Cool Vector

The digital infrastructure industry is incredibly diverse and needs talent of all types, says Harris Hamid, a computer science student at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey, and a student advocate for non-profit Nomad Futurist Foundation. 

"No matter what you're doing, you can find a spot here," Hamid tells Cool Vector. 

Hamid emphasizes how the industry welcomes people from all backgrounds, recalling how he has already met graphic designers, engineers, and career-changers with different areas of expertise to offer. He encourages students to see Nomad Futurist as a resource for learning and networking, regardless of their major, emphasizing that there's a place in the industry for everyone.

Access the transcript and a searchable library of content at the Cool Vector Substack.

#datacenter #digitalinfrastructure #computerscience

Walter Cannon helped create and implement LinkNYC, the project that brought free public Wi-Fi to all five boroughs of New York City. Cannon tells Cool Vector about how the project came to be under the Bloomberg Administration, as well as the logistical and political hurdles of rolling out thousands of Wi-Fi kiosks.

Looking ahead, Cannon - a self-described "all-around technology guy" — discusses the growing need for low-latency infrastructure closer to end users, especially as AI adoption becomes more widespread.

Access the transcript and a searchable library of content at the Cool Vector Substack: 

#datacenter #digitalinfrastructure #newyorkcity #wifi

Artificial intelligence tools are being adopted across construction, including digital infrastructure construction, says Indigo Pinto, Co-Founder IBB Solutions, a management firm for digital infrastructure construction projects.

Pinto is also an ambassador for Nomad Futurist, and she reflects on discovering Nomad Futurist and how the phrase "the future is now" resonated with her view of the industry's trajectory, particularly when it comes to the rising generation of talent entering the field.

Access the full transcript and a searchable library of content at the Cool Vector Substack.

#datacenter #digitalinfrastructure #constructionmanagement #coolvector

The data center industry is leaving enormous value on the table by failing to apply chip-level simulation techniques to the full infrastructure stack, argues Sherman Ikemoto of Cadence. Closing the “chip-to-chiller” design gap is now an existential requirement, given the pace of AI compute density growth.

In an in-depth Cool Vector interview, Cadence’s Group Director of Business Development describes how “the timescales to build chips, and to build the facilities that house the chips, are totally different. So there's this natural massive gap in the design chain.”

Key takeaways from Ikemoto’s interview:

• If data center developers are able to compress a 24-month AI factory standup to 18 or 16 months, that translates directly into billions of dollars of accelerated return.

• For three decades, rack power density grew ~10% annually. In the AI era, it has jumped to 60–100% per year—an order-of-magnitude acceleration that fundamentally breaks traditional data center cooling technologies and design methodologies.

• Backing off GPU power utilization by 10–20% frees up enough headroom to add more GPUs to the same power envelope.

Access the full transcript and a searchable content library at the Cool Vector Substack: https://coolvector.substack.com/p/from-chip-to-chiller?r=4tjd55

#datacenter #digitalinfrastructure #ai

Stan Hanks invented a commodities market for broadband while at Enron, and has well informed views on the need for a similar market for compute. The main challenge: units of compute are proving difficult to standardize. 

In this episode of Cool Vector, Stan Hanks of Kreneon, Wayne Nelms of Ornn, Hadassa Lutz of Cloud2Ground and host David Snow join Cool Vector to examine whether compute can be turned into a tradable commodity — drawing a direct line from Hanks' experience creating a broadband futures market at Enron to the emerging effort to do the same thing for GPU capacity. 

Compute has the economic conditions for a futures market — surging demand, volatile prices, massive capital at risk — but lacks the defining characteristic of a true commodity, which is fungibility. Workload built for one chip architecture can't simply be swapped to another. 

This fascinating conversation takes place as the one-year lease price of the H100 GPU has jumped nearly 40 percent between late 2025 and early 2026, and market players are now are racing to launch the first regulated compute futures products.

Key takeaways from this episode:

• Token usage is opaque and hard to predict - Hanks compares tokens to a foreign currency where you don't know how much work you're actually getting — likening the experience to a parking meter that speeds up mid-session, demanding another quarter well before the hour you thought you'd paid for.

