A historic home tour of the virtual world

In downtown Palo Alto, California, on a busy street with coffee shops and art galleries, there is a building that helped shape the internet as we know it today. 

“You wouldn’t believe it walking by,” said Eddie Espinosa, a customer operations manager for a company called Equinix. “This is the home of the virtual world.”

“Marketplace Tech” host Meghan McCarty Carino toured this building as part of our ongoing series about AI infrastructure.

Behind the ornate exterior of this building is a data center. Equinix, the company that owns it, is one that you might not personally have heard of, but without knowing it, you’re connected to it all the time. 

The company specializes in “colocation data centers,” which are kind of like apartment buildings for computing power. Customers, which can include banks, social media companies, streaming services, and even large cloud providers, lease space for their data traffic. 

Equinix operates hundreds of data centers worldwide, and they’re building more — the company has plans to double capacity by 2029 — in hopes of capitalizing on the AI boom. 

But this one is special. It was built in the 1920s by the Pacific Telephone and Telegraph company as a telephone switchboard point. “Over the decades, those voices changed to bits and bytes, but the need to connect never changed,” said Espinosa. 

Once inside, he took McCarty Carino into a room with racks of computer servers and cables. “Every single fiber cable you see here is a different customer, internet service provider, cloud provider, enterprise company,”  said Espinosa. “People think the internet is just in the air, floating, but it requires physical connections.”

In the basement, he pointed out one room next to loudly humming equipment, that was once the headquarters of Alta Vista, one of the internet’s early search engine companies. 

“It’s kinda spooky down here,” McCarty Carino commented. It had creepy blue lighting and a maze of mesh cages for servers.  

“This was the first cage of PAIX back in 1996,” said Espinosa pointing to one of them. PAIX is short for Palo Alto Internet Exchange which, as one of the first neutral internet exchange points, helped create the foundation for the modern internet.

Before that era, a few large telecom providers and research institutions controlled most of the “roads” of the early internet. Those roads didn’t connect in very many places. 

The innovation at PAIX was basically to just plug a bunch of networks together in a neutral location, almost like a roundabout. “That makes it more efficient [and has] cost reductions,” said Espinosa. “[The founders of PAIX] saw that in order to make the internet grow, this is what needed to be happening.”

Click the audio player above to hear McCarty Carino’s conversation with Espinosa inside the Equinix data center.