Good morning, Cold Isle here. We’re the 5-minute spinach to your Popeye.

Here’s what we got for you today:

• Supply chain silliness, geopolitics, and an opportunity

• Listen to This: How AI is changing data centers 🎧

• Quantum computing and cryptography as we know it

• Will you be building your next data center on the moon? 🌑

• Daily Dal-E 🎨

Expected reading time: 4min, 16secs

‘Supply chains’ is a boring topic

And we all know that Covid-19 eviscerated supply chains and normal business operations for two years.
We also probably all noticed that other industries like manufacturing, construction, and consumer goods have snapped back to something resembling lead-time normalcy. And yet, the data center world hasn’t sniffed anything close to pre-Covid supply chain normalcy.
The Uptime Institute looked into this further and found:

• 75% of organizations are reporting current supply chain disruptions of some kind

• 20% of operators report major delays on current projects

• Satisfaction with vendors’ delivery schedules has plummeted

• Over 40% of operators are looking for alternative sources for materials and components

So why are data centers and other mission critical projects so resilient to the supply chain recovery seen elsewhere?
UII blames the complexity of the electrical and mechanical equipment that is ubiquitous in every aspect of a data center project.

Take an engine generator: you’ve got hundreds of complicated parts, sourced from dozens of countries throughout Europe, Asia and North America.

And even when trying to source simpler parts like voltage regulators, air filters, or battery terminals, the components of the components are coming from elsewhere.

So the entire system is deeply susceptible to the whims of a highly dynamic global marketplace.

(For what it’s worth, here's a poll Compass did on Linkedin a few days ago: 🤷)

As such, our current geopolitical quagmire is doing us no huge favors. With Russia’s intrusion into Ukraine throwing energy pricing into the muck for the foreseeable future and China’s increasing belligerence, there’s a deep uncertainty around pricing and production schedules.
(No need to say why semiconductors are a particularly relevant ingredient in all of this.)

So what though? There might be a silver lining: According to our buddies at Equinix, supply chain issues themselves have been a motivating factor for IT decision-makers to invest in their digital infrastructure. 

In fact: 34% of industry leaders plan to deploy their expansion plans virtually, via the cloud.
So while materials logistics are particularly challenging right now, the operation driving that challenge is an increasing demand for information services. (That’s also the title of my memoir.)

More stuff you should be reading…

🎓 A bunch of different data center certifications. This is a cool, if limited look at some of the major certifications in the DC industry, and the organizations behind them. I doubt there are many professionals that wouldn’t benefit from at least one of these.

❌ APIs have quickly become a significant invasion vector for cyber attackers. DCKnowledge does a fine job breaking down how pros can address that risk on a data center level.

🎧 LISTEN TO THIS: Samueh Dougelbene spends about 20 minutes discussing how and why AI workloads continue to influence hardware design and data center topology. From the Light Reading podcast, Samueh really knows her stuff.

🏛️ I’m not convinced that the Government Accountability Office knows its way around a data center, but it’s interesting to see what they think. Here’s their new Data Center Optimization “progress report.”

💻 This is not an ad for Deloitte. But this white paper they did for the World Economic Forum is a compelling look at the risks and opportunities of the imminence of quantum computing, particularly in relation to cryptography. They believe that quantum computing will reach a tipping point that would make some cryptography easily defeatable.

Data centers on the moon

There’s a startup in Florida that has raised over $5 million to put miniature data centers on the moon.

With land, power, and water constraints becoming more oppressive every day, Lonestar Data Holdings wants to land refrigerator-sized data centers on the lunar surface. Their goal is to build a series of data centers on the moon and establish the moon as a viable platform for data storage and edge processing.

I did not have “using the moon’s surface for data storage” on my 2023 bingo card, but that is one of the coolest things I can think of.

Daily Dall-E

“a data center on the martian surface”

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