The electrician shortage slowing the AI boom

The race to build AI infrastructure is often framed around the availability of power, chips, and capital. But another critical constraint is becoming impossible to ignore: skilled labor. In this episode, Shayle sits down with Raymond Hawkins, chief customer officer at Compass Datacenters, about why a shortage of qualified electricians has emerged as one of the biggest bottlenecks to data center construction, and how the industry is responding. Hawkins explains that labor shortages aren't preventing new data centers from being built, but they are driving up costs, extending project timelines, and forcing developers to compete aggressively for experienced electricians. As AI demand accelerates, companies are increasingly moving workers across the country, housing them near construction sites, and relying on a traveling workforce much like the healthcare industry relies on travel nurses. At the same time, demand is surging for highly specialized professionals capable of installing the sophisticated electrical systems that modern AI data centers require. Hawkins also explores how modular construction and prefabrication are reshaping the way data centers are built, and how, as data centers expand into new markets, developers must become more transparent about their projects to earn a community's trust. Shayle and Raymond discuss:- Why electricians have become one of the biggest constraints on AI data center growth - How workforce shortages are changing hiring, training, and construction practices - Compass Datacenters' partnership with community colleges to develop skilled labor - The role of modular construction and prefabrication in reducing labor demands - Strategies for earning community support through transparency, workforce investment, and responsible infrastructure development Resources: Catalyst: The State of Play of Data Center Development Catalyst: AI Scaling Pathways: On Grid, On Edge, Off Grid, Off Planet Latitude Media: As community scrutiny grows, data center developers turn to on-site power Latitude Media: The mechanics of data center flexibility Latitude Media: The off-grid data center fantasy Credits: Hosted by Shayle Kann. Produced and edited by John Sheehan. Original music and engineering by Sean Marquand. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. This episode of Catalyst is brought to you by ENGIE, the smarter energy supplier. ENGIE doesn't just provide the power to run your business — they supply the energy to move it forward, with reliable, flexible solutions built for what's next. Learn more at engieresources.com. Catalyst is brought to you by EnergyHub. Peak season puts every grid to the test — and the utilities that pass are the ones that built flexible capacity before they needed it. EnergyHub works with more than 170 utilities to coordinate 2.5 million devices and 3.4 gigawatts of dispatchable flexibility through a single platform designed to perform when it counts most. See what that looks like at EnergyHub.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Bloom Energy. Bloom Energy fuel cells deliver affordable, ultra-reliable onsite power for hospitals, utilities, and data centers – at speed and at scale. Learn more by visiting BloomEnergy.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Latitude Media, covering the new frontiers of the energy transition.

• 0:07Shayle Kann?

  I'm Shayle Khan. I invest in early-stage companies at Energy Impact Partners. Welcome to Catalyst. So I've noticed that I keep coming back to this question of what the current rate limiter on AI infrastructure growth is. As I'm sure you've heard, if you've listened to this podcast, I think the main candidates are demand, in theory, nobody really picks this right now, chips, power, and labor. The last one people mention a lot, but then I've found kind of move right along, whereas the others, chips and power, get a deep dive worthy of their rate-limiting status. I think that's because labor feels to be maybe the most intractable of them all. To a first order, the AI industry can kind of throw money at the other problems. They can

• 0:52Shayle Kann?

  buy chips from AMD instead of Nvidia. They can try to convince TSMC to expand capacity. Or on the power side, they could buy gas turbines to throw behind the meter from GE or Siemens or an air derivative supplier, or they can sell out Bloom's fuel cells for years and years and years. Not to say those things are easy, but when it comes to labor, it's sort of a trickier problem. To be clear, lots of players in the market are trying to do something, workforce investments of one kind or another. But I think it's just a little bit outside their comfort zone. Anyway, the result of this is that I think workforce, particularly for electricians, is maybe the least appreciated, but certainly one of the most important bottlenecks in this market. And I wanted to dig into how it's actually

• 1:35Shayle Kann?

  manifesting and what one might do about it. For this one, I brought on Raymond Hawkins, who's the CCO at Compass Data Centers. That's coming up next.

