# Data Centers Have a Heart. Meet the Humans Behind the Cloud.

The people behind the infrastructure are worth knowing. Three days at YOTTA reminded me why their kindness matters, and how it is the seed that, if properly nurtured, can start the rest of the industry’s relationship with its neighbors.

By Tony Greenberg

The future has a power cord, and outlets are scarce. The neighbors need to know who gets plugged in and who sits in the dark.

For three days at [YOTTA](https://www.yotta-event.com/), the newest and largest meetup around AI, energy, and infrastructure, I listened to an industry try to fit tomorrow into a building and find enough electricity to wake it up. The talk ran from chips and capital to power, and from there to compute beyond Earth, as though one planet had become an inconvenient starter home. It felt at once familiar from my 30+ years behind the servers and groundbreaking in an exhilarating way.

Old friends were the other draw. They are the kind who remember earlier versions of me and still answer the phone, which may be the most underrated form of renewable energy. Among them were Peter Gross, George Rockett, and Dean Nelson, who are both the most influential visionaries behind this machinery and some of the kindest humans I know.

Kindness does not settle a dispute over electricity, water, or land, but it does complicate the polarized caricature in which everyone building a data center is a villain with a cooling tower.

Over the years I have watched these friends build schools, gather extraordinary minds, and give their time to causes far beyond their companies. Their light should be seen. It should also guide the industry toward making kindness as much a part of the blueprint as electrical engineering.

## Only time buys trust

I entered this business in March 1996, marketing the corner known as co-location. I liked the hyphen in CO-LOCATION: two things sharing a place, with even the spelling learning to live together. I recall my push for “Internet Data Center company” as a moniker for Exodus’ services after conversations with Barry James Folsom. The industry was still finding its language, and the rest of us were finding our way.

Four years later, I went from pitchman to auditor. I founded RampRate to bring transparency and better decisions to technology deals, which has meant years of crawling through the plumbing between a promise and a contract. It is glamorous work, if you enjoy spreadsheets.

That journey had its own lessons that still matter. A low price can be a magic trick: the cost vanishes from your bill and reappears in somebody else’s life. It’s just one of many illusions. A top-notch service level commitment with a cap on the credits. No one getting fired for buying an established brand. Value was a shadow on the wall, and our small team cast a large shadow.

The threads are converging in ImpactSoul, the rehabilitation of extractive business models to serve the public good. That means a stronger connection between the wealth compute creates and the wellbeing of the people who make it possible. And YOTTA is where I spent time with three founding fathers of the industry who deserve their own spotlight.

## Peter: keeping the machinery alive, remembering why

Peter Gross is one of my dearest friends, and the industry’s great-uncle and godfather. If there’s a groundbreaking innovation in energy or mission-critical infrastructure, there’s a good chance that Peter was an advisor or a mentor. Endlessly curious and erudite, giving of his time and prodigious intellect, and with a directness that cuts through the BS, his is the vote that counts most if I want to distinguish hype from breakthrough.

His career includes co-founding EYP Mission Critical Facilities and leading PMG Associates, and his service on the advisory board of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment and Sustainability and on the Los Angeles Ballet board reaches well beyond the infrastructure he helped shape.[1]

Keeping a server alive is an accomplishment; remembering what makes life worth keeping is another.

![Tony Greenberg and Peter Gross at YOTTA](https://syzygy-who-gets-to-plug-in.eclecticexe.chatgpt.site/tony-peter-gross-v2.png)

Tony Greenberg and Peter Gross at YOTTA.

## George: a curator of humans

George Rockett founded [DatacenterDynamics](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/) (DCD) and YOTTA, and I watched him build both step by step, with courage, intellect, persuasion, and a great deal of good conversation.

He gathers people from the industry and far beyond it, then gives their collective intelligence room to become something extraordinary. I crave our conversations, because his knowledge runs deep, his curiosity travels widely, and I rarely leave thinking exactly as I did when I arrived.

George is one of the great catalysts for what I call a gemspark, the fusion of serendipity and synchronicity, in which an unexpected encounter meets a meaningful alignment and a possibility comes alive.

At YOTTA, George and I held a puppy in a hall devoted to tomorrow’s machinery, and for a moment the future had paws. The puppy had no position on grid interconnection and made no claims about transforming humanity, which I found refreshing.

![Tony Greenberg and George Rockett with a puppy at YOTTA](https://syzygy-who-gets-to-plug-in.eclecticexe.chatgpt.site/tony-george-puppy-v2.png)

Tony Greenberg, George Rockett, and puppy at YOTTA.

## Dean: the conscience has a work history

If Peter is the most valuable mind and George the connective tissue, Dean Nelson is the best embodiment of the heart, not just because he built the first public accountability for energy use at eBay (we pitched in on it) or gave hyperscaler servers a second life at his current venture [Cato Digital](https://www.datacenterfrontier.com/machine-learning/article/33002501/cato-bare-metal-platform-comes-to-hudson-ix) (full disclosure, I’m an investor in that), but because he spent as much time giving kids across the world a future as he did on breakthroughs in tech and emissions.

