More Good, Not Less Bad. Rethinking the Data Center [014]

Episode Description

JoAnn Garbin is our first returning guest, and few people know data centers better. At Microsoft she led the Regenerative Data Center of the Future. Today she runs Regenerous Labs, working to build the first data center designed from scratch to be good for the company, the community, and nature.

Ron and JoAnn start with a Gallup finding that more Americans would oppose a data center near them than a nuclear plant, then work through what is real and what is noise. JoAnn explains why "water neutral" is usually branding, why most of a data center's water footprint sits upstream in power generation, and why the companies building these campuses are software companies pretending to be power and construction companies.

She walks through the Mud Lobster design: canopies instead of buildings, one road instead of many, permeable ground, and a one-year build instead of ten years of dump trucks. And she gives local leaders a checklist: ask whether the demand is real, get the load and the tenure in writing, make the builder carry the grid costs, and treat the town as a partner whose revenue stays local.

Two notes. "Regenerous Labs" appears to be the correct name of JoAnn's company based on our earlier research, but double-check the spelling directly with her before publishing since it is an unusual word. And "Regenerative Data Center of the Future" versus "Regenerative Datacenter of the Future" is worth confirming with her as well; the transcript uses both spellings at different points.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube.

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