• 1:52Speaker 00

  Demand flexibility is now an essential part of the data center's speed-to-power playbook. But how do data centers actually curtail load? GridBeyond is the end-to-end solution for flexible energy management. GridBeyond's advanced derms and VPP platform is tailored to what data centers care about most: maximizing reliability, intelligently meeting curtailment obligations, reducing costs, and managing all your distributed resources in one place. Ready to transform your distributed energy management? Get started at gridbeyond.com. Catalyst is brought to you by Antenna Group, the communications and marketing partner behind the most influential companies in energy, climate, and infrastructure. For three decades, Antenna has helped ambitious companies stand out, build market leadership,

• 2:35Speaker 00

  and become category-defining brands. From breakthrough startups to global industry leaders, their team brings the expertise, relationships, and track record to accelerate your momentum. Learn more at antennagroup.com.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  The power plant for the modern grid isn't a building, it's a network. Energy Hub's derms platform connects batteries, EVs, thermostats, and commercial and industrial sites into virtual power plants that over 230 utilities dispatch as reliable grid capacity day in, day out. VPPs deploy in 60 to 100 days at 40% to 60% less cost than traditional infrastructure, and they perform like conventional generation from day one. Learn about the flexibility platform for the modern grid at energyhub.com.

• 3:23Shayle Kann?

  Raymond, welcome.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Hey, glad to be here. Thank you.

• 3:26Shayle Kann?

  All right. My first question for you is, my sense is that when people talk about, like, what's the rate limiter for the growth of data centers, you know, there's a list of things that people point to, the chip supply chain being a big one, power and power availability being another, maybe right now, community pushback being another one that has emerged.

• 3:48Speaker 03

  Sure, that one's come up lately.

• 3:50Shayle Kann?

  One of them, though, yeah, one of them, though, clearly is also labor and the workforce. But I think it gets the least airtime of them. You know, if you're to think through, for you guys, what stops you from, you know, skyrocketing your build-out rate, where does labor rank?

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, today, you know, you listed probably 1A and 1B, power is the biggie, and the community has raced up the list pretty quickly. You know, didn't think we'd be at the White House six months ago, talking about who pays for infrastructure on the grid, but we are. And right after that would be labor. And I would tell you, you know, it's interesting, the question of, hey, is it stopping us? What it's doing is costing a lot more money and putting a strain on the schedule. Lots of management of where can we get the right people slotted in at the right time. If we had all the labor in the world, we could

• 4:52Speaker 03

  go faster. But there's, without a doubt, and especially in the electrician space, it's a tough space to get enough bodies in enough hours, because most of our projects, we're trying to run them 24/7.

• 5:04Shayle Kann?

  Yeah. So what does that actually look like? I mean, you alluded to it, but I'm interested in to get a little bit more detail. Like, you know, you're building a new data center, you're going to need a certain amount of trained electrician work, certain number of person hours, let's say. Like, what is the actual process to go find that workforce? And then, you know, presuming that it is constrained, as you're saying, how do you manage that?

• 5:29Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we could probably find people with a better answer than me, but at the end of the day, it starts with our selection of GCs, and it starts with us building a relationship in the marketplace and going through the bid process early on and going, hey, this is what our labor pools are going to look like. Let's think about this today. Let's think about this long before we get there. There is a lot of moving labor around. We have a large project going in Mississippi. You know, when I tell people we have a large project going just outside Jackson, Mississippi, some people go, where's Jackson, Mississippi? So kind of the point of, it's not in downtown, you know, Atlanta or downtown of Chicago. So there's lots of work ahead of time, thinking about where are we going to find the labor?

