In Bandwidth, I called myself the Forrest Gump of fiber. In this book I'm more like the guy in the seat next to Forrest. I was there, but the bench wasn't mine.
Data centers were never my main business. Fiber was. But the two grew up together, and I spent thirty years at the place where they touched. At MFS, I worked for the company that built MAE-East, one of the first rooms where the Internet's networks met. At Level 3, I ran the network that included the data-center Gateways we built in most of the big cities; by March 2000 we had about 4 million square feet across thirty facilities. At Zayo, we connected our fiber to every carrier hotel and data center we could reach, and for a few years we owned a colocation business of our own, zColo. After Zayo was taken private in 2020, its new owners sold zColo, and $600 million of the proceeds went to investors. One of my friends, Steve Smith, ran Equinix for about a decade and then took my old chair at Zayo.
So this is less of a memoir than Bandwidth was. Most of the people in this story never worked for me, and I never worked for them. I never met Ellen Hancock or K.B. Chandrasekhar, whose Exodus Communications was the hosting company of the dot-com boom. Where I was in the room, I'll say so. Where I wasn't, I'll lean on the reporters who were. The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, BusinessWeek and Fortune wrote the first draft of this history, and I quote them heavily. When their accounts disagree with each other, or with what I wrote in Bandwidth, the footnotes say so.
What I can offer is the pattern. I've lived through one Boom, Bust and Resurgence cycle, and I wrote a book about it. The data-center industry has already been through one of its own. It is in the middle of a second, bigger one right now, and this time the stakes are measured in gigawatts.
A Disclosure, and an Experiment
One more thing belongs up front, in plain sight.
This book is an experiment with Claude, the artificial-intelligence model made by Anthropic. Claude did almost all of the research and almost all of the drafting. It read the period newspaper archives, the SEC filings and the trade press, pulled the quotes, did the arithmetic and wrote the first version of nearly every page you're about to read, under my direction. I chose the story, set the rules and argued with the drafts. Claude did the digging, and it did a lot of it. If Bandwidth was a book I wrote with a lot of help, this one is a book I directed with a great deal of help.
I set the rules the way I'd set them for any researcher. Every fact, number and quote has to trace to a source listed at the end of its chapter. Nothing goes in my mouth that I didn't live. Where a sentence needed my memory and the record didn't have it, the draft leaves a bracketed note for me to fill in rather than making something up. You'll see some of those notes in this edition. I left them in on purpose.
The experiment has a wrinkle that I'd be a poor student of conflicts of interest to ignore. Anthropic is also a subject of this book. Chapter VIII covers its rise and its initial public offering, which was still pending as this draft was finished. So a chapter about Anthropic was drafted, in part, by Anthropic's product. In Bandwidth, I quoted Jack Grubman's line that "what used to be a conflict is now a synergy." I'd like to hold this book to a stricter standard than Grubman held himself. In the Anthropic section, every number comes from the company's SEC filing or is labeled as press reporting, and I've tried to give the skeptics the same room as the bulls. You'll be the judge of whether that worked.
Finally, I'm publishing this as a first draft, in public, and I will revise it. Machines and authors both make mistakes, and the people who were actually in these rooms will know things the archives don't. If you were there and the record here is wrong, tell me. The second edition will be better for it, and the footnotes will say who set us straight.