Megan McCarty Carino

Sometimes things are not as they appear.

I understand this is actually a data center.

We're in downtown Palo Alto, California for our series on AI infrastructure.

Eddie Espinoza is the customer operations manager of the data center that is hiding inside this ornate old building.

It's owned by a company called Equinix, which is one of those companies that you might not personally have heard of, but without knowing it, you're connected to all the time.

Equinix specializes in something called co-location, which is kind of like apartment buildings for computing power, where customers can lease space for their data traffic.

Equinix has data centers all over the country, and they're building more in hopes of capitalizing on the AI boom.

But this one is special.

It was built in 1929 by the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph Company as a place for telephone switchboards.

Once inside, Eddie took us into a room with racks of servers humming away.

Wait, so they had their office spaces down here with all this machinery?

Yes, yes.

It might be hard to picture, given the gleaming campuses of big tech companies today, but a lot of early Internet creators, like the founders of AltaVista, were in spaces like this one.

It's kind of spooky down here.

It was dark with creepy blue lighting and a maze of mesh cages to lock away servers.

This was the first cage of PAX back in 1996.

That is the big reason we're here.

PAX is short for the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which pioneered the business model that co-location companies use today and really created the foundation for the modern Internet.

Here's how it worked.

Before PAX, the Internet was mostly operated by research institutions and a few large telecom providers.