Techstrong Gang – March 11, 2025

Hey everyone. It's 10 o'clock. Do you know what your cloud costs?

You're watching Textron Gang. Hi everyone. Welcome to Tuesday on The Gang.

It's m Alan Shimmel. It's great to have you on here. We've got a lot to talk about.

Three as usual, three different segments and some great people here on our gang lineup for today. Let me quickly introduce you to them. We kind of got the, uh, two in Ohio, two in Florida, and one in New York kind of team today.

Let's go to Ohio first. Oh, gimme an O, gimme an H. Um, I'd say they, they can't help themselves down there in Ohio when you start that.

I know. It's like Pavlovian. Uh, he is the, uh, founder, CEO of, uh, tech Field Day and regular gang member.

It's, we haven't had a mar in a week or so. Steve, Steven Foskett. Hey, Steven.

It's great to see you. It's good to be here. Thanks for inviting me on here.

From flyover data center country, Soon to be big data center country, though not as big as Iowa, it seems, uh, moving from Stephen, but staying in Ohio. She's the editor of Textron ai, Textron it, gestalt it. And more Sag Saha.

Hey Sona, how are you? Hi, Alan. I'm good, thanks.

Excuse me. Thank you. It's great to have you on.

Glad everything's well to be here. Uh, moving from Ohio, I guess continuing east into, well, it's not quite upstate New York, unless you're from Long Island where I'm from, and then it is upstate New York, but he's in Harrison, our Chief content Officer, Mike Ard. Hey, Mike.

All right. Welcome to the capital of Not in my backyard. Okay.

The NIMBYs. Okay. And then joining me here in our Avoca Raton headquarters.

She's the queen of sustainability and our editor analyst for all things Echo green and sustainable. Bonnie Schneider. Hey, Bonnie, how are you?

I'm Doing great. Thanks for having me. Yep.

So let's face it, we're all moving a little slow today due to the daylight savings time, right? It's two days after Saturday night. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday.

I guess this is the last day. You could use this as an excuse though, 'cause we should be acclimated by now. Yeah.

Yeah. Steven says, I don't know, Mondays are hard and Tuesdays, Monday's hard. Tuesday's hard.

But we'll, we'll be okay, but let's jump into things, Mike. Um, couple of surveys out and analysis and surprise, surprise, we still don't know what we're paying for cloud services and, and don't blame the DevOps people is my take on it. But, um, you know, but isn't it, I think the system's designed this way.

It's like reading your cell phone bill, I guess. But I think the times are changing the quote Bob Dylan. So we have three reports out.

One is from harness written in collaboration with AWS talking about how the DevOps teams don't have enough visibility into what the costs are for the things that they're consuming. And then cast AI has a report out talking about how it's even worse with modern cloud native applications where utilization rates of CPUs, for instance, are in the 10% range. 6 range, which means, you know, the costs are going up.

There isn't enough capacity, despite all our efforts to go build more data centers. Steven, on the face of it, this kinda all looks crazy because we don't have enough capacity. You would think people would wanna be more efficient, but we're not making a whole lot of progress here.

So what's going on? We are not making a lot of progress here, are we? And, and it seems that, uh, the capacity that we've deployed, especially in non-AI applications, but also in AI applications.

I should note I've seen some interesting reports there too that we could talk about. But, uh, you know, it, it seems like we're not getting that efficient. And Kubernetes, um, unlike, you know, VMware, which was really focused on, uh, maximizing efficiency of infrastructure.

At least that was the initial product sale. That's never really been the product sale for Kubernetes. And it appears that that's really, really not happening.

I mean, if you look at the numbers in these reports, um, you know, we're getting some pretty low levels of utilization, 23%, um, in terms of memory utilization and, uh, CP utilization at just 10% according to the cast AI report. Uh, that is not surprising, I think, to those of us who are running infrastructure. Um, you know, my systems are honestly running at below 10% in terms of CPU utilization as well.

Um, but that being said, you know, is that good utilization or not? I guess that, that's the question. If you're, if you're able to, or if you need to be able to burst, if you need to be able to provide a rapid response, that may be an acceptable rate of utilization or, um, it may not, depending on, on your perspective.

