Meghan McCarty Carino

It's kind of spooky down here.

It's kind of spooky down here.

A historic home tour of the virtual world.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm 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.

We'll be right back.

I'm Megan McCarty Carino.

This is Marketplace Tech.

We're continuing our series on AI infrastructure today with a historical tour of a building that helped create the modern internet.

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