• 6:14Speaker 03

  What markets are we going to go get that labor? And is that labor willing to get picked up and moved? And then when we do pick them up and move, is there enough housing for them? You know, I think sometimes, a popular show, Landman, you see those, in Landman, those camps where there's just trailer and trailer after trailer. There's a lot of that at data center sites, where you are bringing the labor, especially in these tier-three, tier-four markets, and providing places for them to live and eat and stay so that they can be near the job. Because, you know, 40 miles outside Jackson, Mississippi doesn't have 500, you know, highly-trained electricians.

• 6:49Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, you know, I wonder whether, I guess this must be, the answer to this must be yes, but like, is there a new category of like, journeyman electrician who is, you know, going and spending six months at a time, or whatever it is, living in a camp outside Jackson, Mississippi, and then in Abilene, Texas, and then wherever the next data center is going to be? Is this a whole new category of electrician?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  We have seen teams that will manage a team environment where they'll roll guys in, you know, 30, 60, 90 days at a time. You know, I spent four years in the Marine Corps. It feels a little bit like days of deployment, where, hey, you know, we're going to get ready, we're going to go get the ship ready, and it's going to go out, and it's going to be in the water for six months, and then we're going to come back and switch everybody out. It feels a little bit like that, right? Because the projects are so big and so long that we are bringing waves of talent, waves of skill into the marketplace, giving them a place to live, eat, sleep every day, and then going to the job site where you're bringing, literally, an army of electricians. And to your point, at all different levels. But yeah, the journey part of it, or the travel part of it, just like travel nurses,

• 7:57Speaker 03

  there's a lot of that. It's all over our marketplace.

• 8:01Shayle Kann?

  You mentioned especially electricians. I want to double-click on that for one second, because, you know, it's not just electricians that you need to build the data centers. All sorts of construction that gets done, there's plumbing, other things like that. Is your sense that it's just that the supply-demand balance of electricians is most acute? People do say electrician seems to be the one that, like, is the biggest bottleneck. Is that why? Or is it just like disproportionate number of electricians that you need because the data center has basically a ton of wiring?

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's a little bit of both, right? Some of it is, there's so many electricians, and the level of electricians you need, right? You know, the panel that gets put on a data center doesn't look anything like the panel at my house. So you've got much more senior, much more capable electricians, one. And then, two, you need hundreds of them, right? Because to your point, at the end of the day, the reason we charge rent based on kilowatts is it is the limiting factor in the building. And so, one, we have really, really skilled electricians, really, really high-end electricians, working on really, really, really big systems. It is the biggest piece of the skilled labor. Yes, there's, you know, heavy equipment operators, and yes, there's, you know, plumbers, and yes, there's sheet rock people. But all of those look much more like a traditional

• 9:15Speaker 03

  build. The electricians are much more involved and much more sensitive to the facility.

• 9:22Shayle Kann?

  That raises kind of an interesting question, which is, is the bottleneck predominantly just, there are not enough electricians in the country, let's say? Or is it that there are plenty of electricians, but actually you need this specialized, you know, higher-level, trained subset of that category? And if only you could, so like, we're going to get to what do you do about this, right? But is the fundamental thing you do about this, get more people trained as electricians? Or is it get more electricians trained as specialized electricians, basically?

• 9:55Speaker 03

  So in good AT&T fashion, I think it's "and." I think we need more electricians, and we need more senior electricians. It's both. It is not either-or. You could employ more electricians today, without a doubt, and you could employ more higher-end electricians today. Just the industry is swallowing up the capacity. I mean, just like you see in the utility providers struggling to keep up with our industry from a pace perspective, same thing with the electrician, for lack of a word, industry or market, has struggled to keep up the pace of the growth. I mean, it's hyperbolic. It's on the news every day, so everyone knows all about it. But, you know, to me, I think about it just like the utility providers. Those guys have never heard numbers this big and never heard numbers

• 10:38Speaker 03

  coming this fast. And that same problem is manifest, no, is it manifest in the generation, you know, transmission and distribution side of the business? It's manifest in who's going to wire this on the other end.

• 10:51Shayle Kann?

