cover of episode Saving the Planet with Better AI Data Centers (with Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller)

Saving the Planet with Better AI Data Centers (with Crusoe CEO Chase Lochmiller)

2023/8/14
logo of podcast ACQ2 by Acquired

ACQ2 by Acquired

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Crusoe Energy uses computing infrastructure to mitigate flaring by capturing waste gas and converting it into usable energy for AI data centers, significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Shownotes Transcript

We sit down with Crusoe Energy CEO Chase Lochmiller to talk about the two “hard to imagine” tasks they’ve undertaken: 1) building a new AI cloud infrastructure provider from scratch, and 2) colocating and powering it with stranded energy from some of the harshest and most remote locations on earth.

Crusoe’s cloud of course has to compete with (and in many cases exceed) the price/performance curves of cloud incumbents like AWS, Azure and Google in processing AI workloads. And the way it does so is by building data centers literally on top of oil flares (and other wasted energy sources) that otherwise comprise multiple percentage points of annual global greenhouse gas emissions. In other words — methane that previously just got lit on fire is now powering your favorite AI startup’s training workloads!

We cover what it actually takes to build and operate a public cloud, the latest Nvidia networking and server innovations and what they mean for GPU data centers, and how to set up a company to pursue something “hard” like this across the team, operations and capital raising fronts. Tune in!

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