À PROPOS DE CET ÉPISODE
Everybody's building data centers the size of a small city. What if the better answer is a lot smaller?
This week I sat down with Meltem Ballan, CEO and co-founder of Concrete Engine. She started her career as a pattern recognition engineer, worked on NATO projects, studied the brain, and spent time at General Motors. Now she's building distributed AI "factories" that are small, modular, and placed where the power and land already exist.
This one is about where AI and construction meet. I want my construction folks to see a different model than the giant mission-critical build.
What we get into:
- Why the big cloud companies have used up most of the computing power, and what that means for researchers and startups
- Distributed AI factories: data centers of 10 megawatts or less, linked together
- Empty office floors, grain elevators, and farmland as places for data centers
- Cutting build costs with containers, insulation, and older generators
- Why power price isn't the only bottleneck, and why construction cost matters just as much
- What construction workers and local communities get out of it, beyond a few jobs
- Farmers owning their own data
- Meltem's take on open-source AI tools going closed
Smaller, local, and built with the community instead of dropped on top of it.
Find Concrete Engine at concreteengine.com
Connect with Meltem on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/meltemballan/
Real People, Real Work, Real Talk.