• Anthropic and ChatGPT are token 'price setters' - Nelms observes that the closed-source model providers — OpenAI and Anthropic — produce their own tokens and set their own prices, making the token market far less liquid and competitive than the GPU rental market where multiple neo clouds are offering access to relatively comparable hardware.

• GPU price fluctuations call for a futures market - The one-year lease price for the H100 GPU jumped 38.2% between October 2025 and March 2026, precisely the kind of volatility that Wayne Nelms argues a liquid futures market — with prices written into debt covenants and used as hedging benchmarks — would give infrastructure investors the tools to manage. 

• How Hanks created a broadband futures market while at Enron - By building his own fiber network to create a naturally long position, then standardizing both the buy-side and sell-side contracts around a common definition of bandwidth capacity, Stan used Enron's $20 billion treasury to move the market from bespoke, one-off bilateral deals toward something that looked and behaved like a commodity.

• Compute has a 'perfect opportunity' for commodity market mechanics - Han ks draws a direct parallel between the broadband boom of the late 1990s and today's compute buildout — massive capital being deployed into infrastructure without visibility into future demand and price — and argues that this information vacuum is precisely the condition under which commodity market mechanics have historically proven most valuable.

• Stan Hanks barely escaped the wreckage of Enron - At a famous analyst meeting in January 2000, Stan was presented with a transcript of promises made to the market about products that were pure science fiction, realized he would be asked to attest to their veracity, said he couldn't do it, and left the following Monday — narrowly avoiding a collapse that would eventually make him a DOJ witness for eleven years.

Access the full transcript and a searchable content library on the Cool Vector Substack.

#coolvector #datacenter #GPU #tech #commodities #enron #digitalinfrastructure

The AI boom will be fueled by connectivity — and the companies that win will be the ones that can build fast enough to keep up with it, says LightRiver CEO Mike Jonas.

The hyperscalers, telcos, and utilities driving this buildout are well-funded and highly motivated, but years of consolidation have left them understaffed for the scale of deployment they now need to execute, Jonas tells Cool Vector.

Speaking on the sidelines of the PTC in Honolulu, Hawaii, Jonas also breaks down why the shift from AI training to inference is the next major wave — one that will push spending from massive hyperscale campuses into metro networks and ultimately reach a world where machines, not people, are asking and answering the questions.

Access the transcript and a searchable content library at the Cool Vector Substack.

#datacenter #digitalinfrastructure #coolvector #ptc

Data center owners are turning to the infrastructure secondaries market for capital, and getting pushback over unrealistic valuations, says Eddie Keith, Partner and Head of Infrastructure Secondaries in the Ares Secondaries Group. 

In a fascinating conversation, Keith tells sister channel Liquid Courage how digital infrastructure has rapidly evolved from a fringe asset class into one of the most active and compelling corners of the secondaries market, driven by capital needs that outpace what traditional fund structures can accommodate. 

Keith draws on nearly two decades of secondaries experience to lay out what separates a smart infrastructure secondary from a trap, why the asset class rewards diversification, and the criticality of  mature cash-flowing assets anchored to a strong development pipeline.

 Among the key takeaways:

• Troubled data center deals are of no interest to infrastructure secondary buyers. If a GP can't sell an asset through a traditional process, bringing it to the secondary market as a last resort is a signal to run — not a reason to look harder.

• Data center execs have inflated expectations on value. Some data center owners have valued their platforms at 1.3 to 1.4 MOIC, but due diligence done by infrastructure secondaries buyers have revealed valuations more in the 0.8 to 1.0 range. A data center owner will be hard pressed to sell assets at strong multiples without future revenues supported by contracted cash flows.

• Distressed secondary deals have been 'some of the worst.' The continuation vehicle market was born out of post-financial-crisis distress, and those early deals — broken assets from broken franchises that secondary capital was supposed to rescue — turned out to be some of the few reliable ways to lose money in a market with a thirty-year history of generating returns.

