Brian Feldman, Compass Datacenters’ Vice President of Development, discusses data center development, power procurement, and the future of digital infrastructure.

Brian shares how unexpected opportunities early in his career led him to work with data centers. After graduating from Columbia’s business school, he joined Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) long-range planning team. At AWS, Brian was responsible for buying land for data centers and then procuring the power contract to energize it. 

He learned that data center location primarily depends on what problem the business is trying to solve. Brian points out that use and sales tax incentives and varying data center governance laws across the U.S. play a key role in site selection, too.

[00:15:06] “Data centers like to be next to other data centers [because] . . . [they] are all about interrelational databases and interrelational compute. . . . [T]hat means they can talk to each other almost instantaneously and really almost act like one greater facility.”

Brian shares how much data centers permanently boost local economies. They employ thousands of people during construction—people who live, eat and spend money in the community.

[00:43:40] “The construction cycle just continues. They're temporary jobs, but what people don't often realize is the level of permanence because these buildings do require constant upgrade and retrofit. And that's one, baked into the economics, and two, based [on] the lease terms.”

While the data center boom eventually will slow down, Brian emphasizes that the industry’s fundamental drive is society’s demand for computational power. And things like phone use and the need to interpret data aren’t going anywhere soon.

Links

Brian Feldman | LinkedIn

Compass Datacenters’ website