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With millions of listeners a month, Building the Future has quickly become one of the fastest rising nationally syndicated programs. With a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more, the show showcases individuals who are realizing their dreams and helping to make our world a better place through technology and innovation.
Welcome to Building the Future, hosted by Kevin Horrick. With millions of listeners a month, building the Future has quickly become one of the fastest rising programs with a focus on interviewing startups, entrepreneurs, investors, CEOs, and more. The radio and TV show airs in 15 markets across the globe, including Silicon Valley. For full Showtimes, past episodes or to sponsor this show, please visit Buildingthefutureshow.com.
Welcome back to the show. Today we have Tom and Eric from Redividor. Guys, welcome to the show.
Well, thank you for having us.
Yeah, I'm excited to have you guys on the show. I think what you guys are doing is actually really innovative and cool, but maybe before we get into that, let's get to know each one of you a little bit better. And maybe, Tom, how about you start off and then give us a bit of background on yourself, kind of where you grew up, where you went to school. And then, Eric, I'll let you do the.
Sure, sure. Yeah. So I'm Tom Frazier. I'm one of the founders and the CEO of Redividor. And I grew up in Arizona and went to school in upstate New York at RIT in pretty sorry to cut you off.
What made you want to go into that?
Well, I wanted to go into, basically when I was in high school, I bought my dad for his birthday. I bought him a one Meg Ram chip for his computer. And I just got hooked on this idea of computers in high school. And so I wanted to go to a school that I thought was pretty progressive in terms of where computing was going. So I picked Rit in upstate New York, and, man, I'm really glad I did. I mean, I had such a unique experience there. But my career path is very atypical because I had such an amazing experience at RIT that I was hired there as faculty staff right after my 18th birthday. So I was there, this is in the mid 90s, so the idea of the Internet was literally just taking off.
I had a front seat to the Internet when it was being built, and I just got really hooked on technology and haven't looked back since. But that did take me to the industry of computer security, where I was helping secure some of the most critical assets on the planet, from nuclear facilities to military bases, just lots of different things, and kind of got burnt out. Ended up moving to Australia, where I lived for nearly ten years, and I ran a big portion of Fortune 50s cloud computing and Security division there for Asia Pacific, and got this moment where I climbed the corporate ladder and I reached the top and I was like, oh, man, I think I've climbed the wrong ladder in its entirety. And that set me on this path.
It set me on this path of being an entrepreneur, of like, wow, I really enjoy taking all these things. I learned in the security industry of how you break things, right? You learn how it's assembled in parts and how you can use that to find vulnerabilities. And I just kind of applied that in the inverse, and instead I started building companies and understanding the building blocks to create companies. And that's kind of led me on the majority of my career.
Interesting. Okay, Eric, how about you give us a bit of background on yourself?
All right, so Eric Appleblum, born and raised in the Good Old Bay Area, San Francisco.
That's rare. That's rare.
I know it's rare. Well, it's even more rare. My, actually, I went to San Jose State University, graduated with a degree, with an engineering degree, with a concentration, industrial technology, with a concentration in manufacturing systems. And the reason I did that is I'm a third generation manufacturer. So my grandfather, which is kind of cool, he owned the last plastic injection molding firm to leave downtown. So, you know, I have a much different background than Tom. Not nearly as sexy, but worked in the family business for many years and really took.
Did you just call it sexy?
What? No, I said that it's sexier than plastic. Let me tell you, it can be. No, growing up in San Francisco, I talked to all my friends. They worked for Google, all this other stuff, and they say, what do you do? And I'm like, well, I do plastics. ANd they go, you do know. It's kind of cool. Grew up in the family business, and I became an expert manufacturing. And people ask, why did you go into that field? I was a kid that played with Legos, played with capcella. I was always trying to figure out how to do this robot that know, jump in the pool and crawl out and then go across the know. And you ask, how does it fit in with Redevider? Well, we're manufacturing data centers, so I'm a great compliment tom.
Sure. So I'm curious, how did you two meet? And then let's dive into the company and how you came up with the idea for it.
Tom, I'll let you.
