Ep. 248: Cosme Garcia - A Wrench Still Beats a Backflipping Robot, and Other Useful Truths

Cosme Garcia didn't plan to work in data centers — a project manager got sick, somebody asked him to fill in, and three decades later he's still here, still curious, and still trying to be the least smart person in the room. We talk about wrenches, weather, and what to tell your kid. Chapters: 00:00 How Cosme Accidentally Ended Up in Data Centers 02:00 Exodus Communications and Learning Power and Cooling the Hard Way 08:30 Why Being the Least Smart Person in the Room Is the Goal 10:30 The Question Cosme Is Asking: When Do We Use AI on Ourselves? 14:00 From a Refrigerator-Sized Gigabyte to a 250-Gigabyte Phone 18:40 Even the Lineman on the Pole Now Depends on a Massive Building 22:00 The Cold War Between IT Teams and Facilities Teams 29:30 Jim Gao, DeepMind, and the Variable Nobody Predicted 35:00 Why Humans Are Bad at Patterns and Casinos Are Good at Them 41:30 Too Many AI Tools, Not Enough Time: Where Do You Even Start? 46:30 Agentic AI: Beyond Prompts, Toward Work That Does Itself 54:00 Trust, IBM, and Picking a Partner When the Market Is Crowded 59:30 Are Our Jobs at Risk? Which Ones, and Why a Wrench Still Wins 1:06:00 QTS Grew 20-Fold; Staffing Didn't. Here's What Happened. 1:14:00 What Will Force the Next Wave: Power, Competition, and One Senior Leader 1:21:00 Advice for the 26-Year-Old: Be Fearful or Be the Person Who Figured It Out Reference Links: Google / DeepMind data center efficiency work — the project Jim Gao led that applied machine learning to data center cooling optimization. Public reference: https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/deepmind-ai-reduces-google-data-centre-cooling-bill-by-40/ Cosme Garcia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cosmegarcia/ Thank you for visiting our channel, be sure to Like, Comment, and Subscribe! For more information, go to https://www.QTSDataCenters.com Learn More about QTS Data Centers on the QTS YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/users/qtsdatacenters Think you have a great topic for a podcast or would like to schedule an interview with Dave? Send in your requests to [email protected]