  I mean, you mentioned at the beginning, it's like it's an expensive problem for you. I was having a conversation not too long ago with, I'll say, an unnamed infrastructure person at one of the hyperscalers who said, I think in like half joking fashion, I think we're going to be paying electricians like 2 million bucks a year pretty soon. Are you seeing like bidding wars for talent? Is that kind of where we're at?

• 11:14Speaker 03

  Without a doubt, yeah. The electrician, the cost for electricians, you know, I'm going to give you a, you know, estimate has tripled in the time I've been in the business.

• 11:26Shayle Kann?

  Triple.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  Triple, yeah. In the last decade, yeah.

• 11:31Shayle Kann?

  So you would think, you know, if you believe in an efficient market,

• 11:36Shayle Kann?

  that with some, some period of time, the ability to earn triple wages effectively becoming an electrician would sort of naturally result in a larger workforce. Maybe not overnight because it takes time to train. But like, you know, even in the absence of, of some of them or the clever and new programs that folks are, are pursuing, including yourselves, you know, the market would fix itself, you would think.

• 12:03Shayle Kann?

  Do you see that happening?

• 12:05Speaker 03

  So, so I, so I agree, I believe in an efficient market. I believe that, that markets draw talent when there's money to be earned there. And that is happening. We see it happening in basically every market where we work, where there are people creating training programs, creating fast tracks, creating methods and means for people to get up to speed and to supply more capabilities in the marketplace. Because the demand doesn't, I mean, and that's the other thing. We talk about a lease that gets signed today, we're going to be building that campus for four or five years. So, you know, being able to, I mean, you could start with someone today and spend two years with them in an apprenticeship, and they're still going to be useful on our

• 12:48Speaker 03

  campus for three or four years while we're building there. These things don't go up overnight. It's a lot of work for a long period of time. And so that's one of the reasons we've tried to get into the markets where we are and start education programs. Whereas we're like, hey, we're going to be here for a while. We know we're going to need people at the other end of this. Let's, let's start training in ourselves.

• 13:08Shayle Kann?

  Yeah, so tell me more about that, what, what you guys are actually doing. And also, you know, one thing I've learned about this space is that, you know, it's a complicated model, or at least historically, it's sort of a complicated model for how new, let's just focus on electricians still, get trained and how they pay for their training, for example, right? A lot of them will do it through, through federal grants and so on. It's not historically the case that like an employer would say, I need a ton of new electricians, I'll pay for their training, or I will sponsor it or something like that. So that, that's kind of a new phenomenon. So you as the ultimate employer, or maybe not even the employer, right? Because maybe your GC is the employer. You're just the, you're just the one who needs them to exist. What is the role that you can play in, in manifesting them?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so, you know, we talked about, I mentioned that, you know, we're building campuses and those are multi-year projects. So we've looked in the markets and we've, you know, started the projects and we said, hey, what do we need to get this project finished? We need more skilled labor. We need more, and you'll hear us use the phrase mechanical, electrical and IT skills and in a marketplace. And can we help the marketplace provide that skill? The biggest campus we have to date is in just south of Dallas in a suburb called Red Oak. And we partnered with a community college there, Texas State Technical College, and said, hey, if we were able to convince our partners alongside us to build a curriculum,

• 14:38Speaker 03

  would you be willing to, you know, for lack of a better word, pilot a program where we train in those three disciplines? And so in partnership with Texas State's Technical College and multiples of our partners, because to your point, right, the end user customer is the general contractor or the electrical contractor, he's the one who needs the employees. Our partners, so think of Snyder Electric or Siemens, people that, whose equipment needs to get plugged in by those electricians, have all helped us stand up a, a school at Texas State Technical College, a program to train people 12 weeks. You start off, you don't have to know anything about the data center business, and you leave on the other end a entry level, but prepared to go work in the data center business on the construction side.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  We are, I can't, I can't remember if we just completed our second cohort or just started our third, but we already have the first cohort through the program and already employed, and employed at dramatically higher wages than the average in the, in where we're located. So for us, it's, hey, there's a problem. And it's not only just, hey, we need people to help build our buildings, but how do we serve the communities we live in? It's really a way for us to do two things at the same time. Help the communities where we're trying to build infrastructure, as well as solve a problem for the industry.

