Dirt Meets AI: Building the Future of Data Centers at Scale | Alex Walker, Aligned Data Centers

Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:01.113) Welcome back to the Winner's Circle. Today I'm here with Alex from Align Data Centers. They are in the data center business. It's right in the name. They are a big innovation award winner for 2026 and they've won a couple of other awards from us and a lot of other awards from other award winning agencies. But they are a super fast growing data center company. So welcome Alex and congratulations again on the award and the acquisition. Alex Walker (00:25.08) Thank you, I appreciate it. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (00:27.149) So give us a little bit of background about you and what Align Data Center does. I we all know what data centers are. It's now consuming all of our energy and oil and gas and people and everything. So tell us a little bit about how Align fits into that picture. Alex Walker (00:42.552) Yeah, so I'm Alice Walker. I've been with the line for about a year and a half. I am out of our Phoenix market, but I'm originally from Northern Virginia. So I've kind of grown up around the data center industry without actually knowing what data centers were when I was a kid coming up right in the hub of everything. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (01:04.419) Well, they were weird little warehouse boxes on the edge of town. They're kind of like central offices for the telco centers. You didn't see a whole lot of them, and now you start to see them kind of all over. Now, you guys are in the kind construction business. You're building data centers all over the world. Tell us a little bit about that business and kind of what the focus is for your line. Alex Walker (01:27.402) Yeah, so I run our data center construction for our Phoenix region, specifically the like North Phoenix, West Phoenix region. And it's a little bit of everything from figuring out exactly what data center we're going to build, what configuration, working with our amazing team of subject matter experts, our design team, and walking it through the whole process. We have to get funding from our board. in order to get these going. So we really get to see the very beginning life cycle of a data center and what we're going to put there and help shape why we're doing it and how we're doing it all the way through to handing it over to our operations team. So we, one of the things I love about it, especially being on the owner side now is truly getting to touch every single piece of what makes a data center go from just a piece of land to a huge operation. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (02:29.081) Yeah, and you don't think about it, but you kind of sit right in the hub of all this activity. You've got a massive engineering effort. You've got real estate efforts. You've got workforce efforts. And you're building out an infrastructure just in a single site that is going to be there for decades. And then you're talking about, imagine, a lot of those sites are strung together into networks. Now you're talking about something that is really the infrastructure, digital infrastructure of a city. Alex Walker (03:02.23) Yeah, we get to touch all different pieces of it. It's really exciting. I like to think of kind of the construction team as one of those pieces that kind of pulls it all together. Our process from beginning to the end can take quite a while. These are large data centers and only getting bigger as we continue to move forward in this industry. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (03:27.203) Well, and Alliance really unique in that they're taking kind of the sustainability approach to building out data centers. Walk us through a little bit about kind of the company's kind of goals and missions in the sustainability area. Alex Walker (03:41.506) I don't know, I'm not the best person to talk about that. So probably not the one. Probably not the question for me. We go for like awards and stuff, like our design team does the majority of that and I'm just implementing whatever they design. So. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (03:45.337) Okay, well let's move on. No, all good. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (04:03.383) No, all good. So let's let's pivot a little bit. Alex Walker (04:07.716) Alright. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (04:09.537) Now you're leading all these major construction platforms, programs. It's like putting up a high rise, I imagine, except it's kind of wide, right? You've got this very wide building instead of a very tall building. What experience in your background kind of helped shape your experiences here and what you're doing in the data center market? Alex Walker (04:30.212) Yeah, so I came up through the general contractor side and I had the great experience of working for a general contractor that touched a little bit of everything. So my first building I ever built was actually a tall 17 story office building and just outside of DC. The smallest project I've ever built is a little league baseball field for the Washington Nationals Dream Foundation, which really fun project. And everything in between, higher ed, K through 12, that's really where I got my experience of learning construction. I had an opportunity to travel and go to my first data center project and really honestly had no idea what I was getting myself into. I had raised my hand and said, yes, I was willing to go. And they sent me to a cornfield in Iowa. And I really kind of my start of my data center career, I loved the fast pace, big build. I really love the team mentality too, with the speed of data centers, you can't do it if everybody's not working together. And that piece of it, that camaraderie of we are all working together and we've got to get it done. I find data centers a lot more collaborative than some of the other industries because we're solving complex problems, but we don't necessarily always have time to do it in a formal fashion. So it's a lot of getting all the right people in the right room and trying to figure out the best way to solve the problem together. doesn't have to be the typical person you would think would come up with the answer. The answers can come from a lot of people, which I really appreciated. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (06:28.845) Well, and you're tasked with kind of managing these big cross-functional, know, technical teams. Like you were talking about before, you know, you're dealing with, you know, kind of the architect engineering types, and then you're also dealing with, you know, guys moving large mounds of earth and big pieces of machinery and walls and everything else. How do you describe your leadership style when you're kind of managing all those different types of personalities and functions? Alex Walker (06:56.9) You definitely have to tailor it a little bit to who you're working with. How you approach a design team is very different from how you approach your site work subcontractor. And I like to think of my leadership style as collaborative. Like I was saying earlier, I don't go into the room with a lot of ego. Most of these guys have been doing this for some longer than I've been alive. So I try to get the best out of everybody around me, finding their expertise, and it's really getting the right people in the right room to solve problems. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (07:37.847) And I imagine you do run into some challenging personalities in this area. How do you kind of work through those challenging personalities and get them on board with the project? Alex Walker (07:52.962) Yeah, challenging personalities in the construction industry is something that, again, I've learned from the very beginning. It's a stressful industry. So a lot of the challenges with big personalities come in those stressful situations. So taking it down from this is an emergency to, okay, this is a challenge, but we've all solved these challenges before. Maybe this is different from how we've done it. previously. But at the end of the day, the building's always been built. And I think helping everybody reframe the situation from, yes, it is critical to, it's critical, but we can do this without being elevated. I think that really helps pull, pull those big personalities together. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (08:45.561) Now walk us through the technical steps of developing one of these sites. I imagine it's very different for everyone, but there's got to be a templated model of even from site selection, how are you picking these sites to how are you determining how large a site, that type of stuff. How are you guys getting to figure out what goes where? Alex Walker (09:09.956) So yeah, so site selection happens before a lot of the times I'm involved, but once we get to having a site selection, it is really how big of a data center can we fit on the piece of land for the power we have available. We are trying to utilize every piece of space and every piece of power, and that's kind of the first step. So we have some projects that are in spaces where land is challenging, and then we have other projects where land is not a challenge. So kind of balancing costs and benefit in each of those will get very different outcomes of what our buildings look like in those two situations. After we kind of figure out the land and power constraint, from there we're looking at like both costs and schedule efficiencies for whatever data center shape or configuration that we're looking at. Also considering, like starting to think about what our tenants are gonna need and trying to be predictive of what they are going to need while balancing that we don't necessarily know who we're going to lease to before we start one of these projects. our SME is our subject matter experts have our basis of design, which is configured in a way that we can cater to a lot of different clients and their specific needs at a later point in time. And trying to find those balances of doing enough to be ready for our clients and not doing too much where it becomes not cost effective. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (10:45.665) And I imagine that a lot of these sites are changing pretty frequently. The design, as you said, you've got kind of the template. But I think about even like the warehouse model has changed dramatically over the last 50 years as we've moved into kind of a warehouse model for goods and services. But even the grocery stores changed, how we shop at the grocery store changed. What changes in the data center are you seeing? evolve as we kind of get into this, you know, going from this kind of internet model to this new AI model. Alex Walker (11:20.977) Yeah, they're getting bigger. The pieces of equipment are getting bigger. The megawatts we're delivering are getting bigger. The technology that we can put in a smaller footprint. while necessarily the square footage isn't getting bigger, what we can do in that square footage is growing. And it's different, again, different configurations based on where you end up. building these. So if it's stacked yards because you're in a tight space or it's spread out, depends on a lot of what jurisdictions you're working on, that is real determining factor of what we are building. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (12:07.533) Yeah. And I guess inside of that data center, are you noticing any changes in kind of design or layouts as this is happening? It used to be, I think, probably 20 years ago now, there was this huge battle in how to design data centers for better airflow and better cooling and better efficiencies. Are you still seeing that? Are your teams still working on those efficiency gains and making tweaks to the internal designs? Alex Walker (12:36.14) Yeah, absolutely. They're still continuing to prove our internal designs, but there are definitely more tweaks than large changes when you walk through them. The large changes are coming in the technology side of it. So if you walk into our data centers, you're not necessarily going to see a big configuration difference between one of our previous builds and the ones we're working on, but the technology that's going into them and how they're laid out are slightly Slightly changing, I think kind of the biggest change I'm really seeing is more and more liquid cooling. I feel like every time we're talking about a new project, that's the new hot topic is whether or not the building will be liquid cooled and how we're set up for that. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:22.019) So walk us through that. Is that liquid cool to the chip or is that liquid cool to the server? Alex Walker (13:27.138) Yeah, like liquid cool to the chip. That's the big discussion is whether or not we're going to be set up for for client that wants liquid cool to the chip. One of the pros about the Align design is we can pretty easily pivot from liquid to air cooled and different percentages of liquid cool to the chip depending on our clients needs. So kind of starting with that baseline, if we start at a baseline that has some liquid cooling, we're we're able to pivot to whatever our tenants need. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (13:59.873) Now, as I understand the AI workloads are radically changing how basically the computers are consuming power and everything else. How do you see that changing the environment in five years as this just continues to hockey stick up? Other than getting bigger. Alex Walker (14:16.82) Yeah, think, well, yeah, one of the things that I mean, the amount of space that servers take up in a hall nowadays, back in the day, was how many servers could you possibly jam in a hall. Now we have data halls that honestly look relatively empty because the amount of power that's going to single servers is completely different from how it used to be. So as we do more of that and more high density, I think you'll see the overall square footage of data halls continue to change. But as of right now, because not every tenant is wanting 100 % liquid cooled, we're still not making that change as of yet because we need that flexibility. If a tenant doesn't want a liquid cooled or wants less liquid cooled, we still need that space available to cater. to cater to our clients. So I don't think AirQld is going away anytime soon. So the key right now is flexibility. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (15:22.733) Yeah, outside of power and construction, what are you looking at that kind of for innovation in construction or operations? What are you seeing out there that's exciting you? Alex Walker (15:31.818) So kind of going back to some of the basics, really getting partners involved as early as possible. Those are the kind of things that truly make a difference. Having our general contractor partners on board, having our trade partners on board when we're starting early designs sounds easy, but it's not always the case. A lot of projects start very quickly. And with that, sometimes it's a scramble to get the right great partners in place, but the ability to have those people in the room as we're starting design processes, it's amazing what we can get out of it and the efficiency we get at every level by having all the right team in the room at the beginning. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (16:19.097) Do you think there's one kind of area kind of in your process that's kind of ripe for innovation, like where you could see the biggest opportunity? Alex Walker (16:30.68) That's a good question. I think construction changes so fast that there's never going to be a one simple innovation that's going to be the answer for construction. A lot of this is still very much old school construction. We have to have workers put the piece in place. One of the innovations that you are seeing more and more is prefabrication. And I do think that is going to be a big opportunity as we continue to move forward, finding new ways to do fabrication offsite and bringing them to site in larger chunks. But again, that's still the same thing just in a different location. So making sure when we're moving those offsite that we have the right quality and safety programs wherever we're refabbing our material. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:25.357) Has 3D printing made it into the data center world yet? I know in other areas there are 3D printing houses and warehouses and everything else. Have you seen that pop into the data center market? Alex Walker (17:38.792) Not yet that I've seen, but you never know. We're just continuing to change as we go forward. So you never know where this industry can go. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (17:49.623) Now you're in this kind of interesting environment, right? It's kind of old meets new. You've got this construction meets AI. What do you think you learned in your early career that's keeping you going in this kind of weird market? Alex Walker (18:06.02) Yeah, I think it's really the most successful projects have a really good foundation of the basics. It's how good is your scheduling program? How good is your quality control program? How well organized is your team? How strong is your safety? And really those basic construction principles are the foundations to a successful project. having a really strong commissioning team is always going to be the key to successfully turning over a data center. Without that piece, it just can't be successful. And really having those guys that have done this over and over and over again, no matter how successful the construction side is, commissioning gets squeezed tight at the end. If construction was done early enough, clients would be asking us to commission earlier anyway. it's always going to be squeezed at the end. So having those, that strong commissioning team and having both general contractor, internal knowledge, as well as our third party commissioning agents, all on the same page and working as one team, it's what makes or breaks a successful project. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (19:22.359) And as you look out in the next kind of five years, what are you most excited about kind of where our lines going and kind of the vision that you see? Alex Walker (19:31.072) Yeah, just more bigger. love I really love this Phoenix Market that team that we've put together here. It's really collaborative. We're working on four campuses across the metro. But the relationship across people and teams is is really what I'm excited about. I love I love the sharing of knowledge and the collaborative nature of it. So I'm excited to see what this team does and we get to continue to build in the future. I know our land development team continues to find more and more projects, not just in this area, but across the country. So who knows where we end up going next. Russ Fordyce 🏆 (20:13.689) Well, Alex, congratulations again on the win. We're thrilled to always award people awards. And so we're thrilled to award this the big innovation award to you. And congratulations on all the success and being right in the middle of this dirt meets AI world. So congratulations on all the success. Alex Walker (20:32.452) Thank you, I appreciate it. I appreciate you bringing me on.