When. When COVID happened. My wife is a nurse, and I was very disenfranchised watching my wife have to reuse PPE personal protective equipment because it was such a shortage. And as an entrepreneur, I thought I could do something about that and maybe help. So myself and a few other guys kind of all share a value system around being a good human being. And ultimately, through that process is how Eric and I had met. When you really stand for something in your life, you tend to repel people that don't feel like you, and you attract people who know. That's how Eric and I found each other, I don't know, three, four years ago, just in terms of how were approaching life and both trying to solve a problem for other human beings.
Okay, but you guys live in different geographic locations, correct?
Yeah.
So how did you guys actually connect?
Well, I mean, just phone calls and meetings and stuff about different things. And Eric was doing what he was doing, I was doing what I was doing. And then we started talking more and more. And then we kind of got aligned, and we had these ideas and said, hey, let's start something together. And this is kind of what led us to redividor.
Okay, but then how did you come up with the idea? And then let's dive into what exactly it is.
Sure. So Redividor has four founders. There's myself, Eric, and two other guys, and one of the other founders. We all had this idea, pretty simple idea that if you look at data centers, pretty is. Again, this is like my domain expertise, so it's easier for me to see this. But if you look at data centers quite broadly, there is just this white spot that hasn't been serviced yet, which is the idea of edge computing. So think of data centers getting really small. So if you kind of close your eyes and imagine a data center today, it's like a million square foot facility, probably similar to how you think of an Amazon shipping warehouse. Right? They're these huge places.
But as computing gets more and more intense, as data gets created more and more voluminous in more and more places, COVID really taught us one thing, that people used to go to a downtown office building, and it was connected with a huge pipe to a huge data center. And now people don't work like that anymore, period. The whole world has shifted to working in a more decentralized way. Now, data centers take forever to build, and so there's this kind of, like, lag time to shift into what that looks like. But we see the opportunity for these really small facilities going places. So one of our other founders like, hey, we should do this in what are called opportunity zones. And so Eric and know we're kind of researching it, we brought on some people to help us do it.
But opportunity zones are basically economic areas in the United States that are largely underserviced. It was a paper mill that got shut down. And now you have this town or this whole region that is desolate. Right? And those pockets exist in every single state in America. I can't remember the exact number. Eric, maybe you remember like 8000 tracts of land in the US.
Yeah, 6000.
So that's really where the idea of redivider was born. It's like, can you be a great human being and start from scratch building a data center with no legacy? How would you do it? And we think what we've done now is the result of a lot of great thinking from a lot of great people.
Okay, so how are you similar, other than maybe size and different from the big data centers?
Well, the big facilities, they generally are structured as a publicly traded REIT, right? Like a real estate trust. So they take in a bunch of money, they build a huge building, they get tenants to go in it, and then they know shareholders on a regular basis. So that's how we're similar. We're still offering computing services to companies, whether it be a hyperscaler company like Amazon or Google or Microsoft or Enterprise IT. But where we're maybe a little different is we're focused on what we think are core value principles that are going to drive the next 20 years of computing, and that being sustainability and social impact. We think those two ideas align far greater than the IT department of any company. They're going to align at the board level. Every company, every government is trying to create alignment with these.
One framework that I think is very easy to talk about is the United Nations SDGs or Sustainability development Goals. And so we've designed our entire data center business around the idea that we can push computing into opportunity zones and create a social impact for those communities in a very positive way, and we can offer computing into the market that is much higher sustainability than what's currently available today.
Got it. Okay, so who are your ideal customers then? And how are they using your data center or data centers, I should say.
Well, I think it's multifaceted, right? So if you look at the sustainability of large companies like Google, right, I think they do a phenomenal job. They measure their carbon footprint, they do a bunch of things to reduce their carbon footprint overall, but it's not public. They have their own private mechanics for doing so. So our customer base is literally anybody with a server, in the same way that Amazon or Google might be our customer in our facilities. But if you take away that group of hyperscaler companies and you look at enterprises. The carbon footprint of an enterprise is about five times higher than using somebody like Google. So by us taking a data center and putting it really close, like, literally, we can put a data center in a company's parking lot. That's how small these things can go. Yeah, it's very cool.