• LPs should not overallocate to digital infrastructure. Infrastructure investing moves in waves — digital was considered fringe before COVID made it the belle of the ball — and the investors who stay diversified across the full asset class are the ones who don't get caught over-indexed to last cycle's darling.

Access the full transcript and a searchable library of content at the Cool Vector Substack.

#coolvector #infrastructure #datacenter #secondary #privateequity

The data center industry is sitting on a large reserve of underutilized compute capacity, says Phil Flaherty, Chief Revenue Officer of PADO AI. 

The capacity existing facilities, and unlocking it — rather than waiting for new gigawatt-scale builds — is both faster and more practical. 

Flaherty tells Cool Vector the real opportunity lies in coordinating what happens inside a data center's walls with the broader grid, turning today's passive power consumer into an active, grid-aware participant that can reduce costs and improve reliability. 

He pushes back sharply on the political narrative that data centers are driving up energy prices, arguing instead that properly implemented grid-flexible data centers, combined with a growing renewables base, are actually a mechanism for keeping prices low.

Access the full transcript and a searchable library of content at the Cool Vector Substack.

#datacenter #digitalinfrastructure #power #coolvector

From his perch as an executive recruiter into the data center and overlapping asset management industry, Patrick Reyes says he is seeing a proliferation of opportunities for mid-level executives to move up to the C-suite, and to move from smaller platforms to larger, private equity-backed growth platforms. Reyes, a Partner at Nu Advisory Group who oversees executive recruiting in the digital infrastructure space, says that as private capital floods into digital infrastructure, the link between investment activity and executive hiring has never been tighter. In an in-depth conversation with Cool Vector’s David Snow and Cloud2Ground’s Hadassa Lutz, Reyes explains how the influx of capital is fueling an expansion of the data center C-suite. This also means the creation of relatively new roles within data centers designed to address new opportunities and challenges, Chief Development Officer and head of Community Relations among these. Among the key takeaways: • Some data center CFOs are seeing $1 million cash comp. Total cash for this critical C-suite role at major platforms is clearing seven figures, with PE-backed executives chasing equity payouts in the $10 million to $40 million range upon exit. • Turnaround executives are starting to be hired by data centers. Not every platform is succeeding, and distressed situations are beginning to emerge — bringing a new class of turnaround-oriented CEO and CFO hires into the sector. • Data centers have billions to deploy and need talent. Capital formation and executive hiring are now inseparable, with investors calling recruiters before platforms even formally exist. • Data center executives are seeing step-up opportunities. Inter-industry competition for talent is intensifying, creating a wave of VP-to-C-suite promotions as platforms proliferate. • The rise of the Chief Development Officer. The COO role has grown too large to hold both front-end development and back-end operations, driving broad adoption of a dedicated CDO seat. • The rise of corporate VC across data centers. Major data center companies are expected to follow utilities into corporate venture, backing deep-tech energy startups to secure future power supply chains — and the chief energy officer of the future will need to be fluent in early-stage investing. • Scaling data centers requires “extremely rigorous” executives. At gigawatt scale, a six-to-twelve-month construction delay means hundreds of millions in losses, so execution discipline is now as prized as strategic vision. Access the full transcript and a searchable content library at the Cool Vector Substack: https://open.substack.com/pub/coolvector/p/the-data-center-c-suite-is-expanding?r=4tjd55&utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web #coolvector #datacenter #digitalinfrastructure #humancapital

Felix Seda of NJFX explains how a cable landing station differs from a conventional data center — its core value proposition being latency reduction and the elimination of routing inefficiencies, connecting the US, Europe, and Latin America across four subsea systems within a single co-location facility. He frames NJFX's moment as directly tied to the industry's shift from AI training to inference, arguing that the network layer — not just compute — becomes the critical variable once trained models need to reach end users at scale.

Access the transcript and a searchable library of content at the Cool Vector Substack: https://coolvector.substack.com/p/the-importance-of-cable-landing-stations

#datacenter #digitalinfrastructure #newjersey #telecom