And then of course, there's the data center build out and the data center crunch, which we can talk about as well. But, you know, I guess, uh, what, what is everyone's response to this? Do you think that a 10% utilization rate is good?

I think we're all understanding the issue a little bit better, and you see these finops initiatives, but my take on it has always been that, you know, a center of excellence around finops driven out of the finance department isn't gonna solve the issue till you put the tools in front of the DevOps teams that provision this stuff and manage this stuff. 'cause I think they'll do the right thing if they know what it is that they're consuming. But right now, we just have no visibility.

I don't know, Alan, what's your take? So, I, I think these are really the three stories here. Highlight three separate, uh, facets of the whole finops thing, right?

Let, let, and let's look at them that way. First of all, in terms of DevOps visibility and the cost. Yeah, I get that, right.

People are make, and, and it's not just DevOps, I should mention it's platform engineering teams as well. They're making decisions without actually seeing what the repercussions financially of those deployment options are. And having finops for the finance teams is like having security for the security people and then telling the developers they're not developing secure software.

You need tools for your DevOps platform engineering teams, and I imagine SRE too, that allow you to see in real time or near real time, what are the financial implications of, of the decisions you're making, rate deployment and how you're deploying and so forth. So that's number one. Number two is this cloud native load situation.

So I think when you tell me, well, it's as low as 10%, that's a bit of a red herring, right? So is that your 10% average? Is that your mean?

What are your bursts, right? How often do you burst? And how high do you burst?

Right? If you are using, let's say, averaging 10%, but you do burst above 70, 75% daily, you know, every other day or something like that, you do need that elasticity, the, the, uh, burstability. But the problem you, you know, what you wanna do is most cloud systems are engineered, including cloud native, where it's kind of like a, a balloon that you blow up once you blow it up, it's that big.

But even when you let the air out, it's ki it's kind of stretchy, right? And, and it never comes back to that tightness that, that it had before you blew it up. And that's the problem is for the most part, whether it's cloud or cloud native, our burstability elasticity is a one way elasticity.

It doesn't shrink back fast enough. So if you're using 10% most of the time, but you know, a couple times a week you're bursting up to 70, that's okay. Can I go up and down?

Can I go down as easily as I go up? And If you, if you look at the cast AI report, it doesn't suggest that that bursting is happening. What seems to be happening is we have bad habits from years ago where developers have always over-provisioned infrastructure.

Sure. Blame the developers. They're Easy.

I'm not, let's saying, I'm not blowing them. I'm just saying that this is the fact of life, right? Yes.

There is good cloud hygiene And they, and they do it deliberately to ensure availability, right? Nobody wants that call at three o'clock in the morning because my memory utilization rates. But you shouldn't have that in the cloud.

You should have systems that are elastic. That's one of the tenets of cloud. But elasticity be elasticity, it costs money.

So you have to set a, you have to set some sort of parameter at the top of it that Says, no, no, I, and I've seen this with some of the finops companies. You know, there are finops companies that report and finops companies that do. I'm looking for a finops company that can turn up the dial when needed and turn it down when not needed.

And with AI and everything else we have, you would think we could start developing programs that'll do that automatically for us. The fact that we're having this conversation and these results from this study, tell me, like, we haven't, we haven't developed that on off, you know, elastic up, elastic down. That was the promise of cloud in 2006.

It's 20 years, guys, where is it? Yeah, I agree. It's unfair to blame the developers, uh, for this.

'cause companies normally set hard spend limits around resources, cloud resources, and, uh, it's not like teams are given card blanche, uh, on whatever they wanna use. So, mm-hmm. But, but let me talk about the third one you cited there, Mike and Steven.

And that is this real estate company giving us the market report on co-located data center space. So first of all, let's be clear, that's not public cloud at best, it's private cloud. At worst, it's, it's rack and serve data center space, right?

Like it always has been back when I was doing it 25 years ago. Um, what I found interesting is that the normal suspects, Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Chicago, LA right data center space in those cities are really at a premium. Really at a premium, even though they're building more and there's a lot more coming on.

But we have, you know, if we're gonna call those, let's say the NFL cities, we, we have a bunch of second wave locations. Stephen jokingly referred to Ohio. Uh, but Columbus has always been a big data center, or even back when I was doing it 25 years ago.