We can talk about that, too. But we can now take the environmental footprint that we can deliver, which is highly sustainable in terms of the embodied carbon in the facility, how we run the computing, even down to the energy that we can use to run these facilities, being highly sustainable, that gives them a significant advantage for their board about delivering on some of the goals they have towards their SDGs.
Interesting. Okay, so let's dive a little bit deeper into that example you just gave about putting a data center into my parking lot. It seems simple, but it's got to be somewhat complex. Right? So walk us through that.
Should I take this one? Really what we're doing, what's different is that we're manufacturing data centers. So your traditional hyperscale data center could be a million square feet, giant building, just racks and racks of servers. So what we're doing is that when you think about the edge, is that we're manufacturing and think of these as 40 foot shipping containers. And depending upon the scalability or the size of what we're doing, it could be ten of them put together. It could be one or two, depending upon the specific application or specialty computing that we're applying this to. So what that does is it gives you modularity. We're able to drive cost downs because we're doing economies of scales. Because we're manufacturing, we're taking larger volume of stuff to drive down cost, increase the quality, and then from there, we develop something that is portable.
And when it's portable, then you're able to move things around. So it gives us flexibility on the location. And that's why we say a parking lot. We don't necessarily need to put down any type of building structure. We don't have to do a foundation or anything. We can literally put these in the parking lot, put in ground screws and secure them, then hook up whatever is powering them, and then move it when it's not needed anymore. So it gives us a lot of flexibility. You have to move this closer to where it's needed. And if you need to move in the future, we can move it somewhere else if it needs to be repurposed.
Interesting. Okay, so then how do you power these things? Is it green tech? Is it solar? Is it a bit of both, like, walk us through that.
I'll let you take that.
Yeah. I think it's worth maybe taking a minute on this idea. I really love to use bitcoin. About the canary in the coal mine. If you read anything about bitcoin right now, it is, in my opinion, very incorrectly positioned. As it's killing the planet. It has no value. Like, it sucks up all this electricity. But that's the canary in the coal mine, I believe, for the data center industry at large. Right. These are baseload customers, meaning they're always sucking electricity. It's not like your house that has a curve to it called the duck curve. So with that, when you talk about how do you make that clean energy? First of all, making data centers clean energy provides a profound difference because it is always on, but then comes down to how you do that.
So there are a number of ways that we think about it, and there will be different solutions for different areas. Right. So in one place, we might plug into the grid, because that grid operator has a very high sustainability footprint. Right. They've got a lot of solar, they've got nuclear, whatever it is, sometimes we just plug into the grid. In other cases, we want to take control of our own future, because we also think that there is a very pending escalation of electricity costs here in America over the next five to ten years. We think it is going to be a significant change to cost. So to insulate on that, we're doing this concept of a micro grid island, meaning we will have our own grid for our facilities in that location.
And that means we will power these facilities on site with some form of clean energy. Now, we're largely ruling out solar, because if you take the environmental footprint of solar, it's enormous. Right. To get a baseload always on power for solar, you've got to clear so much land that one. You can't put these a lot of places because you don't have the room for the solar panels. And when you do have all that land, well, you're actually creating an ecological change by clearing the land. So we don't think solar is the right thing for data centers. Great for your home. Not anti solar, just not solar for data centers.
Got it.
Wind is fantastic for different locations where you can have wind, but that doesn't work everywhere. So we think that we're very excited about the future of hydrogen and where hydrogen is going. We think that is probably the best possible scenario. And then there's some really great natural gas solutions as well. And ultimately, over the course of two decades, we see this idea of putting micro grid islands as a key unlock for the data center industry.
Okay, interesting. So do I need to basically be in and around a city, or can this kind of be in the middle of nowhere? Bit of both. How does that work? Does location, I guess, matter?
It can be both. It can definitely be both. It depends on the use case. Right.
Okay.
That's the beauty of these facilities being prefabricated, is it also changes what a data center looks and feels like. So, for example, one of our dream scenarios is to go to an opportunity zone that is economically depressed. There's also a high correlation to child obesity because of food deserts in these locations. And there's also an extreme lack of play space for kids. And so one of our dream scenarios, which we're not there yet, but we hope to be, is to take these data centers to be able to put them underground, use the waste product of a data center, which is either hot air or hot water, to power a community greenhouse for that opportunities and location. And then, because it's underground, build a park on top of it. And now we've completely changed the prosperity of that community through health, wealth, and education.
