DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show

Academic institutions and research facilities have long turned to HPC for research purposes, but today they are increasingly seeking AI capacity to further their exploits.

While the drive is there, access to hardware and knowledge of orchestrating such workloads remains a challenge. In this episode, we talk to Stephan Fabel - CEO of ThisWay Global and former head of Nvidia DGX Cloud - about some of the challenges facing the sector and why he feels so strongly about the importance of bringing AI to sectors that need it.

DCD talks to Arka Chanda, an associate at the Centre for Economic Transition Expertise based at the London School of Economics.

Arka was one of several experts who spoke at the UK government’s Environmental Audit Committee about the risks and opportunities to the sustainability of data centers in the UK, and we talk about the impact of data centers on emissions, why it's difficult to get concrete statistics on data centers, and what an alternative future for data center development looks like.

After a short break, Bernard Borghei is back in the tower industry with his latest venture, Connected Infra Group. Borghei tells DCD about the company’s plans to expand its tower portfolio across the US, and discusses opportunities for the market in the coming years.

Renewable energy deployments across the UK are expanding significantly.

In this episode, DCD speaks to Tim Foster, director of energy for business at Conrad Energy, about the potential of renewables in powering the data center market.

DCD speaks to Pado AI about how it uses AI and machine learning to help data centers orchestrate compute workloads and manage power usage more efficiently.

As data centers continue to spring up across the US, opposition to them has grown in intensity and breadth. We talk to Amanda Garcia, an attorney who leads the Southern Environmental Law Center's data center advocacy, about why local communities are pushing back against data centers, the SELC's role, and what the future of data center regulation looks like.

DCD speaks with David Rothenstein, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Ciena, about how the company plans to support the demands for AI infrastructure. Rothenstein talks about connectivity up, out, and across data centers, hollow-core fiber, AI, coherent optics, and more in this episode.

In this episode, DCD sits down with Mark Pestridge and Paul Lewis to talk about Telehouse's EMEA strategy following the company's senior leadership reshuffle.

We discuss expansion plans, the company's relationship with the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, and how customer demands are changing.

DCD speaks to Marissa Hummon, CTO of Utilidata, about the company's Karman platform and its potential implications for the data center market.

With today's announcement that he is resigning, we look at UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's data center legacy.

Talking to Kao Data CEO Spencer Lamb, we look at the impact (or lack of) AI Growth Zones, why UK energy prices are so high, if copyright is a challenge, and more. Plus, we learn about prospective national leader Andy Burnham's data center visits, and what the data center industry should look for in a new PM.

Data center site selection is a crucial step in the construction process, and picking the right piece of land can be the difference between a project succeeding and failing.

For AI data center developers with money burning a hole in their corporate back pockets, separating the promising propositions from duds is a time-consuming business.

Build thinks it can help with an AI-powered system that it says can help sift through potential sites to identify the best parcels of land.

In this podcast, CEO James Stirrat-Ellis explains how his company's system combines artificial and human intelligence to speed up projects, and how it has worked with the UK government on its much-vaunted AI Growth Zones.

Did you know that DCD has a sister publication?

In April 2025, DCD acquired networking publication SDx, and with it now having been part of the InfraX family for a year, we thought it was about time we sat down with senior editor Ben Wodecki to give the publication a proper introduction.

Tune into the episode to meet Ben and hear about what SDx covers, as well as a bit of a discussion on the key upcoming topics you can expect to see on the website.

It can seem like GPUs get all the headlines when it comes to AI workloads, but there are a lot more challenges when it comes to handling massive training jobs.

We talk to Pradeep Vincent, Oracle’s Executive Vice President & Chief Technical Architect of OCI, about the importance of power and the oft-overlooked networking in large-scale AI clusters, particularly as we approach multibuilding scale, and potentially multi-campus.

DCD catches up with Patrick Halley, president and CEO, Wireless Infrastructure Association, to discuss the requirements of the telecommunications industry’s infrastructure build-out.

Halley outlines how AI, fiber, and spectrum are essential for meeting the demands to support these networks, as he examines the opportunities for the mobile carriers, fiber providers, and tower companies.

With the AI industry fueling a shift away from training and towards inference, and claiming agentic AI as its next frontier, the need for hardware to support workloads that require high-compute and low-latency performance has never been greater.

On this episode of Zero Downtime, DCD talks to Sumti Jairath, chief architect at SambaNova, about some of these driving forces, how the semiconductor industry has changed over the last decade, and what some of the biggest challenges facing chip companies right now are

DCD speaks to Nayel Brihi, corporate energy analyst at BloombergNEF, about the state of energy procurement over the past year.

It is the 100th episode of Zero Downtime! Before we get into the episode, a huge thank you to all of our listeners - new and those who have been with us since the beginning.

In this episode, we are joined by Kevin O'Leary, AKA Mr Wonderful, best known for being on Dragons' Den/Shark Tank, with a recent debut in the Marty Supreme movie.

Lesser known is O'Leary's involvement in the data center sector. We talk about his investment in Bitzero, plans for the "Wonder Valley" data center campuses, and his thoughts on the data center market in North America as a whole.

In this episode of Zero Downtime, we talk with Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway, about the European cloud computing market and whether it is possible to compete with the US hyperscalers.

DCD sits down with the CEO of Sage Geosystems, Cindy Taff, to talk all things enhanced geothermal, and how the technology could power the data centers of tomorrow.

That data centers need insurance goes without saying. Any commercial building will typically be insured against standard damages and risks, but data centers are far more complicated than an average warehouse or office.

One area that has emerged of late is the idea of “SLA” insurance, or Service Level Agreement insurance. Parametrix is one of the pioneering companies in this realm, and we discuss where the idea came from and why it is growing drastically in popularity.