The Sustainable Data Center and the “AI Gold Rush” with Missy Young, CIO of Switch

CIO Exchange Podcast

Switch is an innovator in the data center industry, providing services that are 100 percent renewable with a perfect uptime record. In this episode, Yadin sits down with Switch’s CIO, Missy Young, to discuss how Switch’s sustainability practices trickle down and benefit their customers' ESG efforts, as well as their bottom line, and how AI is impacting the data center capacity across the industry. They delve into examples of how Switch partners with large companies and why so many digital transformations are failing within enterprises.
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Key Quotes:

“A lot of people think it costs you way more to go green. No, not necessarily. It's not true. It depends on how you do it. But when you have a middleman who is buying the energy for you and then marking it up 80 percent and selling it to you, then yes, it's going to cost more. But if you can buy direct, you're going to get a much better bang for your buck.”

“When C-level executives want to do digital transformation, it is a necessity that they have buy-in from the team. It is a necessity that they figure out, am I making sure that these employees don't feel fear because of this change? Am I making sure that they still feel valued? Am I making sure that I'm assigning the right tasks to the right people? Am I sure that they're not so afraid of the complexity of this change that they're not even going to do it?”

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Timestamps:

(01:31) The scale of Switch’s services

(02:17) Why people aren’t running their own data centers

(04:27) The value beyond a perfect uptime record

(05:21) How Switch formed their buying cooperative

(08:56) 100 percent renewable data centers

(11:38) Becoming net water positive

(12:38) How this supports customer ESG initiatives

(13:45) The "AI gold rush" and lack of data center capacity

(17:22) How Switch partners with companies / FedEx case study

(19:48) Why are transformations failing?

(25:00) What Missy sees happening next

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Links:

Missy Young on LinkedIn

CIO Exchange on X

Yadin Porter de León on X

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