to have to give them the heat rejection they need. We're having the power they need, which means we have to give them the heat rejection we need, which is back to your point about where first tier markets, second tier markets, I get customers that ask me today and they're like, hey, where are we going? I'm going, hey, we're going wherever the power is.

That's where we're going. Wherever the generation is, that's where we're headed because we've got to have sufficient power to support these tools. All right, you alluded a little bit to your partner talking about Apollo. You got to tell us a little bit about what Apollo is doing. give us a little bit about what you mentioned a punch of your team is in Eastern Europe tell us a little bit about what you guys are doing thank you for for great segue

and I this is I don't I want to make this this is not going to be a pitch yesterday when I spoke at the the Illinois Economic Development Conference Summit excuse me there were people in that room that were they were not technical at all right so in fact I think I said

GPU and AI maybe like once or twice and when I really wanted to do was bring down practical, practical uses of this technology. So Apollo, and for those that don't know, we, we are an MLOPs, an AI platform, right? And what's unique about us is that we are the industry's only true multi-tenant white label platform. So we weren't designed to be sold to enterprises, right? We were designed to be sold to telcos and data centers, managed services providers.

You know, we're like Amazon, but we're not. We just have the software layer that we can completely white label and put into private environments for enterprises, but really focusing on like health care, financial services, government. Back to that little silly oil analogy, right? So I'm standing on this mole hill right now, try to explain to people that, yes, you can, you know, build a gas station, right? But then you could also do all these other things.

So at the Illinois Economic Forum, I told them what we were doing with a couple of villages. So we were doing some work with the city of Hamilton and Ohio, the village of Hoffman Estates, which, you know, we've got some compass love. I've been around there. I love it. And then also with the mayor's office, with the city of Omaha. So multiple municipalities, just a few of them. And what we've done is that we've rekindled their childhood sense of imagination. And we ask them, what are some of the most challenging things that nothing out there can solve that we could,

potentially build, or these aren't even bespoke. We have free-built agents already that could be customized to do something really, really special. And they thought about it, like, okay, we're flying blind in terms of how happy our citizens are. Well, like, that's really interesting. Well, what do you mean? Like, usually it's a problem when we get to it really late and we get frustrated

people at town halls. How do we get to that earlier? So we have a sentiment analysis AI, right, which scrapes information for, let's say, the city of Omaha, public information. Reddit, Facebook, X, whatever you want, right? But then also, since government emails have to be stored, we can scrape those as well. So all of a sudden, Mayor Hawkins, that's a great name, Mayor Hawkins gets in there and he pulls up his dashboard every day and there's a green, there's a yellow, and there's a red.

Green is like, people are happy. They love social services, yellow is like you've got to fix some of this stuff and red. There's so much trash in these parks, I can't go to them. Now, here's the kicker. This data is automatically aggregated and put in these dashboards. fascinating is that because we also look at government emails and this is all very, very secure, we don't, I should say, we don't look at them. The users of the city of Omaha look at them. They can see something like this. A city administrator is emailed and a director saying,

hey, we're having some problems with trash in these parks, but nothing's being done. And then people start complaining. So now all of a sudden, the mayor is capable of seeing a very simple dashboard and saying, whoa, whoa, we have a problem with people being unhappy. What's going on in my parks? and what's going on with my parks because people aren't, people aren't doing their job inside of my city. And now they can approach the situation before there's any fire, before even the ember starts simmering. That's one use case. Another one that we're working on is called, that one's called Happy Meter. Another one's called LawLens.

And that one specifically looks at all legislature, all of the aspects of the government and helps people ask it questions, understand potentially what's happening, be able to, Iraq with new laws and new legislature to respond to questions and so on. Another one we're calling is called the mayor link. So the mayor's office receives about 50,000 calls a month, of which 20,000 are, can I go outside today? Should I take my dog for a walk on Main Street? Is my family too tall, right? And so now we can create not a chat bot.

I need to be so clear about that. And true AI agent, which sounds, talks, types just like me, right? But then with a human in a loop persistently, right? When there's a question that, hey, you know what, I don't think I can answer that. Let me get an administrator on the line to answer it for you. All of a sudden, we'll take by 50% of those calls, those really easy, low-hanging fruits off of their table. I'm just literally rattling off some of these fun ones. And here's one more.

And there's one more after this, I promise. FOIA, Freedom of Information Act. Now, I had no idea that this was such a massive headache for cities across the entire country. But basically, Raymond, anyone with a YouTube channel right now is going to send these FOIA requests to the police department to get these videos of somebody getting arrested because apparently it makes really good content. Now, while it's a very crappy. Not what FOIA legislation was intended for, but that's where it's ended up. That's right. Legally, they have to respond to every one of those.

