639Cloud CEO Tim Shaler joined host Paul Zelizer on episode 399 of Awarepreneurs, the world's longest-running social entrepreneur podcast, to explain how we built and operate a data center powered entirely by solar and batteries — and why the rest of the industry should pay attention.
Listen to the full episode here.
Cloud computing, digital media, and AI are driving exponential growth in data center power demand — at the same time that traditional grids struggle with load management and renewable intermittency. Data centers need continuous, reliable power. The industry's answer has largely been "renewables can't do that." Ours is different.
Cracking 100% renewable reliability. Tim walks through the engineering behind our solar-plus-battery system in rural New Mexico: sizing for the shortest days and cloudiest weather, five days of battery storage, and recycled diesel generators as a backstop used for less than 1% of operational hours.
Why New Mexico. Affordable rural land makes large-scale battery storage economical, while high altitude and local conditions boost solar production. Innovations in our solar fields deliver roughly 60% greater efficiency, and co-locating generation with the data center cuts costs that grid-dependent facilities can't avoid.
Water stewardship in an arid region. Tim addresses one of the most common concerns about data centers head-on: our facilities use minimal water through humidity-control strategies, with plans to utilize brackish water going forward.
Two companies, one mission. 639Solar builds and manages the solar and battery systems; 639Cloud owns and operates the data centers, offering virtual machines, dedicated VMs, and bare metal, all running on 100% renewable power with dedicated resource allocation.
Community impact. The conversation also digs into what our data centers mean for host communities: job creation and upskilling during construction and operation, and measurable local wage boosts — backed by data from our own build.
Tim shares our five-year vision: expanding on our existing land and infrastructure, growing our cloud services, extending our patent portfolio, and licensing our IP so the broader industry can adopt this model. As he puts it in the episode, the solution is as much about smart engineering as environmental stewardship.
Listen to the episode or connect with Tim on LinkedIn. Interested in cloud services powered entirely by the sun? Explore what 639Cloud offers.
Suggested meta description (152 chars):639Cloud CEO Tim Shaler joins the Awarepreneurs podcast to explain how we built a 100% solar- and battery-powered data center in rural New Mexico.
