Data Center Infrastructure Podcast

Episodet

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  From Dirt to Data: Why Cooling Decides Who Wins the AI Race 10.08.2026 24min

  Somewhere in America, a piece of dirt is about to become a data center. Eric Sonner (Data Airflow) and Lance Teel (Atlas Energy) kick off the Data Center Infrastructure Podcast with the part of the story nobody tells, the cooling, power, and mechanical systems that stand between raw land and racks of live compute. Eric explains how his team sizes cooling for a 200 megawatt building the size of two Costcos, why closed loop systems work like the radiator in your car, and how a brackish water project in West Texas turned a better PUE into 15 years of added compute value. Lance covers the power crunch, secured genset capacity, and why the industry has moved from a server shortage to a power shortage to a fight for public trust. They also get into thermal storage tanks, chiller lead times stretching past a year, the difference between AI factory and enterprise cloud redundancy, and why the water math on a modern data center looks more like a McDonald's than a reservoir. The Data Center Infrastructure Podcast is brought to you by Data Airflow, mechanical engineering, procurement, and commissioning for hyperscale AI and HPC data centers. New episodes every Monday.Listen to wherever you get your podcastsAvailable now on YouTube - Search "Data Center Infrastructure Podcast"