But Iowa, New Mexico, west Texas, where's our girl, Amanda Ani, right? She always talks about San Angelo being the Silicon Prairie or whatever they call it there. Um, you know, so West Texas, New Mexico, Iowa, some of these other, uh, Toronto, well, Toronto's a major league data centers, uh, city.

But you know, some of these second wave cities really starting to catch, uh, the data center bug. And, and that's good, right? Assuming we have affordable energy that they can feed off of and, and use, I, I think that's great.

And it's the natural way of things. I just wanna also mention about cast. They have a tool cast highlight, um, for carbon emissions tracking.

And that's exactly what it's doing is, is looking for inefficiencies, um, to, to report. So kind of also goes hand in hand with that. Yep, Absolutely.

Hey, Bonnie, what's your sense of, um, you know, it's not just data centers that are tapping into the grid, right? It's cars and everything else. I mean, is, is the grid gonna just choke on all of this or, you know, are we, we reached a point where, you know, it's, it's becoming a conversation about adding more capacity like in isolation.

But, you know, everything else in the world is heating up air conditioners. Do we have the power? Well, that's, you know, that is, that is still the big question.

I think that in anticipation of the surge of the AI power, um, all options are on the table. That's what it seems like anyway, in terms of how are we gonna get energy, whether it's now nuclear, um, leaning into renewables, more, anything, um, you know, building more efficient data centers, which we're gonna talk more about in the next block coming up. Um, so it's, right now it's, it's not, it's definitely a concern.

You know, one other factor is the effects of climate change. You know, we're having more frequent and more long lasting wildfires, for example. So all of that comes into play that affects the grid and, and makes the grid more vulnerable as well.

Yeah. Steven, are folks gonna be walking around with big fans in these data centers in Columbus, or how does that Well, I think that it's, it's, you know, uh, there's a few points to think about there. You know, to Bonnie's point, um, you know, about the grid, that's actually something going against Texas because Texas has their own disconnected power grid, and it's faced a lot of power challenges in the past.

So I would say the, the I 35 corridor, maybe attractive for data center buildout, but probably not as attractive as a place like, you know, uh, Charlotte, uh, Columbus, Indiana, Minneapolis, where we have a much more connected grid. Um, the same is true of, uh, areas of the country that have suffered from wildfires or water shortages. It, it doesn't make as much sense to be building out there as it does in places like Charlotte, Columbus, Northern Indiana, Minneapolis, that don't have, uh, water shortages and, and major, uh, storms and things like that.

You know, Columbus especially is looking very, very attractive. It's got a lot of interconnectivity, it's got a lot of land, it's got a lot of water, it's got a lot of power. It's got all sorts of things going for it.

And that's why we're seeing, it says, it says here about 2000 acres in Columbus that have recently been acquired for data center buildout. I wouldn't be surprised if, uh, if we really do see a, a boom in, in data center buildout based on the fact that essentially we're, you know, to the point of the first story, these utilization rates may actually be what we want in order to make sure that we have, uh, enough capacity to absorb any, you know, spikes in demand. And in that case, and given the low rates of availability in other data center locations, it makes sense to, to build out, I mean, the market's gonna do what the market's gonna do, and if, if there's enough demand for it, they're gonna build it out.

And hopefully they're gonna build it out in places like, you know, Columbus instead of Northern Virginia or Silicon Valley or someplace like that, that's already pretty well tapped out. Well, there, there's also a company in, um, platform sh, that built a data center in Quebec because they're leaning into the hydropower of the lakes nearby. So location does matter.

Location. Absolutely. Alan, You'll remember back in the day when Citibank of the world would build their own data centers.

And one of the questions that came up was, well, will they go back to doing that? 'cause they can't find enough capacity from, uh, the cloud service providers or the colo people. You know, if you are a Fortune 50, that could be a viable option for you.

But beyond that, it's too expensive. It's too expensive that, that a make versus buy decision. You rent data center space, especially if we go on a building, boom, you know, I, I gotta tell you, I have sort of a visceral reaction to hearing this, right?

com, right? That was my first company was in web hosting, and we had data center and we sold it. And I helped a company that go, go public in a roll up of hosting and what we called a SP application service provider.