We've completely changed how data centers can integrate with a community and uplift humanity in general.
Okay.
No, I love that idea. But then how do you do maintenance on something that's underground? Like, obviously you'd have an access point, or. How does that work?
Yeah, you would do an access point. That's right. Yeah.
Okay.
And then obviously you just tunnel if you needed to grow it.
Yeah. I guess my example is one of many. Right. There are others that simply would be above ground, some that would be inside of buildings, some that would be maybe on the roof of a know, the idea of edge computing is going to dictate that there is no one size fits all. It's going to be a library. And that's really where Eric's expertise in manufacturing comes in. We're not doing the Henry Ford any color you like, as long as it's black. Right. We have to create this library of capabilities, and then depending on the scenario, we're going to use one, three, and seven, and in this scenario, we're going to use two and 64 and 98.
Got it. Okay. No, that's actually really cool. So then if you're changing the way a data center can be, how do you play security into that? Because obviously, I don't want somebody else getting into there and accessing my data. Right.
Yeah. Again, this is an area that is near and dear to my heart. Having spent ten plus years doing security for literally critical assets, there are plenty off the shelf solutions to accommodate that, from the physical security where you think it's like Ballards and fencing and cameras and whatever. But the other part to it that is integral to the design that we set up in the beginning is if you build a facility that is seen as an asset worth attacking for theft, we think that's an incomplete solution. If you build an asset that generates value for the community in large is interested in protecting it and preserving it as opposed to attacking it. And that's where we really think the idea of these facilities, powering greenhouses and using our waste product for other things that benefit the community.
Now we are really integrating into the fabric of that particular community to the point that they see its value more in place than if they were to attack it.
Okay, but then how do you handle the small percentage of people that are just jerks and will do that anyway?
You have security.
Yeah. You still have 24/7 guards. You still have fences and cameras and these little man trap things where it's got two doors. So you can do stuff like all those basics of security are going to be there, but it's more the overarching idea that communities protect assets that help as opposed to attacking it.
Okay, no, that makes total sense. So then how does that also work? Because obviously there's different weather, and throughout a year in certain parts of the world, obviously that has to factor in when you're doing the design of these things. But how do you make sure that you keep it cool in the summer and not freezing cold in the winter? Right. How do you manage just the temperature and the climate inside your data centers when they can be so customized?
Eric, do you want to do that, or you want me to take that one?
I can do that. I mean, there's many different ways that we can address that. So there's different technologies. They have air cooled technologies, you have immersion technologies depending upon the different climate. Do you understand what immersion is?
Well, just give us a bit of a background.
Okay, so immersion background is you prep a computer to basically be submerged in dielectric fluid, and that's used to cool or maintain the temperature of the computer. Now, this can be used in extremes, in extreme cold, very effective because it's an oil, doesn't freeze easily, depending upon the environment. If you're in a desert, very hot, once again, it's in a liquid, which is much easier to maintain the temperature. Most of the stuff that you see out there is air cooled, which is pretty standard. But in extreme cases, we have the ability to change the different cooling systems depending upon the different environment.
Got it. Okay. I think I even read a while ago that certain companies were putting stuff underwater just to keep it cool, right. In certain parts of the. Which is pretty cool, right? That you can do that.
I don't know how cost effective that is, but it's pretty cool.
Okay, fair enough. So I'm curious, can you maybe give us some other examples of how companies are leveraging your products and solutions? Because it almost seems they could be endless, and you could partner with somebody or a company to really build whatever we have the technology to build these days. Is that fair to say?
It is endless. It is so endless. And that's why we're excited. That's why we get up every day. The idea that the data center industry of yesterday are these mega buildings, and they're not going anywhere, right. They are a core piece of the Internet. The future, though, the majority of the future of computing needs to follow the data, where the data is generated. Right? So I'll give two examples. The large data center, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, they have this term they love to use called data gravity, where put all of your stuff in our cloud because you have gravity, and now you can do stuff with it all in the cloud. What we're seeing on a macro level, though, is people are getting really tired of paying the bill to shuttle the data to and from the cloud.
