Data centers are large warehouse-looking buildings. No windows. Giant fence. Most often a security guard. Substation next door, high voltage power lines coming in. The trucks out front, the guys that are working — they look like just you and I.
But inside the building, you cannot believe what is going on.
There are GPUs buzzing, and every single one of them has a piece of fiber run into it. I am not exaggerating. Every single hyperscale data center building can handle hundreds of thousands of individual fibers. The biggest ones in the country, in the world — they have millions of fibers.
Compare that to the FTTH build we've been working on for the past few years. 48-count fibers. 144-count fibers. 288-count fibers. No. These hyperscalers, they're 1,728 fibers. 3,456 fibers. 6,912 fibers.
But the question now is: why do they need that much fiber?
Every GPU. Every rack. Every aisle.
Every single GPU, every single rack, every single aisle, every single row is getting hundreds, if not thousands, of fibers.
The internet that's coming to your house is using a single fiber. Think about that. Every house in the country has a single fiber. Every single one of those houses connects to a GPU. Think about that. Hundreds of millions of houses connecting to hundreds of millions of GPUs.
Somebody has to build that infrastructure. Somebody has to splice it. Somebody has to test it.
Can you keep up with that? Have you done that much splicing? Have you done that much testing? Do you even know what's involved in that? What does it take to process all those splices and all those tests?
Let's walk in one
Let's see what we see.
Rows and rows and rows of racks. Many, many cages. Overhead cable trays running like light highways above every aisle. Perfectly dressed, not like what you see out there in the rural fiber-to-the-home build. Everything is neat. Everything is in order. Everything is the way that it should be.
No dust. No dirt. All you can hear is the loud whistle of the GPUs and the servers running twenty-four seven.
Maybe there's a few people around. They're all working. There's no bucket trucks. There's no ladders. There's no outside plant poles. They bring their tools, their equipment in on a cart. They do their job. They leave for the day.
Which is exactly why I'm writing this
I think that the skill and the people in this industry are out there, and they're doing other jobs. And they don't even know what's going to happen in the next few years, where they're going to be needed.
So I'm writing this article so that people understand that in the next few years, they gotta switch their skill set. They gotta move from being outside plant fiber-to-the-home splicers working in a cornfield in Ohio to working inside a hyperscaler data center. No longer splicing 48-count fibers. You're now splicing 1,728 fibers.
You gotta move. You gotta adjust to that. It's something new. It's something different. But this is where it's heading.
Don't stay out there in those cornfields for the next few months. Come inside to the data center. Join the hyperscalers — because that's where the splicing work is at, and that's where it's moving to.