And we did have, we had in Columbus, Steven, we had, uh, we had bought some stuff from Borden companies, actually, if you remember board in the cow. And, um, we had, we had Northern Virginia, we had a huge one in Atlanta. We had Paris, London, we had a bunch.

com bubble bursted, you know, I had to tell my wife, we couldn't get that interior designer furniture. There's nothing matter with this old couch. Um, the, that they were saying, oh, we overbuilt data centers by so much.

We're not gonna need new data centers for seven years. And there's so much dark fiber in the ground, it'll be 10 years till we light them up. Light that up.

And it was, you know what it did. I mean, you know, we had plenty of data center space in 2002, 3, 4, 5, 6, and then of course the recession hit. But tech, I think that's might be a reason.

One of the reasons why tech didn't get hit as bad in that great recession is, you know, so many other industries. 'cause we did have all that capacity that was already, you know, the CapEx was already invested. But, you know, we're in a new world now.

Is the data center space they're building gonna be good enough for AI apps and, and for what? And quantum, right? And we're, I'm really starting to hear Quantum becoming, you know, I think we're accelerating the, uh, quantum horizon sounds like something out of a movie.

Um, but anyway, that's my take. Here's, Here's my bet. We're gonna see a lot of data centers on the other side of the Canadian border from Niagara Falls, and they'll also be lined up on the Mexican border.

And, you know, we'll be arguing about tariff rates for compute, but theoretically it doesn't all have to be in North America, right? No, absolutely Not. Or the United States anyway, since Canada and Mexico are part of North America, technically.

So there you We're no longer calling it North America. It's just America. Okay.

You know, just the Gulf of Data Center America. Just America. America, babe.

All right. Don't, let's not go down that path. Let's take a break here.

We're gonna come back and let's talk about sustainability. Swedish style. It sounds like love.

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Contact us today and tell your story to the world in the most powerful way with Textron Group. Welcome back to the Techstrong Gang. We are talking about sustainability.

And this time we're going overseas to Sweden, where data centers and data center construction is a hot topic because a company called Eco Data Center, no relation to Ecotech Insights, similar name, uh, but they just got substantial funding to build not only a, a larger, uh, data center, but in conjunction with creating a whole hub for AI infrastructure. And Sweden has some interesting construction features. They're actually the site of the first wooden data center.

And they lean into renewable energy as well in, in a huge way. So I thought it would be interesting to take a closer look at what they're working on and what this signals in terms of funding and investors when it comes to data centers. Sweden's Eco Data Center specializing in sustainable digital infrastructure, secured about $460 million from institutional investors.

The company operates five Swedish data centers, including the world's first wooden facility, powered fully by renewable energy Eco Data Center, recently partnered with AI Hyperscaler Core Weave to build one of Europe's largest AI clusters featuring Nvidia Blackwell, GPUs, and Quantum two phony band networking. How will this power intensive facility stay cool through high efficiency chilled water cooling solutions provided by Ohio based Vertiv, a company founded in 1946 as a refrigerator manufacturer and now a leader in data center hardware, software, and analytics. These cooling systems remove heat from servers by circulating water through pipes that absorb it.

Eco data centers recent funding highlights investor confidence signaling a shift towards smarter sustainable tech infrastructure. And you may have noticed in that video, we featured an Ohio company, Steven Vertiv, to talk about the cooling of processes for data centers, which of course is now really interesting because as we're seeing these stories emerge, how heat will be, um, mitigated seems to go hand in hand with any time type of data center story. There's an, uh, um, an incident, uh, where, where they're gonna talk about cooling situations, how they're gonna cool the data centers.

And in this case, the partnership with Vertiv, um, was a big part of the story. Hmm. You know, I can't help but think the more we, we play with climate and, and efficiencies in this, right?

So you get a place like, I'm reminded of one, I was in Iceland, right? I remember going to to dinner in Iceland inside of a greenhouse. This one greenhouse produced just tomatoes.

Hmm. But they grew the enough tomatoes for the entire nation of Iceland year round. They did it using artificial lights, artificial heat.