• 15:55Shayle Kann?

  I do wonder, I guess, you know, you're, you're building one massive construction project in a given location. It may be, I mean, if you're Northern Virginia, there's lots of these, right? But it may be that at this location outside Dallas, or the one outside Jackson, Mississippi, it's not like there are going to be a bunch of data centers popping up in that same region. So is the, is the notion, you're training people on this specialized set of things, they're going to have a few years of employment while you're building out this one big campus, and then thereafter, they, they go travel to wherever the next data center is going to be?

• 16:31Speaker 03

  I think there's really two tracks after, after the campus is done. First of all, it's years, so that Dallas campus will take about five years to build. But to your point, it will come to an end. And for us, I think there's two tracks after that. There are longstanding jobs on the campus that having mechanical, electrical or IT infrastructure skills, you can deploy staying in your home market. And then the industry certainly has, to use your phrase earlier, opportunities for journeyman to move to projects all over, right? There's Wyoming projects and there's projects in ours in Mississippi. There are lots of more remote, large projects going on. The Panhandle of Texas, there's lots of big projects. And we certainly expect there'll be people, just like we had to do in Jackson, moving to go work there for four or five years.

• 17:16Shayle Kann?

  Yeah. There's obviously, in theory, two things you can do about a labor shortage for, for data center construction. One is find more people, which is what we've been talking about. But of course, the other is require less people, which has more to do with like the design of the data center and can you prefab some of it and things like that? Like, how much opportunity do you guys see in just minimizing the number of labor hours that are totally, that are required in total, maybe particularly for electricians?

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I got to tell you, that's one that's been part of Compass from the very beginning. So I'm a two dot horn a little bit. We viewed building data centers as really a manufacturing process from the very beginning of our business, not a stick-built construction project, but rather an assembly project. And, and our motivation there, I know you're asking about how do we manage, does it help with the headcount problem? Our motivation there was really a couple of things. Speed, if, if, higher quality and a more diverse workforce. If you can, you know, we talk about putting a project in Jackson, Mississippi.

• 18:22Speaker 03

  Almost all of the people that are going to show up in Jackson and do the work are going to be men, for lack of a, just the dynamic at home. Someone's got to, you know, manage the stability of the household, take kids to school and whatnot. And so generally, it's a more, the traveling journeyman worker is generally a man. And so by doing off-site manufacturing, putting together large components of our data centers off-site, it allows for a safer, more diverse and more reliable product, right? Safer for the, the employees, more diverse, because giving somebody, hey, you can be here from eight to five, you don't have to live in a different city, you can be home in the evening with your family. It allows us to employ more women in the business, and it makes the business much safer to operate, right?

• 19:05Speaker 03

  Instead of doing complete stick build in the field, being able to test and commission and assemble off-site and just roll it in a truck. My boss gets really mad when I say this and snap it together like Legos. He does not like the Lego analogy, but it really works for me. That is much safer, it's much more reliable, it's fewer hours, it's far less risk to the people on site. So for us, our motivation was to make the sites safer and faster, but what it has led to is a requirement for less skilled labor, less skilled labor at the job site. There's skilled labor now, but it's now spread around manufacturing facilities with our partners.

• 19:45Speaker 00

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• 20:27Speaker 00

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• 21:54Shayle Kann?

  What can you actually prefab? Like, what, I'm trying to, what are the Lego building blocks?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Good question. So, almost everything in the electrical world and almost everything in the mechanical world are prefabbed for us now. So, think of all the way out from where the utility comes onto the campus, and I've got a transfer switch, or I've got a transformer that I'm stepping down. We'll have all of that preassembled on a skid, so that you don't have to have somebody wire between the transfer switch and wire between that and the, you know, a transformer. We'll have the entire power center, everything in there that distributes electricity into the building, all show up in one unit. We have our entire, today, both liquid or hybrid cooling, so both liquid and air, shows up in a single package unit.

