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I really firmly believe in moving to a more circular economy, and when we think about the big movements we had over the last 10 or 20 years, I grew up in the movement from IT to cloud... Which was really not a technology shift as much, in my opinion, as a consumption model shift. It was aligning outcomes of the provide... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's right. |
**Zac Smith:** \[15:46\] So the same thing is happening with OEMs, who are early -- like, they're starting to make that shift with as-a-service. Just a little bit. But in reality, still - if they don't build another server and sell you another server, they don't get paid. And to me, these are massive, multi-hundred-mil... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** My follow-up question to this was "How did Equinix Metal change your Why, coming from Packet to Equinix Metal?" But I think we can draw the conclusions, we can draw the parallels, because some of the things that you were alluding to is scale, first of all; the complexity of the whole supply chain when... |
I think that people can kind of imagine how Equinix Metal makes it easier... Not to mention the interconnectivity, all the data centers. So all that - basically, you have a lot more leverage to use in delivering that Why. Anything to add? |
**Zac Smith:** I mean, there are some positives and negatives to it, right? Back in Packet days, we were -- I'm gonna call it an "arms dealer" for transformation, as it pertained to this level of the stack... Which was just like -- I always thought, like - hey, there's real estate e.g. data center as a service, which i... |
And then there was this thing called IaaS, which was everything from the computer, and the network, through databases and load balancing. It was a whole thing. It had a ton of verticalized software opinion built into that. So what Packet was doing was we were trying to democratize that lowest layer. I called it hardwar... |
Now, obviously, as Equinix, we were a little bit more focused on our own large-scale real estate portfolio... But with that come some incredible advantages. No longer do we have to think "Wow, how could we change this?" I'm like, "Well, we have 240 buildings in 65 markets around the world. We could start there." And we... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Hm, interesting. I didn't know that, actually. |
**Zac Smith:** Yeah. So it was created as a neutral place for the internet to grow. So what I've been really pleased is the support I've gotten throughout the leadership, from our CEO Charles, throughout the rest of the organization and whatnot... In doing a lot of this innovation in the open. So I get to share the Ope... |
**Break:** \[20:12\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So why do I keep getting drawn back to Equinix Metal? And you're right, it's hard for me to say that, but I have to. I just wanna say Packet, but... So what keeps me getting drawn into Equinix Metal - the reason why I keep coming back is because you have the best hardware, hands-down. So I have been r... |
**Zac Smith:** Of course. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** And in my opinion -- so having all these data points, I think that Equinix Metal does it best. What's the secret? |
**Zac Smith:** That's a good one. I don't know. First and foremost, I randomly landed in this industry and figure out I love -- I love this industry, by the way. I love the community around -- the plumbers, the builders. It's just one of these unique places of the internet that is so apprentice-driven and collegial, wh... |
But when we started Packet, we had this super, super-clear vision... And I think I've already repeated it once here, but it was "How can we automate hardware, no matter what it is, no matter where it is, and no matter what software you put on top of it?" That was the thing. And what we knew is we knew our place in the ... |
\[24:07\] And so I was like, "This is what we're gonna be the best in the world at. We're gonna figure out how to enable hardware no matter what it is", to this massive world of software, call it 40 million developers in the world, who wanna use all the stuff, right? And they need to make their amazing software work wi... |
So I think our focus on that just pure mission, which was - we knew that we had enough there to prosecute, and we could spend the vast majority of our careers trying to make hardware accessible for software, knowing the pace of hardware is changing so rapidly. We're like in the golden age of hardware right now, with th... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Oh, yes... |
**Zac Smith:** When 5-6 years ago that just wasn't right? It was x86 or you're done. And now you've got serious languages that have been made multi-arch and have the build capacity and the CI pipelines and the related ecosystem to make that continue, and "build upon itself." That's happened faster than I expected, wher... |
So I envision that over time we'll create a much better what I'm gonna call HCL (hardware compatibility list) for the internet, that effectively can be an idempotent view of every single piece of hardware ever, and that would allow all the software to be able to choose and understand how to work with it. We're pretty f... |
But I think that's where I'm gonna give your answer, is just like being super-crazy, laser-focused on what we do... And I've spent a lot of time in my first few years at Packet -- I'm not gonna say fending off revolutions, but a lot of people... The clearest one on my mind was I almost had most of my management team wa... |
