The hats he wears are many: Chairman & Founder of Infrastructure Masons (iMason,) CEO of Virtual Power Systems, Co-Host of The Next Wave Podcast, and Founder & CEO of a strategic advisory and consulting service for Startups, Fortune 500 companies, and Investment firms. One might call him a living legend in the data storage space. Back by popular demand, Dean Nelson joined Not Your Father’s Data Center for another tremendous conversation with host Raymond Hawkins.

Nelson queued up some significant trends in the data storage space since his last visit that he was itching to discuss.

“If you think about our industry, today we have 7 million data center locations,” Nelson said. “These are places that have some type of compute in them. And there’s about 104 gigawatts of capacity built. That’s capacity that could be used. From a consumption standpoint, there’s 594 terawatt-hours of consumption. If you now equate that, that’s 2.4% of the total energy draw globally. Through iMasons, we created this baseline on purpose. And what it includes is three categories. So, digital infrastructure, in general, is providers, networks, and crypto.” Breaking down these categories helps define where the energy usage is going and how Nelson and his iMasons can find new ways to maximize the consumption of that capacity.

Even within the 594 terawatt-hours of consumption, Nelson said not all of that energy is consumed at once. Only roughly 67 gigawatts of the 104 gigawatts of power get consumed. That leaves at least 37 gigawatts unused around the globe. “And why is that,” Nelson asked. “That’s because of buffers and buffers, and everything else that happens from enterprise applications to cloud to data centers and everybody saving to ensure that they don’t have an issue.”