Meghan McCarty Carino

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.

They owned the virtual roads of the information highway.

And those roads didn't connect in very many places.

You had to pay tolls to jump from one network to another.

The innovation at PAX was to just plug a bunch of networks together in a neutral location, almost like a roundabout.

That created the system that helped make the cloud possible.

This is the home of the virtual world.

From telephone switchboards to early search engines to today's data-hungry AI companies, we humans have needed places like this to connect.

Maria Hollenhorst and Daniel Shin produced this episode.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino, and that's Marketplace Tech.

The pressure is on for tech companies to be good neighbors.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

A micron memory chip factory in upstate New York is wrangling with local groups who want legal assurances the project will benefit the community.

We'll dig into that on today's Marketplace Tech Bytes Week in Review.

Plus, how YouTube plans to crack down on AI slop.

But first, it's shaping up to be a big year for very big IPOs.

Elon Musk is reportedly preparing to take SpaceX public at an anticipated valuation of around $1.5 trillion.