And it takes so much time. But we're like, create an AI agent, which we've done. Take 80% of those that are ridiculous. Or more. And also to the point where you can look at the FOIA and then it goes to an administrator and says, we are 95% sure that this is good, valid. Everything's fine. Here's the 5% we're not really sure about. Can you validate the look? It's like, okay, it's good or no, this 5% is pretty serious. Send it back and something that would take hours. Right. Now it takes minutes. I'll give you a final one. So in Nebraska, there are. I love the FOIA one. That's a good one.

There's others. There's RFPs request for zoning and all of this stuff. There's a crazy one that they want us to basically take drones with spatial technology attached to it where you can upload the map of the city. And the drone will fly because you can't fly over private property, but it can't fly over the streets, right? And with scan, it's going to say that crosswalk is fading. There's a missing stop sign that sewer needs fixing. And it's going to just fly and send that data back to the services teams. The services teams are going to have a dashboard. Now, it's not. not going to tell you to go fix it. It's going to tell you which team is the most efficient, which team should go out there. How would you be fixed, et cetera? When the mayor caught win of this, they were like, they were like, so what you're telling me, Bill, is that I can have a pothole fixed in 40 minutes after it's recognized. We're like, yeah, sure, you can get your team out there fast enough. And you're like, that's going to get me some votes. I'm like, that's your that's awesome. AI potholeole repair. I can see it now. It's literally the goal to make citizens life's better to use this technology to do something extraordinarily positive.

So, okay, in Nebraska, there's a lot of cow, a lot of cattle, right? 200,000 heads of cattle with this one client, and they had cameras set up, and this is not generative AI, it's traditional machine learning, right? And they had cameras set up, and they would monitor the cow faces. And you could literally identify each individual cow based on how they look, right? And they were monitoring for infectious disease, walking weird, is it like snoddy, eating, is it laying down, what's it doing, right? And those models in Amazon would take two or three weeks to run.

So they were really inefficient, right? Because you'd probably lose half a herd by that time. We moved that into our platform in Omaha. And that time frame went down about one to two hours. Now, I'm a city slicker. I don't know what that means. So we went to them and like, could you educate us a little bit? Bill, do you know how much a single head of cattle cost?

I'm like, I don't. Like three to five thousand dollars. Thousands of dollars. I'm like, oh. And they're like, so what you've done for us, it's given us the ability to identify an infectious disease in one cow. and get a vet out there in about an hour. You've saved us millions.

We don't know how many. We'll let you know when we deploy this, this, you know, field wine. And I can move that cattle into another pen and I don't get any other sick cattle. All up to the above. And the visual acuity model is so on point that they're going to use it for potatoes. Basically to be able to. So where are you ingesting the cat? And the reason I'm interested because I own about a thousand mama cows.

So I want to know how, where are you ingesting the data? So are you using the same cameras that you were analyzing the facial data from? All that stuff is the same. None of it's changed. Just the back-in intel is better. Better hardware, better software, us, right? Much closer to the fields, but also optimized specifically to allow them to get the best return for that architecture. So as a cattle rancher, one thing I tell you, I have to go get in the car and drive to the cows, and they're not near my house.

because my neighbors don't like a thousand cows nearby. So it's a couple hours drive. If I could do the health and wellness check or have it done for, back to dashboard, if I had a health and wellness dashboard so that I didn't have to go count my cows

and look at them, but that's what it is. You described that the platform, it's nothing insane, but it is a very specific machine learning algorithm that's capable of identifying these infectious diseases and that's why do you that's why you go to the ranch as you go to look at put

your eyes on all the cows yep yep and say that she's got a problem she's got a problem cut those two out and let's go see what she's got yeah yeah but that's why you physically go uh you Raymond you're this this gives you so much more data and so much impactful information to do something with actionable actionable information and incredible time saver absolutely and only time saver but But money saver, instead of having 20 sick cows, I have one. Yes, and you can identify it very, very quickly. There's a $12 billion trust that we're working with, big, big trust, right? And one of the things that they can't do because of their financial service organization,

use any sort of AI, like none, right? Unless in the Apollo architecture, their cluster is completely segmented and secure, not a single bit or a bite will ever lead their environment. So they're going to have their own private GPT, like literally, we're going to take Lama, we're going to put it internally, and they're going to have a little, little window, right? Basically, just their website, they're going to click on AI assistant, and a window opens up, and it's chat GPT, but completely private, completely secure with guardrails, an individual can ask about the weather, or they can ask about specific projects that they're working on, or to find some kind of a

