Episode 705: Pete Sacco on AI Infrastructure and the Human Work of Leadership
Calvin Hendryx-Parker hosts Pete Sacco, a 30-year veteran of data center building, founder of Gray Wolf Data Centers, and author of The Bridge. The first half is infrastructure. Pete argues the next trend is enterprises training small language models on their protected data and running inference inside their own walls, questions a neocloud model built on 20-year leases and GPUs that depreciate in a few years, and predicts data centers will get smaller, not bigger: a data center in every town, locally owned and switched, with identity, governance, and security run centrally. He splits inference into light, on the device, and heavy, federated in sites from a 300-kilowatt container to a 20-megawatt facility. The second half is leadership. When agents take the rote 80% of the day, what's left is one important decision after another, and Pete explains why that's exhausting, why the anxiety lands even harder on employees, and why discernment, wisdom, and community are what leaders have left to offer.