And so this computing pendulum swing, that was mainframes in the beginning, and then it went to personal computers and then servers and then back and forth. The way that pendulum is swinging now is taking all of the innovation of the cloud over the past ten years and putting it in a smaller scale closer to where the data has originated. So we're just calling that like a data fountain, right? There's thousands and thousands of little fountains of data happening. And so by putting the computing closer to that data, you get the same benefit of the cloud. We can do it in a sustainable way, we can do it in our model with higher social impact, but it's more aligned with what customers are looking to do with their data by moving the compute instead of moving the information.
Right. And I guess based on your understanding, how many companies, and there's probably a lot of big companies, are still not in the cloud at all, is that fair to say? Or they're slowly migrating or kind of. What's the state of the industry right now?
Yeah, it's probably too deep to go through in an hour interview. But you have some people that still have their computing power in their corporate offices in some way, like a hospital might have a closet with computing power in the hospital. You then have other people that use what's called colocation like us, where it's a data center, and they simply put their servers in the data center. And then you have others that are using cloud services, which they program it at an API level to the cloud as opposed to at the server level for colocation. What that mix is, I mean, we could look it up. I don't know what it is off top of my head, but the macro point is the cloud is awesome. It is absolutely incredible for sustainability, for flexibility, all those things.
But we're seeing this cost creep that's coming into cloud. So we think the idea of this edge computing market is the future, because now we want to be able for you as an enterprise to effectively go to a distributor and say, please add a data center to my shopping cart. And a truck shows up tomorrow and sets one down and you're going to borrow it for a year. And then somebody else is going to say, I want ten as a permanent installation or whatever. We just think that there's a different modality to computing tomorrow than there is yesterday.
Interesting. Okay, so I get a data center set up in wherever, close to my business. Walk us through, how do you guys manage that, if at all, over the weeks, months, that year, two years, or forever that I'm using your data center? Walk us through that once I have one. And what you guys do.
Yeah. So let's take smart city as an example. The cities all over the country or all over the world, rather, are trying to use technology to automate things or improve things. And a great use case is traffic calming, right? When they look at traffic patterns for congestion. Now they have two options to do that. And I am answering your question. I was trying to set it up right. So when you could completely rebuild the road infrastructure or you could set cameras on top and use computer vision to analyze stuff. So obviously the computer vision is significantly cheaper and easier to do. So that's where most smart cities are headed. But now you have video data that you've got to shuttle to the cloud. Well, that's going to cost a crazy amount of money to do so.
A smart city would say, we're pushing hard on computer vision. We're pushing hard on IoT and automation and item track, asset tracking, all these things. So we need a data center and they call redivider. Great. We're going to put a data center nearby. Now, our general mode of operation is two basic ideas. We have a hub location that we have staff, and we're building out our first major kind of hub location later this year. And then we have our spoke locations, which are kind of like a lights out. So if it's a lights out scenario, like a smart city, we would make sure that their lights out data center is supported by a nearby hub. So if there's a problem there, we can go do field service on the lights out. It's a drive distance away.
But because we don't need to be there all the time, we can take all the advantages of these large scale data centers, but we have all the advantages of a small facility close to that city.
Oh, interesting. Okay, that's actually really cool.
Yeah.
Okay, that's really cool then, right? Like that's game changing.
Correct.
Okay, I guess in theory, then you could put these all over a smart city, little data centers, I guess. My dad's retired, but it's funny that you mentioned because he sets up some of those cameras just in town and they do all the data stuff. And so it's interesting how because he talks about they literally have SD cards that they have to take back to the office and upload to the cloud. And it takes a long time because this would solve all that time and energy and just like paying people to do literally transferring data from an SD card.
Right? Yeah. And just to continue down the smart city thinking, I think the progressive smart cities are going to. Anybody who's running smart city listening, get in touch. But the really smart city operators are going to look at this as a revenue opportunity as well. They're going to say, I'm just making up a number. We have a need for half a megawatt of computing power to run our smart city, but we're going to put in a two megawatt modular facility, and now we're to be the provider to other tenants in our city. So if you have an enterprise that's in your city, they can then be the hosting for the enterprises that work there.