file or whatever the case might be. But we are giving access to this extraordinary technology, which to some industries that are unfortunately, you know, they can't. Now, Apollo specifically, we are the factory floor. We are the factory floor with all the tools upon which people come to build. Again, similar to Amazon, but we're not because we're all in sort of a private, much more secure kind of an architecture. We have clients that say, Bill, we know what the press, just give us the platform we're good. But many, many, many more of them say, we spend six hours on these RFPs.

They're complicated as heck. We have to ingest PDFs, pictures, diagrams, and it takes my person seven hours to do this. We take that. We build a small proof of concepts and show them how to do that. It can be done in 10 minutes, and then we scale it out. We refuse to build an elephant on a unicycle. Looks great. Does nothing for your organization.

So be a true advisor. And it's exactly the same thing that you do, that Chris Crosby, that Nancy Novak with Amy Marks, your extraordinary team at Compass, you want to be good partners to. build infrastructure to fit and support your clients to the best of their ability so they can be amazing. And that's exactly what we're trying to do with people. But the educating is important, right? We want to make sure people understand that beyond just chat GPT, agentic AI, specific little use cases that are extraordinarily valuable, they're achievable right now. And here's the kicker that people might understand. They're much more economical because of the hardware solutions that

we've seen grow and expanded the industry. So something that would have been a million dollars three years ago. Back to my mainframe example, you don't have to buy this in a massive bite anymore. That's part of what took the technology revolution so long, relatively long, in comparison, right? It's because when we had to pay for the first generation of the mainframe, so it was $40 million. Then the second generation was $20 million. And then the third generation was five million. And then we got to where companies could really afford it because we could sell for a million bucks. Right. Right. We've skipped most of that in this AI turn of the crank. Yes, there's been a whole lot of generational skipping. So to your question, Raymond, we've

been working on democratizing this technology. We've been working on deploying into more facilities around the world. And now we're expanding a little bit of our solutions, which we've always had to help people imagine, to help people understand what's possible. After this economic development conference, I've had numerous emails and notes saying, Bill, is this possible? And usually the answer is, yeah, it's actually not even that hard. You think it is, but it's really not. But listen, there's places where it's not possible. We have to go back and tell them this is a little bit too complicated for AI to do. Let's dial it back a little bit. But it's been extraordinary. It's been so much fun to see people rekindle their childhood sense of wonder and imagine and reimagined, I should say, how they govern. Look, the village of Hoffman Estates has 50 years of their notes digitized. It's literally digital waste. It's just sitting there, right, doing nothing for them because they have to keep it. Why not use it? Why not use it to ask questions, improve the city, understand historical aspects of what might be happening back then to versus right now. How did we get here? Mm-hmm. Yeah, what were the decisions made? So great. Well, man, Vitali,

thank you for letting me use your birth name. I'm grateful for that. I know everybody knows Jez, Bill, but it was fun to get to do that. Thank you for sharing with us about Ukraine. Awesome to hear what's going on with Apollo. Man, our industry, it's an exciting time to be in our space. It's a lot of fun. I know that we've had John before, and we've talked for an hour without me blinking and I, so we've got to have you on again because there's so much more to talk about.

Man, this has been fun. I really, really appreciate it. Good luck to you and your team at Apollo and excited to see what the next generation, this next discovery of oil does for the world, because it is, you know, it is radically changing the way we do things in every corner of life. You got me with the cows. I just can't. The notion that it helps me, and AI evaluate my herd is unbelievable.

To everyone listening, again, please understand, you know, we really are experiencing a renaissance in this industry. And it's special. And I truly believe that every data center is going to become an AI data center. It's completely dependent on how fast you can get there. And really, you need two things. just two things to be successful in this industry right now. Power and bravery. Yeah.

I liked, what was the term Jensen used at his speech? Did he call it the AI factory? Is that what he called it? Yeah. I mean, that's where we're going. I liked that term. I do too. Every data center, we're just going to become factories.

It's going to be the heartbeat of AI solutions is going to be data centers. I used to tell people where warehouses for ones and zeros. I like the AI factory better. I like that. That's where we're headed for sure. I couldn't agree more. Thank you so much for having me on. Bill, it's been awesome.

Thank you, my friend. Good to see you. Good to talk to you. Always a pleasure.