• 22:42Speaker 03

  So, these things, you're not having to put together any of it on-site. All of our buildings are tilt-up, you know, prefabricated, so that the panels show up, and we literally just crane them and set them in place. So, no one's having to make any of the walls, no one's having to pour any forms or fill any forms or pour any concrete. They all show up on a truck, again, literally just like Legos. Slab A goes in slot A, slab B goes in slot B, and they get lifted off a truck and slid into place. So, almost the roof is the same way. We have prefabricated double Ts that support the span. Literally, the whole building gets, almost the whole building, it's about 85% of the

• 23:25Speaker 03

  building, gets snapped into place, showing up on the flatbed of a truck.

• 23:29Shayle Kann?

  That's, it's remarkable that despite all of that, it's still a five-year construction project, and also, you still need all of these laborers, you're still having a, like, you've done so much to modularize it and prefab it, and yet, there's still so much more that needs to be done.

• 23:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, and the five years on the example in Dallas, that's because it's 10 buildings, right? So, it takes us about nine months to build a single building. And then, you know, you go, well, wait a minute, Raymond, that doesn't have to be five years.

• 24:02Shayle Kann?

  What's the scale of a building? Sorry, what's like in megawatt terms?

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, 40 megawatts, a little over 200,000 square feet. Help people understand that. Think of your SAM's club. Your SAM's club's probably somewhere between 30 and 40, maybe it's, big ones are 15,000 square feet. So, think five to six of your SAM clubs under one roof, and lots of electricity.

• 24:24Shayle Kann?

  And you said 40 megawatts apiece, something like that?

• 24:26Speaker 03

  40 megawatts is what we build today.

• 24:29Shayle Kann?

  Okay, so if you're building five of those, that's a 200-megawatt data center. Or if you're building nine of them, I guess you said that would, that'd be a, yeah.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, the one in Dallas is 10, so it's 400 megawatts. We have lots of fives and lots of tens around the US, so lots of 200s and 400s. And in the world of data centers today, you know, I remember, you know, been in this business 13 years, I remember we talked about kilowatts. It is completely normal to talk about gigawatt campuses today.

• 24:56Shayle Kann?

  Right. What's the rate limiter on the building, or not the rate limiter? What stops you from having a, you know, gigawatt building?

• 25:04Speaker 03

  So, for us, we've chosen the form factor we have because we have some beliefs about, you know, how you impact the environment, how you impact microclimates around the building. So, we've done a lot of study. Lots of CFD happens inside the building. Hey, computational flow dynamics, how am I going to move the energy around? How am I going to move the heat up? How high do I move the ceiling? Do I have to spend any money letting the heat move around the room? There's lots of study of what's going on inside the building. We've done a good bit of study on what goes on outside the building, right? When you have all of this equipment, not only exhausting, but also sucking air in and pushing warm air out, you can produce microclimates.

• 25:46Speaker 03

  So, for us, we've chosen the 40-megawatt form factor to allow us to spread the buildings out and not impact the performance of the equipment. Can you do it in larger form factors? You can, absolutely. Do I think that that will move our form factor up? Not anytime soon. We felt like we figured out a sweet spot between the equipment we buy, the readily-available nature of the equipment we buy, managing the building that size. But certainly, people that do purpose-built buildings that are very specific engineering can build larger form factors. It's just not in our roadmap at this time.

• 26:21Shayle Kann?

  I think we should spend a minute on the community stuff. I mean, it's tied to the, you know, you mentioned that that is one of the reasons to invest in workforce that's local and so on. But it's also obviously become, it's flared up, it's like a really big issue now. What is your perspective on what best practices should be for a data center developer entering a community to position yourself to be able to actually build the thing and not get the kind of backlash that we're seeing right now?

