DCD Zero Downtime: The Bi-Weekly Data Center Show

Renewable energy deployments across the UK are expanding significantly. In this episode, DCD speaks to Tim Foster, director of energy for business at Conrad Energy, about the potential of renewables in powering the data center market.

DCD speaks to Pado AI about how it uses AI and machine learning to help data centers orchestrate compute workloads and manage power usage more efficiently.

As data centers continue to spring up across the US, opposition to them has grown in intensity and breadth. We talk to Amanda Garcia, an attorney who leads the Southern Environmental Law Center's data center advocacy, about why local communities are pushing back against data centers, the SELC's role, and what the future of data center regulation looks like.

DCD speaks with David Rothenstein, senior vice president and chief strategy officer at Ciena, about how the company plans to support the demands for AI infrastructure. Rothenstein talks about connectivity up, out, and across data centers, hollow-core fiber, AI, coherent optics, and more in this episode.

In this episode, DCD sits down with Mark Pestridge and Paul Lewis to talk about Telehouse's EMEA strategy following the company's senior leadership reshuffle. We discuss expansion plans, the company's relationship with the National Physical Laboratory in the UK, and how customer demands are changing.

DCD speaks to Marissa Hummon, CTO of Utilidata, about the company's Karman platform and its potential implications for the data center market.

With today's announcement that he is resigning, we look at UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer's data center legacy. Talking to Kao Data CEO Spencer Lamb, we look at the impact (or lack of) AI Growth Zones, why UK energy prices are so high, if copyright is a challenge, and more. Plus, we learn about prospective national leader Andy Burnham's data center visits, and what the data center industry should look for in a new PM.

Data center site selection is a crucial step in the construction process, and picking the right piece of land can be the difference between a project succeeding and failing. For AI data center developers with money burning a hole in their corporate back pockets, separating the promising propositions from duds is a time-consuming business. Build thinks it can help with an AI-powered system that it says can help sift through potential sites to identify the best parcels of land. In this podcast, CEO James Stirrat-Ellis explains how his company's system combines artificial and human intelligence to speed up projects, and how it has worked with the UK government on its much-vaunted AI Growth Zones.

Did you know that DCD has a sister publication? In April 2025, DCD acquired networking publication SDx, and with it now having been part of the InfraX family for a year, we thought it was about time we sat down with senior editor Ben Wodecki to give the publication a proper introduction. Tune into the episode to meet Ben and hear about what SDx covers, as well as a bit of a discussion on the key upcoming topics you can expect to see on the website.

It can seem like GPUs get all the headlines when it comes to AI workloads, but there are a lot more challenges when it comes to handling massive training jobs. We talk to Pradeep Vincent, Oracle’s Executive Vice President & Chief Technical Architect of OCI, about the importance of power and the oft-overlooked networking in large-scale AI clusters, particularly as we approach multibuilding scale, and potentially multi-campus.

DCD catches up with Patrick Halley, president and CEO, Wireless Infrastructure Association, to discuss the requirements of the telecommunications industry’s infrastructure build-out. Halley outlines how AI, fiber, and spectrum are essential for meeting the demands to support these networks, as he examines the opportunities for the mobile carriers, fiber providers, and tower companies.

With the AI industry fueling a shift away from training and towards inference, and claiming agentic AI as its next frontier, the need for hardware to support workloads that require high-compute and low-latency performance has never been greater. On this episode of Zero Downtime, DCD talks to Sumti Jairath, chief architect at SambaNova, about some of these driving forces, how the semiconductor industry has changed over the last decade, and what some of the biggest challenges facing chip companies right now are

DCD speaks to Nayel Brihi, corporate energy analyst at BloombergNEF, about the state of energy procurement over the past year.

It is the 100th episode of Zero Downtime! Before we get into the episode, a huge thank you to all of our listeners - new and those who have been with us since the beginning. In this episode, we are joined by Kevin O'Leary, AKA Mr Wonderful, best known for being on Dragons' Den/Shark Tank, with a recent debut in the Marty Supreme movie. Lesser known is O'Leary's involvement in the data center sector. We talk about his investment in Bitzero, plans for the "Wonder Valley" data center campuses, and his thoughts on the data center market in North America as a whole.

In this episode of Zero Downtime, we talk with Damien Lucas, CEO of Scaleway, about the European cloud computing market and whether it is possible to compete with the US hyperscalers.

DCD sits down with the CEO of Sage Geosystems, Cindy Taff, to talk all things enhanced geothermal, and how the technology could power the data centers of tomorrow.

That data centers need insurance goes without saying. Any commercial building will typically be insured against standard damages and risks, but data centers are far more complicated than an average warehouse or office. One area that has emerged of late is the idea of “SLA” insurance, or Service Level Agreement insurance. Parametrix is one of the pioneering companies in this realm, and we discuss where the idea came from and why it is growing drastically in popularity.

Mobile devices require networks to make them function, and these networks are often deployed in places most people wouldn’t dare to visit, such as telecom towers. Some can be found thousands of miles high, but for tower contractors, it’s their everyday job, and across all sorts of weather conditions. Tommy Schuch, a former tower contractor and now documentary maker and founder of Climber Protection Group, explains the risks of the job to DCD , and why the sector needs a shake-up to protect those risking their lives. Is this the most dangerous job in the world?

With the deployment of 4G and 5G services still an important focus for US carriers, the need for telecoms infrastructure to house this equipment couldn’t be greater, which presents an opportunity for infrastructure companies such as Palistar Capital-backed Symphony Towers Infrastructure. DCD caught up with David Bacino, CEO, Symphony Towers Infrastructure, to discuss his first few months in the role, opportunities in the market, and plans for 2026. Update: After this episode was published, Bacino announced he is set to transition from his role as CEO to that of vice chairman.

Anyone who has entered a data center will be familiar with the upright rack design that has become standard in data halls around the world. But while piling up the “pizza boxes” has served the industry well for decades, the advent of liquid cooling systems, developed to meet the thermal needs of advanced chips, means a new approach may be needed. Cooling firm Air2O is thinking outside the (pizza) box, and has come up with a modular, stackable design for data center racks, which it says can improve cooling efficiency. On this episode, DCD speaks to Air2O’s Iggy Kogan about the new design, dubbed the High Thermal Density Air-Cooled Rack Assembly.