logo
episode-header-image
Jan 2025
5m 32s

Why Would A Data Center Come To Your Nei...

Victor Menasce
About this episode

On today’s show we are looking at what might be the economic drivers for the construction of new data centres.

Data centres are a very capital intensive business. They consume a lot of land, electricity, water, and of course the hardware software and climate control equipment. They burden the local electric utility with a lot of demand and they don’t contribute very much to a city’s vibrancy. Nobody goes on a Sunday afternoon drive to look at the data center.


Apart from the fact that you have access to artificial intelligence applications from OpenAI and Google and Amazon and countless others, the data center doesn’t contribute to the community in a visible way. These applications are in the cloud and therefore their location is largely invisible.

A data center owner is looking for a few key elements.

  1. excellent optical fibre connectivity with redundant networks and multiple physical paths. This way a network outage does not represent a single point of failure.
  2. Adequate land and zoning at a reasonable price with a favourable property tax rate 
  3. Plentiful and inexpensive electricity where the electric grid has redundant pathways which will make the data center more tolerant to local power outages.
  4. Access to a skilled talent pool or operate and maintain the data center.

--------------

**Real Estate Espresso Podcast:**
 Spotify: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast](https://open.spotify.com/show/3GvtwRmTq4r3es8cbw8jW0?si=c75ea506a6694ef1)  
 iTunes: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast](https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-real-estate-espresso-podcast/id1340482613)  
 Website: [www.victorjm.com](http://www.victorjm.com)  
 LinkedIn: [Victor Menasce](http://www.linkedin.com/in/vmenasce)  
 YouTube: [The Real Estate Espresso Podcast](http://www.youtube.com/@victorjmenasce6734)  
 Facebook: [www.facebook.com/realestateespresso](http://www.facebook.com/realestateespresso)  
 Email: [podcast@victorjm.com](mailto:podcast@victorjm.com)  
**Y Street Capital:**
 Website: [www.ystreetcapital.com](http://www.ystreetcapital.com)  
 Facebook: [www.facebook.com/YStreetCapital](https://www.facebook.com/YStreetCapital)  
 Instagram: [@ystreetcapital](http://www.instagram.com/ystreetcapital)  

Up next
Yesterday
Changing Landlord Rules
<p>We have become accustomed to hearing about legislative changes that advance tenant rights and make it more and more difficult for property owners to protect their properties and indeed run a profitable business. There is nothing that compels investors to make losing investment ... Show More
5m 18s
Nov 24
Unreasonably Short Construction Schedule
<p>On today’s show we are looking at the compressibility of construction schedules. We often hear that projects will take longer and there are all kinds of reasons why they legitimately need to take longer. </p><p>It’s a large site and the site work will take a long time. The uti ... Show More
6m 16s
Nov 24
Estate Planning with Allison Kierman
<p>Allison Kierman is based in Scottsdale Arizona where she specializes in estate planning for business owners and high net worth families. On today&#39;s show we are talking about some of the pitfalls that can occur when this sometimes painful topic is ignored. </p><p>To connect ... Show More
9m 8s
Recommended Episodes
Jun 2025
The state of play of data center development
The future of the grid increasingly hinges on where and how data centers get built. To forecast the kind of power infrastructure we need to meet AI’s growing appetite, we first need to understand a laundry list of variables: data center size, workload type, latency, reliability — ... Show More
36m 24s
Oct 2023
Hungry Like the Wolf: Data centers and new power-intensive tech
The rapid growth of digital infrastructure like AI, edge computing, virtual reality and private clouds is making data centers—once an underappareciated niche—into an increasingly important commercial real estate sector. DigitalBridge CEO Marc Ganzi and CBRE’s Pat Lynch share insi ... Show More
41m 56s
Mar 2025
Data Center Dynamics: AI and Energy Demand
Energy-hungry data centers are on the rise. Power demand driven by artificial intelligence has been met by an increase in power purchase agreements (PPAs) for low-carbon energy. Meanwhile, DeepSeek has reduced demand through more efficient computations. So what is driving decisio ... Show More
36m 52s
Mar 2025
The potential for flexible data centers
Tyler Norris says regulators have been getting two different stories. On one side, they’ve been hearing that data centers are largely inflexible loads. On the other, last year the U.S. Department of Energy recommended data center flexibility, and EPRI launched its DCFlex initiati ... Show More
31m 29s
Sep 10
Data Centers Could Supercharge US Gas Demand
Artificial intelligence needs power, and lots of it. If all the data centers in the current US pipeline get built, they could suck up the electricity from 100 nuclear power plants and still be left wanting more. One obvious solution for supplying this massive demand is natural ga ... Show More
31m 10s
Sep 23
The data center surge: Building the backbone of the digital age
<p style="margin: 0in; font-family: Aptos; font-size: 11.0pt;">In this episode, Fahmi Enam, head of Media Communications and Digital Infrastructure at J.P. Morgan Commercial Banking, is joined by Scott Wilcoxen, global head of Digital Infrastructure Investment Banking at J.P. Mor ... Show More
18m 22s
Apr 2025
#716: Concrete, Cooling, and Compute: Reinventing Data Centers for the AI Age
Dive deep into the fascinating world of modern data centers with Sr. Principal Engineer at AWS, Stephen Callahan. Discover how AI is revolutionizing data center design, why nothing is uninteresting at scale, and the innovative ways AWS is tackling sustainability while powering th ... Show More
29m 54s
Sep 30
How can the grid help AI, and how can AI help the grid? Live from NYU at New York Climate Week, featuring leaders from Nvidia and Amazon | Energy Gang Live from Climate Week
<p>Recorded in front of a packed room at NYU’s Kimmel Center during Climate Week NYC, Ed Crooks and Amy Myers Jaffe moderate a debate on the high-stakes topic of AI and energy. They dig deep into the questions raised by the surge of investment in data centers: what it means for g ... Show More
1h 8m
Sep 19
Live from Aldar’s latest real estate launch party!
19 Sep 2025. We’re live from Aldar’s latest Dubai launch party as Cecilia Reinaldo takes us inside the developer’s newest project and what it means for the city’s property market. Plus, Deloitte has been crunching the numbers on UAE hiring, we get the latest from their human capi ... Show More
32m 28s
May 2023
VREP #372 | Critical Housing Market Insights with Zonda's CEO Jeff Meyers
Today&#39;s guest has been analyzing and collecting data on residential new home construction and real estate trends since 1985. Now, as the head of the leading provider of data to the residential home building industry in North America, CEO of Zonda Jeff Meyers sits down with Ma ... Show More
1h 10m
Listen to millions of songs and podcasts on Anghami