And when you tie that to the government incentives of attracting business, now they have a new incentive to offer people that they're getting their cost covered anyway because of their own internal needs as a community, and they have a revenue generating opportunity. So we think smart cities is a real game changer here. And we think the scale of edge computing is measured in thousands of facilities for America alone.
Yeah, fascinating. How does it change for rural? Because let's be honest, selfishly, this is a problem that I have personally that I think maybe satellite Internet has been. The only real option right now is if you have a community where it's by a lake or kind of outside of a major city, you could basically set up a data center around there to get them higher speed internet, way more cost effective than getting satellite or it shot to you through a wire or two, basically satellite dishes, for lack of a better term, for a. Is this a potential solution to some of the rural challenges with Internet as well, or. Not really.
This is why Eric has the hardest job in show business. Right. Because when you build out this library, you have to think of all the scenarios and the one you just presented is a good one and a very hard. Yeah, we're not going to solve the rural broadband issue in mass, but we can help make it less painful. So if we work, let's take a rural, and I'm not trying to exclude Canada, but we're very much focused on America. But if you take a rural community and we work with the federal government incentives, we work with the state incentives and the local incentives and say, hey guys, look, we're not being greedy, but if you trench a super high speed fiber line to our data center, then we can set up a lot of kind of Internet access points for that community.
There is benefit there. There's benefit there. And that's one of the tenants inside of the social impact program that we have is like, how are we benefiting the community in a way that's irrespective of the revenue profit scale or benefit of redivider. And those are when you think of capitalism in terms of stakeholder capitalism instead of shareholder capitalism, the mentality that you have shifts dramatically to thinking about solving some of these problems and making it a solution by a group of people instead of just one.
Sure. Well, and it seems to me, just from what I've read online, that a lot of governments of the world are really trying to do that anyway, right. They're trying to solve accessibility to everybody, whether you live in a city or in a rural setting. And the other thing to all this, I guess, is, as a lot of people we talked about earlier aren't really necessarily always going back downtown. Some people have moved further out because they're like, well, why not? Right, but I want high speed Internet or maybe in a community I need to set something up or I'm going to move my office a little bit further out because it's cheaper. Right. And being able to actually support that with my own data center is game changing for a lot of companies.
Yeah.
That'S very cool. Okay, so I guess if a company is listening and they want to get started, walk us through the process of actually getting me a data center as a company. I get that's kind of a very broad question, but what's the general kind of process and how long does it roughly take?
I guess to start with, we have to also understand where we are as a business and be practical about know, data centers are not know, they're not something you get in a week. It's not Amazon prime shipping. Right. Yeah. So by prefabricating them, our goal is to be able to install a facility within 30 days. That's our goal.
Yeah, but that's nothing, right? That's not long. That's very quick.
There's a big caveat. We have a lot of long lead time items. Say some items, call it generators, call it some of the air units. They could be up to 60 weeks for that. So we can't put them down in 30 days. But that is after we've established a long or a significant order where we start the supply chain of all the items coming in so that we can produce them. We can produce these in as little as one a week, one every three days. But it just depends upon how big the order is and how much of a supply chain we already have in process. But when we start laying them down, that's the key. Then we can bring that lead time all the way down to 30 days into each new location.
Right. Okay. But even still, that timeline isn't that long to get my own set up. Fully custom, basically correct.
Well, yeah. And that's the beauty of prefabricating, is by having a library of different components, we know that it's unlike the traditional data center industry. They're going to be weird, wild shapes and formats of data centers for edge. So specking out the parts are all those items in our supply chain. That kind of stuff is going to be a critical factor.
Interesting, but I think when you bring up a point like that, one of the big things when you talk about what's different about redivider, what is, we'll call it our competitive edge, is when you're creating micro grid islands, you're creating your own power. That means that we're not having to work with the grids. We're not having to go through the process of lobbying for a certain amount of power. That really compresses what we call the term time to power and time to power is one of the biggest killers of putting down data centers. So if we can compress that down to 30 days, it's a competitive advantage for our company, and we believe that we can do it.