So a lot of that was just staying super-focused on what we did, and I think some of those other providers that you mentioned, of which I'm huge fans, and know the founders of most of those businesses, that moved our industry in their own way... But they became (I'm gonna call it) all-purpose platforms in a lot of ways.... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** \[28:12\] I can see the importance of that, and I can see many decisions which were controversial, such as "Let's not build a Kubernetes." Like, what?! No, everybody's building a Kubernetes. What are you on about?!" |
**Zac Smith:** Oops... I forgot to build a Kubernetes service... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** That's exactly the title, yes... That was one of the great blog posts which I had the pleasure of reading... And it shows in the small things, as well as the big things. But for me, one of the reasons, again, why I loved Packet, and now I love Equinix Metal, is that I could provision an instance type,... |
**Zac Smith:** \[laughs\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** So not much has changed since then. But there is this problem... You wrote a little bit about this, the liquid cooling imperative; that's another great blog post. By the way, do you know that one of my favorite downtimes is to read your blog posts? |
**Zac Smith:** Uh-oh... \[laughter\] |
**Gerhard Lazu:** No, they're really good. They're short, they're well thought through, and you convey a lot of information in a very good way - compressed information... They're great. |
**Zac Smith:** Well, we have a term for that here at Equinix... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** What is it? |
**Zac Smith:** Well, we started it at Packet and it's due to my twin brother Jacob, which is "Craft, not crap." So we don't ship any crap content. Only crafted content. So... Craft, not crap. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** It shows. It shows. So the hot chips, coming back to the 5 gigahertz one - there is the cooling problem. Can you give us the TL;DR on that? Because you thought quite a bit -- again, I don't want you to reproduce a whole blog post... |
**Zac Smith:** Sure. |
**Gerhard Lazu:** But as a summary, as a TL;DR, why is that important? Because there's another big initiative that is linked to this, the Open 19, and I see a link there... And I can see you being the innovators behind this. But tell us more about that. |
**Zac Smith:** Yeah, so the TL;DR is that chips are getting hotter. Why are they getting hotter? Mainly, we're getting dense, the nanometers are getting smaller on the fad processes. That's how you kind of stuff more transistors in. In order to then do that, you need to push way more power through these things, and we'... |
So that's one in the general-purpose, large-scale silicon trends that we're dealing with. And the second thing is we have way more sophisticated purpose-built technology at this point, like GPUs, or accelerators. We have things that are very, very specific at doing one thing very well, and you then keep them busy, so y... |
\[32:20\] But anyways, getting back to it - accelerators and purpose-built technology are getting hotter... So you have this electricity thing, more juice into the rack, and denser, effectively... And then you have the other problem, which is cooling. We're kind of getting to the upper barriers of two things. Number on... |
So in big data centers you've got 20%-30% of the energy just using fans to pull air around... And then we're getting to this density level where you just can't cool it if there's not enough air flow to be able to do that... And especially in a mixed data center. In a hyperscale data center is where you can build around... |
So moving the liquid -- I'm not gonna go into all the things, but just think of it like your car radiator or air conditioning. Pulling a liquid that turns into a gas over the hot part, the chip, the plate, whatever, and then being able to do that does a few things. Number one, it can be way more efficient. You can stop... |
The other thing you can do is create a much, much higher differential between the intake and the output. What that allows is - you've probably heard of things like heat pumps. You can actually turn that back into energy. So you've got a natural thing called a giant turbine called "thousands of computers creating heat."... |
And then the most important part of that process is actually today most of our data centers and most of the data centers in the world use evaporative cooling, and that takes millions of gallons of water per day to evaporate this heat. And that is simply not sustainable. So we need to move into a closed system, where we... |
So there's these momentous challenges and opportunities... I think it's -- like what I've touched on earlier, related to some of the business model changes are gonna be necessary to that... But as we -- like, for example at Equinix we have a goal of reaching Carbon-neutral by 2030 using science targets... We have to ex... |
\[35:44\] I think one of the biggest challenges we have right now is that in an enterprise data center, with this diversity of technology that's going on, everything from Dell servers to NVIDIA DGXes, to boxes that you brought in from your -- you know, "This is a ten-year-old server I've got... Let me bring it into the... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Reuse, yeah. |
**Zac Smith:** Reuse is the best thing we could possibly do... And luckily, software is getting sophisticated enough to deal with that. At least until we get a more robust recycling program built in with the silicon manufacturers, where we can recapture that and put it back into use. |
Well, one of the problems with this diversity is that there's no current standard for how racks get put together... So if you've ever built a PC - I grew up building PCs... |
**Gerhard Lazu:** Oh, yes. |
**Zac Smith:** You used to have the ATX case. |
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