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. Sheila, I might, I got lots of thoughts on this one, so I might ask you to tap the guardrails and keep me on message here. But I'd say the biggest one for us is, our industry grew up being secretive. Not secretive because we had anything to hide from anybody, but think about the first two significant customers for large-scale data centers. It was the financial institutions, and it was the government. And they were secretive about where that large compute footprint sat purely from a security perspective. There was nothing to hide from the community, but you didn't want anyone to know where JP Morgan's, you know, bank processing big computers sat. So, nondescript building on the edge of town that nobody knew who it was.

• 27:31Speaker 03

  So, our industry grew up with this secrecy only because it was part of a security plan for very crucial assets, whether financial or government. That's the history of the business, and we'd never been asked really to be transparent about where we built. So, this notion that somehow we're, the industry was hiding anything, it was part of the security fabric of the early customers. Now, that there are data centers going in lots of places, and there's lots of questions, the industry needs to push the envelope to say, hey, I need to embrace the communities that I'm in, and I need to let people know what I'm doing. Because, and I'm going to give a weird analogy, right? People were not crazy about trains when they started. People thought that if you traveled 30 miles an hour, it would cause your heart to stop,

• 28:15Speaker 03

  and people said, hey, I don't want trains in my backyard. Edison had to give away the light bulb. No one wanted to buy it. And we can't imagine that today, right? But people had to be, you had to give a light bulb to someone to get them to use it. And I'm not, I'm not comparing us necessarily to trains or light bulbs as far as transformative, but digital infrastructure's here. It's not going away. All of us want our cell phones. And what I think, you know, in the world of Compass, we think about a Class A developer. What's a Class A developer look like? He embraces the place where he's going. He embraces his community and says, hey, I want to be a good citizen in the community. I happen to be a corporation, and I happen to run a building, but no different than being a port, or a harbor, or a train, or any other, a dam, a water-treatment facility.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  I'm going to be part of the infrastructure. I want to be a good community citizen in that infrastructure. Being transparent about where you go, embracing your community, offering to help in your community, being a good corporate citizen from a support, you know, and, you know, paying for the things that you're going to use, right? To us, that's all part of being a Class A developer. We use that term internally to say, hey, how would you, you know, in the commercial space, people think of Class A office space, and it means something. And we think the same thing about the data center space. What's a Class A data center developer? They're open with their community, they're helping their community, they're a good corporate citizen in the community, helping not just from an infrastructure standpoint, but helping

• 29:43Speaker 03

  from a education, training, jobs, all of those things.

• 29:47Shayle Kann?

  That makes sense to me. I think, speaking of education, I guess the other sense that I have is that there are some specific concerns that communities have about data centers, and then there's some amorphous ones that are not really localized but are a thing. Like, the specific concerns, you know, that you hear about are things like water consumption, impact on electricity bills, things like that. And then there's some amorphous ones that are like, this is bad for my community, and I don't totally understand why I think it's bad for my community, but it's, but it's bad. And I feel like there's a, there's a big education challenge, right? You have to convince everybody that their rates are not going to go up, that the water consumption's not going to be an issue, that the noise won't be an issue, whatever it is, the specific things.

• 30:29Shayle Kann?

  Then you also just got to have, figure out a way to give this generalized sense of this is actually good for us and not bad for us. And I wonder how you approach the education, community education stuff?

• 30:41Speaker 03

  So, I think you nailed three of the big ones. So, we get asked about water. You know, I talked about, you know, being transparent, you know, secrecy. You mentioned infrastructure, the cost of electric infrastructure. The other one is, you know, do I need this? Is this generally just bad for me? What's that big building over there that looks, you know, weird? Do I need this in my community?