A 2007 trip to India with his mother, Sandy, set them on the path to [Just Let Me Learn](https://justletmelearn.org/about.html), whose work spans schools, transport, and tutoring, the infrastructure of a childhood.[2] He didn’t build it alone, but got the whole industry to join. I funded the soccer field called the RampRate Field of Dreams.[3] A place to play is a place to belong. Geeks Giving Back rallied people around the school. [iMasons](https://imasons.org/) raised $50,000 for it at its first meeting in 2016.[4]

iMasons deserves its own spotlight. Founded by Dean as the industry’s top practitioner org, it started as a convener of expertise. It’s fast becoming the conscience for the compute industry, a place where the people building the machinery can face the responsibilities that come with it. Its Climate Accord extracted meaningful commitments on emissions from top participants. Its Social Accord brings communities into the conversation. The innovation track mentors and guides the next generation of breakthroughs. Its Foundation invests in people through education and professional pathways.[5]

Watching the iMasons Awards was better than watching the Academy Awards. I waited for a seat, and the room felt more in demand than an early shipment of a Rubin chip from NVIDIA.

The prize was recognition, given to people who keep the invisible machine running and to people trying to make its future worthy of the power it consumes. In a week of gargantuan forecasts, that room gave me a human-scale definition of value.

![Dean Nelson, Tony Greenberg, Peter Gross and George Rockett at the iMasons Awards](https://syzygy-who-gets-to-plug-in.eclecticexe.chatgpt.site/tony-friends-imasons-awards.png)

Dean Nelson, Tony Greenberg, Peter Gross and George Rockett at the iMasons Awards. Twenty-five years of hanging on to one another.

You can buy access and you can buy attention, but only time buys trust.

## The cloud has neighbors

Did you hear all the data centers in the world are shutting down?

Yep. They’re putting them in the cloud.

It is a neat disappearing act: the buildings vanish from the sentence while the land, water, and electricity remain stubbornly on Earth.

Follow the cloud home and you find a neighborhood that is stockpiling pitchforks and torches.

This is the crux of the industry’s trouble today: it has been the quiet neighbor for 30 years, but with a bit of partisan prodding, that lack of an impression becomes the focal point for all the fears about AI. If we don’t get out and bring people some homemade pie, people start recalling that news stories that include “he was quiet and kept to himself” usually end badly.

We’ve been trying to change that narrative for years. A sadly now-defunct project built in opportunity zones (federally designated distressed neighborhoods, many of them hollowed out by jobs shipped abroad) fought food deserts with greenhouses kept warm by waste heat. Others are actively shifting compute away from places where it strains the grid and into the hinterlands with stranded power.

Even inside the largest companies, people are working on questions worth taking seriously. One of the most interesting people I met at YOTTA was Tyler Norris, whose co-authored Duke paper, [Rethinking Load Growth](https://scholars.duke.edu/publication/1665550), examines how briefly reducing demand during the grid’s busiest periods could make room for more customers.[6] The local engineering still has to work, since you cannot plug a building into a promising paper. The question still matters: can being a good neighbor include knowing when to ease off the grid, and if that flexibility creates savings, who receives them?

## Bring the alignment down to Earth

Syzygy has been part of my foundation’s name for more than a decade. The word means celestial bodies coming into alignment, and it looks as though the alphabet fell down the stairs and landed on an idea worth keeping. The love began when I learned of its earlier trademark connection to my friend Nolan Bushnell. There is a mezcalrita story, but that is for another time.

At YOTTA, that old love of celestial alignment picked up an earthly assignment: bring energy, intelligence, capital, and human dignity into the same sky, then come down and make the agreement work. That is my assessment of the industry and the good people I know behind it.

The good will is there. The ideas and energy are there. All we need is to align with the interests of the communities that give us a share of increasingly scarce resources. Good people helped build this industry, and my challenge is to make their neighbors feel that goodness in the terms, the bills, and the benefits.

This will take a different type of work than the industry has done so far, no matter the individual virtues of its people. A generous person can change a life. An enforceable agreement can protect people that person will never meet, long after the project changes hands. Kindness needs its own infrastructure of covenants and escrow to survive a refinancing, a leadership change, or a sale.

This is just one facet of the future I’m building. Through ImpactSoul, I want to explore how compute can help advance medicine, widen opportunity, and support a regenerative tomorrow.

### About the author

Tony Greenberg founded RampRate in 2000 and co-founded ImpactSoul. An investor and impact futurist, he works across technology infrastructure, healthcare, and regenerative enterprise.

### Sources

1. [UCLA: Peter Gross](https://www.ioes.ucla.edu/person/peter-gross/).
2. [Just Let Me Learn: its origins](https://justletmelearn.org/about.html).
3. [Just Let Me Learn campaign update: RampRate Field of Dreams](https://www.indiegogo.com/cs/projects/deannelson/just-let-me-learn-school-sesawng-india/updates/28).
4. [Dean Nelson and school-building in India](https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/business/dean-nelson-teams-with-mom-to-build-schools-in-india); [iMasons’ 2016 meeting](https://imasons.org/activity/events-2016-people-amer/).
5. [iMasons Social Accord](https://imasons.org/initiatives/social-accord/); [Infrastructure Masons](https://imasons.org/); [iMasons Foundation](https://imasons.org/initiatives/foundation/).
6. [Duke: Rethinking Load Growth](https://scholars.duke.edu/publication/1665550).

Further research: [25 documented community initiatives and the evidence behind them](https://syzygy-who-gets-to-plug-in.eclecticexe.chatgpt.site/#appendix).