Obviously Iceland gets pretty cold. Um, artificial heat, artificial lights, you know, and they just grew tomatoes like men. And they served every dish, of course, had tomatoes at the heart of it.

But it was delicious. Their energy cost for that data center, uh, excuse me for that greenhouse. Zero zero.

They just put a vent in the ground and geothermal energy spun turbines in that created everything. Now, from a data center point of view, in a place like Sweden, you could certainly build it north of the Arctic Circle to help cool it off. But what the, what the greenhouse in Iceland did though, is it also took that heat out because the place stated a very comfortable, whatever it was, 75 degrees or some, yeah.

78 degrees. And they use that heat to then heat homes nearby, right? So very, very efficient, very, very efficient people.

Those icelanders, if you couldn't do the same thing in a data center in Sweden, suck that heat out while you're bringing in cold air from the outside and use that warm air for something else that the warm air is, you know, when you're living in Lapland or somewhere, warm air is a good commodity to have. And so some smart people are gonna do some smart things, I would assume. And we're going to see some great sustainability and, and um, you know, usage here where where will hot and cold, fire and ice, uh, someone will make hay out.

Yeah. It's a lots of ingenuity happening. And I thought that company was interesting.

And, um, I mentioned that Ohio at Vertiv, 'cause they started out as a refrigerator man. Manufacturer, yeah. So talk about evol evolution with the times.

Yeah. Yeah, that's, that was an interesting point. Um, if I, if I could jump in on that one.

That, that was an interesting point, isn't it? Because, um, many of us in the, in the enterprise tech space, I mean, I'd heard of Vertiv before, but many hadn't. Um, Vertiv, you probably know of Liebert, uh, the company that made those big industrial coolers for data centers forever.

Um, that's ver that's Vertiv s parent. Uh, they essentially were spun out of that. Um, and many of us had encountered, uh, Geist another company that also, uh, is, is part of this whole thing.

Um, you know, Vertiv uh, spun out in 2016. They've been doing some really interesting stuff around, uh, innovative cooling methods. And I'm, I'm pretty impressed with what they're able to build here.

You mentioned that this is, you know, water chilled. Um, you know, there, there's some very, very cool stuff happening in liquid cooling. In fact, um, I'll just give a little plug here.

We're gonna be visiting, uh, HP's, um, innovation center in, in, uh, Houston, uh, in April, where we'll do a tech field day presentation focused on liquid cooling of, uh, data center infrastructure. Uh, that'll be live here on, uh, Textron tv of course. And, um, really looking forward to that because all of these technologies, I think are reflecting this new world where that we're living in, where, as Alan said, you know, heat isn't just waste heat, heat is heat and heat is useful.

And we can think about different ways of, of using this, different ways of, of heating and cooling. Um, it doesn't have to be just blasting conventional refrigerated air at equipment. Now.

In fact, that's probably not a really good, a good way to do it. It makes much more sense to, to do things like geothermal and liquid cooling and, um, heat exchangers, heat pumps, all sorts of different methods that are more efficient, uh, given the cost of energy and the amount of data center, um, infrastructure that we're spinning up here. You know, interestingly, you know, you have, uh, this company in Sweden is working with Core Weave, which is of course the bell of the ball when it comes to AI data infrastructure.

They just went public, um, last week, I think. And, um, you know, core Weave is really at, at the cutting edge of rolling out AI data infrastructure. And the fact that they're working with a, uh, uh, this company on more eco-friendly alternatives in some regions is, uh, hopeful.

I'm having a flashback. I seem to remember power usage, effectiveness. PUE was like all the range.

But, you know, I remember there was a lot of debate about whether these metrics and how they should be measured. And I don't know if we ever settled on a, a standard here, but, um, do we need to revisit PUE Perhaps, or a new version of it? A similar kind of thing.

I, it makes sense. Anyway, hey, let's take a break here on the gang. We're gonna come back, we've got sick c Block, our last segment to talk about.

And that is, you know, what's really in Fort Knox? Is it a bunch of just, you know, should we put a bunch of Bitcoin in there? com is the leading resource for news analysis and education on challenges facing the cybersecurity industry.

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com. Home of security bloggers network. Hey folks, we're back in, well, slightly related topic, but the President wants to create a reserve for Bitcoin.