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Let's go through them real quick. Water. So I'm going to quick Compass commercial. We've been waterless cooling since the day we started. You know, the industry with GPUs has forced, you know, a higher, you know, a more dynamic heat rejection model. So liquid cooling comes into play. We just do it with closed loops. So we're not a constant user of utility water in the marketplace. We think that's important. Frankly, most of the industry is going that way, but it's completely fair for people to ask the water question. They just think you need to talk with your developer, talk with the data center in your space and make sure that the water they're using is not coming out of your utility and it's closed loop. In that regard, I think you largely handle the water conversation.

• 31:51Speaker 03

  Paying for the electrical infrastructure. For us, we've taken it on ourselves to pay for the infrastructure that delivers power to us, right? There's generation that's owned by generally the utility. Then there's transmission and distribution and then the substations to get your site powered. We've taken the position from our very beginning that we pay for anything downstream to get to us and put that on our bill so that it doesn't impact ratepayers. Not and then we take that one step further. We also want to be a resource to the marketplace. I saw a video you did about your electric car sitting in your house and how much storage was in that facility in the car. I think you compared it to wall units from Tesla.

• 32:36Speaker 03

  Same thing, right? I built a data center. I got tons of generation on site. Me and my customer paid for that generation. Not only do we want to pay to get the electricity to our campus, but in the worst times, we want to be a resource to the grid. We want to be able to generate or turn off our need for grid power and generate it ourselves. So we try to collaborate in the markets and say, hey, how can I be a resource for the grid in your most strained times? Whether it's Snowmageddon in Texas or whether it's summer, July in Phoenix, we want to be able to say to the, as a Class A developer, we want to be able to say to the, to the utility provider as well as the customers around, hey, not only are we going to pay our own way, we also want to be able to help the grid in the toughest times.

• 33:20Speaker 03

  So that's water, that's electricity. And then the, hey, I'm just not sure data centers are good for me. It's really a big education, right? You know, this is not my phrase. I read it on an article yesterday, the analog American, the American that doesn't realize they're, they're reading about data centers on their phone and they're tweeting about it on their phone and saying, I don't want it. And all of that happened in a data center somewhere.

• 33:42Shayle Kann?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  All, all of the things that you're reading and all of the things you're tweeting and saying you disagree with all took place in a building somewhere called a data center. And, and not, not to be ugly about it, but just to say, hey, realize we're not going backwards. We're not going to get away from a digitally connected world. And how do we partner with that digital infrastructure in such a way? How do we partner with our communities in such a way that doesn't scare people? Hey, this is a good thing for you. It's a good thing for, for the, for the business. It's a good thing for your community and can we do it in a way that makes everybody feel comfortable and safe?

• 34:15Shayle Kann?

  Raymond, this was a lot of fun and I, I will say, I really appreciate the way that you frame this, both from the labor perspective and the community perspective. I think, I think there's a lot, it's going to be, it's a tough road for data center developers right now, just and from both the practical perspective of getting enough people and then from the, you know, perspective of getting enough buy-in and licensed to operate. So there's a lot of learning to be done there. So I appreciate you thinking hard about it.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's important for us, important for us as a business, but certainly important for us. I mean, we could take it all the way to, you know, national security, right? I think having a robust digital infrastructure, I think makes us a better country, a safer country. And it's, I think you can't under, you can't overstate how important it is.

• 35:00Shayle Kann?

  Yeah. All right, Raymond, thank you for your time.

• 35:03Speaker 03

  It's been great. Thank you so much.

• 35:05Shayle Kann?

  Raymond Hawkins is the Chief Customer Officer at Compass Data Centers. This show is a production of Latitude Media. You can head over to latitudemedia.com for links to today's topics. This episode is produced by Max Savage Levinson. Mixing and theme song by Sean Marquand. Anne Bailey edits the video version of the show. Stephen Lacey is our executive editor. All of our episodes are now on YouTube. Subscribe to Latitude Media for episodes of this podcast and Open Circuit. You can find the audio version of the show anywhere you get your podcasts. I'm Shayle Khan and this is Catalyst.