Very cool. No, that's awesome. I'm curious. So I have this data center set up and it's going, am I basically managing the software and the actual content inside the data center that's on the servers, or do you help with that.
Or how does that work generally? Again, flexibility is the kind of key answer here. But generally, we would say, they're our facilities, we're managing them, we're servicing them, we're providing the slas of uptime and move ad, change of equipment, that kind of thing in some cases. So basically, as a customer, if you're like an enterprise, you would be managing the software on the computers? We're managing the computers. It's the easiest way to think about it.
Okay.
In other cases where it's like, hey, I want to take a data center for a year. You guys can go away. You don't have to manage it. I'm going to manage, like, again, take a different example of a movie studio. And they are going to create animated film. They need a huge bank of graphics cards. So they don't really care about the general computing. They just want to create these rendered models. They'll go, we don't need you. That's fine. We'll build the data center. We'll load it up with our graphics cards, or they have their own whatever. And we put in the parking lot and that's it. We might do a kind of basic maintenance on it, but for the most part, they would be in charge of doing it.
Got it. Okay. Interesting. No, that's actually really cool. I'm curious then, how did you guys fund this? Did you raise some money? You were self funded? Walk us through that.
Yeah. Every entrepreneur you've ever met in your entire life will tell you it is the required but soul sucking effort of raising money and the approach that we've taken. So, to directly answer your question, when went down the opportunity zone path, we learned a ton of stuff. Specifically, you can't create an opportunity zone business unless you have your first investment from an opportunity zone fund. So then went down that path. So we created an opportunity zone fund. We got investors for that fund that help us build out the initial businesses and how they're structured, as well as our pilot location as we move forward. Data centers are hugely capital intensive, and so there is going to be a permanent kind of capital raise that goes on a project by project basis. Okay, interesting.
We built the model and everything with our investors through our opportunity zone Fund. And as we expand with smart cities, or we expand with hyperscaler cloud edge, or we expand with bare metal as a service, or know there's a bunch of use cases getting that investor pool to say, all right, now we want you to back this project and this project. And that aligns with the kind of larger private equity capital markets in general and how they like to fund things. And the evidence of that is these data center REITs already exist. They have the same capital infrastructure to fund their new projects. The difference is their traditional data center projects go from funding creating a building, which takes two years before it's turned on. And our model, it's incremental growth along the way.
So we can do turn on 1, then turn on two more megawatts, and then turn on 5 MW. So by the time we hit that two year arc, we've created this kind of income stream along the way. And so we think that our fundraising process, like every other data center company, is going to be in perpetuity. And it's a tough thing to do, especially in today's economic climate and things like that. But we do know that the total demand for data centers is absolutely, mind bogglingly huge, and it's only getting biggEr.
Yeah, well, but you're saving companies money, right? And you can do it a lot quicker, is the reality.
And we're saving money, we're doing it quicker, and we're aligning with their corporate goals around sustainability and social impact, and that sits outside of the IT department. Right. And I think that's the key thing to our strategy, is, hey, Mr. Enterprise, you want to change your carbon footprint, don't buy electric vehicles to electrify your fleet, and don't do this. And don't do this. Simply take the existing computing you have today, airlift it over to Redivider, and here is the impact Delta that you get. That's a very compelling story. On top of it being cheaper and faster.
Yeah, and I think to add on to that, one of the reasons that's going to be such a hot topic is, right now, data centers consume about 2% of the world's power. They're expecting in the 2030s, it's going to consume 30% of the world's power. So whether anybody likes it or not, the scrutiny is coming, and we think we're addressing a problem that is about to hit everyone that makes a lot of sense.
That's really cool. But sadly, we're out of time. So how about we close with mentioning where people can get more information about you guys and any other links you want to mention.
Yeah, you go to our website, Redividor. Co. And learn all about what we're doing. Get in touch with us and see some of the amazing folks that we've put around us as a company that really believe in our mission and what we're, you know. If you're like minded, please get in touch.
Perfect. Well, Tom and Eric, I really appreciate you guys taking the time out of your day to be on the show, and I look forward to keeping in touch with you and have a good rest of your day.
Absolutely. We really appreciate it. Thank you.
Thanks, guys. Thank you.
Bye bye.
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