You know, just like the gold reserve, just in case something happens, we'll have this reserve of Bitcoin that we could spend. It's not clear to me how much value that Bitcoin will be, and it could be just some sort of, uh, elaborate game that mess with the price of gold, because people are asking the same question about, well, is there gold in Fort Knox? And nobody seems to have the an answer for that.

I think the last official who saw the gold was Mitch McConnell, and that was almost eight, nine years ago. So, Alan, what's your take? What's going on here?

And, um, is this more of a Ponzi kind of scheme or is there something real here? What do I know about the restaurant business? All right, let, let's, let's, let's, let's take this one apart.

First of all, let's adjust the Fort Knox thing right off the bat, because that's just ridiculous. So what are you trying to say? In the last eight or nine years, Joe Biden and his son Hunter came in and took the gold out of Fort Knox in little laptop sized things.

And that's, that is such a nonsense, ridiculous conspiracy pizzagate thing that I'm not going to give it any more light a day done. There's plenty of gold in Fort Knox, And it is continually audited. It takes 27 years to do it, and they have audited it.

The gold is there. So let's, you know, let's, let's not give that the time of day. Now, it's not just a Bitcoin reserve, it's a strategic Bitcoin reserve.

And I don't, you know, from the king of strategy himself. Um, but let's, let's look at what we're talking about here. 'cause like so much of what this administration does, it's all smoke and mirrors and bull crap, right?

The fact of the matter is, we already have this Bitcoin reserve. We're not buying any more Bitcoin. We're not selling any Bitcoin.

We're at, we're, what it is, is the United States has confiscated, approx, I forget how many billion, 13 billion, 14, some billion dollar number of bitcoins as a result of criminal prosecution and forfeiture over the last X years. We haven't sold those bitcoins. The idea is to take those bitcoins and say, okay, they're now a strategic reserve of Bitcoin.

And now we are in the Bitcoin game, and the Bitcoin is backed by the full faith and credit of the, well, it's not backed by the United States government. Who are we kidding? But, you know, so we get to the administration gets to say they did good for the Bitcoin people.

'cause you know, all those crypto bros, they all loved this administration and they all voted that way because the Biden administration was felt to be harsh on all of the, on all the crime that goes into the Bitcoin and cryptocurrency business, right? Someone, someone cracked down on it. And so they went the other way.

And so this administration says this is a promise kept or starting a strategic Bitcoin reserve. Now the reserve is just for Bitcoin. President Trump has said he'd like to have four or five other kinds of coins in some sort of reserve as well.

I'm surprised he didn't put his own coin in there. 'cause self-dealing has never stopped him before. Um, but that being said, he, he liked these four or five other coins that quickly went up when, when he mentioned them.

Um, guys, th this is now, there's nothing a matter with having strategic reserves, right? We have a strategic reserve of petroleum, for instance. Mm-hmm.

Right? Which if of helium as well. Other companies have strategic reserves of commodities, you know, it's fine.

And we already have this strategic reserve. So if that's all it is, it's a big nothing. I suspect though, you know, that pigs can't help themselves.

And once you have this str strategic reserve of cryptocurrency, the crypto forces within the, or the crypto bulls within the administration, including our crypto czar, who's also our AI czar, um, the president himself, his sons and family members and some others in the administration will try to figure out a way to enrich themselves from it. And that, because, you know, one has to ask beyond the the PR aspect, what else? Why else are they doing it?

And, and that's why else they're doing it. Me personally, I have a lot more faith in the Golden Fort Knox than I do in cryptocurrency. And I think for good reason.

Steven, do you wanna hazard a guess? How much data center capacity is being allocated to the minting of Bitcoins? Uh, no, I don't want a hazard a guess at that.

I, I suspect though that it's not as much, uh, fungible data 'cause center capacity as we might think, because I think a lot of the Bitcoin stuff is happening in, um, different types of environments. Uh, I know that wasn't a serious question, but I I, I do not want to hazard a guess. That being said, like Alan said, there is no strategic Bitcoin reserve.

This is just a relabeling of something we already have. And that's why the price of Bitcoin actually fell 5% after this announcement because people who actually know about this stuff realized, wait, that's not a thing. That's nothing.

