Kai Risdahl

This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Risdahl.

After Tiny Fish, Megan and I pulled up and parked outside a new and huge white building.

It looked pretty deserted, no parked cars, just a single security guy who, after the obligatory ID check, directed us into the lobby.

Pleasure to meet you.

First things first, tell us who you are and where we are.

Digital Realty has more than 300 data centers worldwide.

It's one of the biggest data center providers out there.

We actually passed another huge Digital Realty building while we were driving in just two blocks away.

The company is more than 20 years old, which is another way of saying it's been building and leasing data center space for way longer than this current AI boom.

Digital Realty broke ground back in 2021.

And to the untrained eye, it does look about ready to go.

The whole place is 430,000 square feet, four stories high, with an identical data hall on each floor.

Still empty for now.

This place is so new, man.

The whiteboard markers aren't even unwrapped.

Come on through.

This place is a lot like the Los Angeles data center we were in yesterday, just quieter, without the hum of 48 megawatts plugged into it.

Kotlin led us down a hall with industrial pipes and huge swaths of cables running all along the ceiling.

It looks like it could be a storage warehouse, honestly.