Down Round Data Centres 101
Nov 5, 2025
The hosts dive into the basics of data centers, tracing their origins and discussing their explosive growth due to AI. They break down cloud computing's transformation of hosting services and the impact of crypto mining on data center structures. Insights into the importance of GPUs for both mining and AI workloads reveal how crypto farms evolved into focused AI centers. There's also a discussion about Australia’s potential as a regional hub for data centers, highlighting the challenges and opportunities in this booming industry.
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Cloud Computing Opened The Startup Floodgates
- Cloud computing moved startups from owning hardware to renting scalable compute in remote data centers.
- This abstraction enabled rapid app growth by offloading storage, scaling and maintenance to providers like AWS.
Crypto Mining Built GPU Infrastructure
- Crypto mining drove early GPU demand and taught operators how to deploy huge racks of accelerators in cheap-power locations.
- That infrastructure later proved directly reusable for AI training and inference workloads.
The Real AI Bottleneck Is Power And Space
- Today's AI bottleneck is physical: buildings, power and networking, not just chips.
- Satya Nadella noted many high-end cards sit unused because there is no space or power to deploy them.