Capacity Clearance

There is a physical reality which we as humans must manage. The entire progress of human civilization depends on us managing and harnessing energy. Energy is our universal currency. Human evolution can be seen through the lens of managing ever greater flows of energy in more affordable ways with lower cost, and converting them into heat, light, motion, work. Humanity is at another one of those evolutionary inflections, converting our energy into intelligence. Ironically we are doing this in a very unintelligent way.

To our knowledge, despite seeking signs of extraterrestrial intelligence, human beings are the most adept beings at the management and harnessing of energy. Still, it is an arduous process. Converting energy into intelligence has proven to be a complicated task. There's no clearer expression of both that complication and the convergence of technology and energy than the data center. AI has kicked off an arms race, and winning it requires the buildout of vast amounts of data centers. This of course requires man to return to the physical world and deal with land, water, fiber, and an immense amount of energy.

We must build out this infrastructure. However, logistical limitations as well as physical ones abound, chief among them being energy. These bottlenecks have led to us becoming incapable of scaling as quickly as hoped. In our rush to build more, we have forgotten to make better use of what already exists. We have on our hands a bit of a crisis: The buildout of new infrastructure will take years. The inefficient use of what already stands is compounding now. Humanity has always been at its most resourceful in crisis. And for the first time, we have help. Humans have been the most efficient creators and managers of energy, but now there is another entity that is more efficient. Artificial Intelligence.

Fragmentation

The mutation of tooling is key to our civilization. Every evolutionary inflection has demanded new ones. If AI is the next inflection, the tools we use to manage energy must themselves become intelligent. The tooling to manage the most energy intensive operations, critical to us realizing the goals of our artificial intelligence explosion, is simply broken, built for a time before. Data center operators are being slammed with unprecedented demand, and that has forced the reactive choice to build more. But every operator we talk with tells us they sit on top of capacity that can serve demand now. The data center is a conversion engine alive with change, taking raw inputs, land, water, fiber, and energy, and converting them into serviceable capacity for customers, who turn that capacity into the extraordinary applications beneficial to society we are seeing sprout up rapidly today. That conversion engine is a leaking bucket. Every data center is a snowflake, they have always been, the physical reality of our planet makes it so, our tools must reflect this physical reality and help us contend with it.

Existing tooling does the opposite. It treats data centers like raindrops. Instead of bending to the facility, it forces the operator to bear a double burden. They manage the physical reality of the building, the racks, wires, cables, networks. Then they also have to maintain the representation of that facility inside every application they touch. This creates massive overhead and constant drift between what exists physically and what exists inside the applications. Scaling compounds it. Every new site multiplies the drift.

Compounding this is fragmentation. Organizations are snowflakes within themselves. Different teams, different priorities, different tools. For Data Centers, the goal of any individual organization, and even the goal of different sub groups within an organization, is the same: provide capacity. But tooling and applications shape how we think. If one group is using a CRM to think about sales, another BMS and EPMS to think about facilities, and another spreadsheets and DCIM to think about managing the physical reality, we are thinking about the same goal differently. Even more operational burden is incurred when these systems don't agree. Layer on the fact that the market is demanding capacity now, meaning you must serve existing customers while planning out how to serve future customers more dynamically, and the problem becomes exponentially more unmanageable than the tooling was ever built for.

One Source of Truth

Critical infrastructure needs critical tooling. Operators should not carry the burden of interpreting a dashboard, reasoning about changes needed to accommodate new customers, keeping track of an ever growing array of asset configurations, and reconciling fragmentation of data across siloed systems. What is needed is one source of truth to reason, plan, operate, and ultimately monetize capacity in one place.

Working with operators on the ground floor of the energy and AI revolutions has allowed us to gain an understanding that reconciling the physical reality of data centers requires manual work that will not scale with the increase in demand projected. The technology built to handle this convergence has not risen to the challenge. Management of both the machines inside the data centers and the energy used to power them requires a platform with intelligence. The category pretending to care about this operational burden has not lived up to AI's promise. Those that promise a more refined or elevated version of the same thing are just that. Promises.

Operators have told us that data centers are leaking buckets of revenue. Leaking revenue means wasted energy. We must build out more infrastructure to meet the demands of our time, but what is the point if that infrastructure is used sub optimally, leading to waste. Further shame if this is done because we have forgotten about the exceptional human beings inside of the building, left with pre historic (pre AI!) tooling not fit for the job. The outside world gains an intelligence bump but not the humans dealing with the machines themselves, a shame! We know AI is what is most capable of managing the operational problems causing the leakage. We also know massive amounts of energy will be wasted if we do not think of the long term consequences of the maintenance of our infrastructure.

To meet the needs of today we need clarity on our energy usage. Energy is the life and driving force behind our civilizations. Technology is how we accelerate change. Data centers sit at the convergence of both. They are a communal project with second order effects on everything from water usage to power prices. AI is what makes this work. As we convert energy to intelligence more efficiently, productivity rises and society grows more abundant. This leads Haloid to our north star.

AI for energy. Energy for AI.