Rewiring the Data Center: Drew Baglino on Power, Scale, and the AI Boom
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
All right, here we are. Welcome back to another edition of Data Center Revolution, the podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Please like or share, comment if you want. And if it's cool, share it with some of the people that you know in the industry that can find value in this. I'm excited today. I have an incredible guest that, Drew, why don't you introduce yourself and then I'll go from there.
Sounds good. Thanks for having me, Kirk. Yeah, so I'm Drew Baglino. I'm the founder and CEO of Heron Power, which is a power electronics company trying to streamline the interconnection of all this new load, like data centers and new generation, batteries and renewables to the grid as we electrify more and more things every day. And before founding the company in 2024, I was at Tesla, largely in an engineering role for 18 years.
That's it. Just getting started at a company like that. Right. I was just reading. So, I mean, like, it's amazing what you guys are accomplished. Um, you know, we were introduced, was it last year from Wade? So Wade Vincent, shout out to you, my friend, our best to you and Kathy. Um, so Wade introduced us because, uh, I mean, I think just last week, maybe it was even this week already. I got an email from Wade on 800 volts DC, right? So anything and everything you need to know about 800 volts DC in like a single video. So it was fantastic. so the thing is is we knew that we're evolving and he introduced you to me because what you're getting into is um you know the solution for the ai power crunch perhaps right and we have uh no shortage of clown cars in this industry of people running around that are pouring out that come from renewables and private equity and are like hey i have a solution for all the data center problems of power but the truth is you know
Who is Drew Baglino and why does his Tesla background matter for data center power?
The question that I would ask you is, are we actually short on electricity or short on the equipment required to move, shape, and deliver electricity? And I'm hoping that that's something you could help us unpackage, especially with your background, because I want to hear your opinion on storage and other things of that nature as well, right? So where did you come from, man? Where did that brain come from? So when people are like, who is this guy? Yeah.
Yeah. Well, for the six years before I left Tesla, I spent a lot of time working on energy problems of all kinds, both building up battery factories and deploying like utility scale battery packs like the Megapack, which was, you know, is Tesla's sort of leading industrial scale energy storage solution. Yeah. And it was amazing to watch that storage market grow, you know, from basically nothing in 2014 to, you know, tens of gigawatt hours, really almost like 100 gigawatts in 2025 globally, you know, in a decade, you know, just massive growth. And so much of the technologies that made that possible and made the electrification of vehicles possible, like the Cybertrucks that I've seen in Texas over the
That technology can be applied to other problems, right? It can be applied to the problems of the grid, of bringing more power onto the grid or making it easier to connect data centers to the grid. And so when I left Tesla, that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to take everything I had sort of learned about the problems in the energy industry and the pain points, the bottlenecks in the supply chain, and use the technology that I had personally done a lot to help scale and bring it to those new problem statements.
Well, that's awesome. Let me zoom out even further. Sure. I know that your headquarters is in California. Where are you from?
I grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts, which is kind of like a suburb of Boston. My dad was an electrical engineer. I'm an electrical engineer, sort of a leaf not falling far from the tree there. And he took the train into Boston, worked at Teradyne for 35 years, which is... Still today, a great company in the automated test space. So basically all of the embedded microprocessors that drive like mobile phones, all the Wi-Fi chips, the 5G chips are all tested by Teradyne machines.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:06–1:48
2
Who is Drew Baglino and why does his Tesla background matter for data center power?
1:48–8:11
3
Are we short on electricity or short on equipment to deliver it to data centers?
8:11–10:10
4
How did Drew’s experience with Megapack and Tesla inform Heron Power’s mission?
10:10–1:19:29
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from Data Center Revolution
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