That's a nothing announcement, a big nothing burger. And not only that, but it's a nothing burger that promises that nothing more will come after, because basically we already have what Trump said, you know? So it's done and, and we're not gonna buy anymore.

And I just spilled stuff all over my laptop. But anyway, that being said, um, I did, I just spilled juice All over My laptop. Oh, I'm sorry, Steven.

Maybe we can buy a new one with some of that Bitcoin By, without calling attention to our friends to the north that have the international strategic reserve Yes. Of maple syrup. Yes.

And that strategic reserve is one that I'm gonna get behind. Well, maybe that's why we wanna bring them into the US so we could corner the maple syrup market. I don't know, Solana, do you think there might someday be, I don't know if it's feasible, but can I build like, you know, uh, a data center that's off the grid and create a little black market around data centers and services and, you know, some of that Bitcoin is being made somewhere, right?

Um, I wouldn't bet too big on Bitcoins 'cause uh, we know that how, uh, volatile that market is. So, no, I wouldn't say that that's kind of something that's in the pipeline. Here's the other, let me tell you another evil kinda angle on this.

Due to the stable geniuses in our government, I have real fears about the dollar remaining, the world staple currency right there. I think, I think if they do the tariffs and we have these trade wars, you're gonna see a concerted, you already have a concerted effort from the brick countries, but you're gonna see a bigger concerted effort to move off of the dollar as the, as the backbone currency of the world, which will deal a tremendous blow to the US and, and its economic might, if you moved off the dollar, what do you move to? And there will be a portion of, of this world, the, the segment of nations that say, let's move to crypto, right?

Because this way we'll never be at the behest of any one country like we were for the US for all these years, you know, in a dollar based, uh, world. And in that case, you wanna know the truth. It may, maybe you want, I mean, you gotta pick the right crypto and Bitcoin would be the leading one, I assume.

But you know, maybe you do want to do that in case they do move off the dollar. Well, if they do, um, maybe, you know, given iceland's, uh, dominance of the data center space, we should move to their currency, right? That'd be great.

Think that's the kronner. Yeah. And if we, and, and I think it goes for like, you know, I Actually have, you know, I have a few thousand kroners on my desk actually, right?

But but's, let's call that trillion of them to, so, you know, the cost of, you know, compute would be like, you know, $500 trillion for Kubernetes cluster. Great. Steven, what'd you say?

We, we, you've got your own strategic croner reserves. I do. I, I, well, I put out an executive order here at Tech Storm, but, uh, we, we've established it.

I, I personally have a strategic, uh, British pound reserve consisting of, uh, six pounds 50 that I left, left over from my last trip to the uk. Mm-hmm. Um, and so if, if we're like, you know, if we're gonna do the same thing, we could just na label everything we happen to have in our pockets a strategic reserve of that thing.

That's the, that's the word of the day, strategic reserve. We've got a strategic reserve of Textron gang. We've got over years now, I think almost a worth of, of gang recordings here.

You could watch on Textron tv. Anyway, I think that's gonna wrap our show for this lovely Tuesday. Um, hey, for the rest of the week, I'm up in Orlando with the good folks from suse and Suse.

K and Mitchell Ashley will be there with me and, uh, Adrian Bridgewater to one of our, uh, uh, author, one of our writers here on Textron. So, we'll, I'll be reporting from there and trying to get on Textron gang. Mike Stevens, Bonnie, you guys on the road, anywhere this week or everyone home?

Uh, no, I'm home. I am, I am preparing for ancient tribal traditions in New York City that will be occurring on March 17. Yes.

I, I've done, I've done one of those with you there. That'll be fun. What was it?

The place with the pipes? Uh, you know, the smoking pipes. Keenans Keens.

Keens Keens. Nice. Good.

That was a good place. All right. That's it for Textron Gang today.

I hope you really enjoyed it. Thank you all gang members. Thank you for watching.

As usual, we have a full tech, strong TV segment immediately following the, uh, today's gang. So pay attention for that. Stephen, no, no field days.

Uh, not today. Uh, that's what we say to the God of death. Mm-hmm.

Uh, but soon and for the rest of our lives. Okay, this is Alan Hummel, we're outta here. Thanks everyone.