GIGAWATTS

Gigawatts, by Claude and Dan Caruso

The Untold Story of Ambition, Real Estate, and Raw Power, from the Mainframe to the AI Gold Rush

Authors
Claude and Dan Caruso
Edition
First draft
Published
11.2026
Chapters
9
Words
99K
Price
Free online
Start readingStart with the Preface

“It is in the middle of a second, bigger one right now, and this time the stakes are measured in gigawatts.”

Dan Caruso, Preface

The load: nine chapters, drawn to length

A history of the data center, from 1960s time-sharing through the dot-com hosting boom and bust, Equinix and the cloud, to today’s AI build-out.

Dan Caruso lived through one boom, bust and rebirth cycle in fiber and wrote about it in Bandwidth. The data-center industry has already been through one of its own, and it is in the middle of a second, bigger one, measured this time in gigawatts.

  1. Build

    1. Chapter I: The Glass House7,371 words31 minOn April 7, 1964, a special train pulled out of Grand Central Terminal carrying several hundred writers up the Hudson to Poughkeepsie.Read
    2. Chapter II: Where the Networks Meet6,469 words27 minAt 8100 Boone Boulevard in Tysons Corner, Virginia, sits a small data center, across the street from AT&T Government Solutions.Read

  2. Boom

    1. Chapter III: The Hosting Gold Rush8,504 words36 minIn the summer of 2000, the hottest real estate around New York City was the real estate nobody had wanted a few years earlier.Read

  3. Bust

    1. Chapter IV: Empty Floors4,522 words19 minOn March 5, 2001, the Wall Street Journal marked an anniversary nobody wanted to celebrate.Read

  4. Rebirth

    1. Chapter V: The Phoenix8,499 words36 minI opened the Phoenix chapter of Bandwidth with the same six words.Read
    2. Chapter VI: The Cloud Eats the Building8,917 words37 minAt 2 a.m. on August 24, 2006, Amazon opened a test of something it called the Elastic Compute Cloud.Read
    3. Chapter VII: The Reconsolidation9,346 words39 minOn the morning of Monday, November 15, 2021, two press releases crossed the wire within hours of each other.Read

  5. The Second Boom

    1. Chapter VIII: The AI Gold Rush15,634 words66 minIn June 2024, Elon Musk's artificial-intelligence company, xAI, chose an empty building in South Memphis, Tennessee.Read

  6. Looking Ahead

    1. Chapter IX: Before Midnight3,820 words16 minTwo companies in this book were founded in Silicon Valley in the 1990s to house the Internet's computers.Read

“This one is a book I directed with a great deal of help.”

Dan Caruso, Preface

Claude is the artificial-intelligence model made by Anthropic. For Gigawatts it read the period newspaper archives, SEC filings, analyst reports and trade press, pulled the quotes, did the arithmetic and wrote the first version of nearly every page, under Dan Caruso’s direction. Dan chose the story, set the sourcing rules and argued with the drafts.

How this book was made

Dan Caruso

DanCaruso

Dan Caruso is the founder of Caruso Ventures which invests in entrepreneurs across quantum, space, and digital infrastructure. A three-time decacorn entrepreneur, he founded Zayo Group, was a co-founding executive of Level 3 Communications, and was an investor and interim CEO of Infleqtion, which went public in 2026. He is Board Chair of the Tulagi Music Festival, hosts the Bear Roars podcast, authored Bandwidth, and publishes Engage Colorado.

About the authors