 From Austin, Texas, it's theCUBE, covering Pure Storage Accelerate 2019, brought to you by Pure Storage. Welcome back to theCUBE, Lisa Martin live on the Pure Accelerate floor in Austin, Texas. Dave Vellante is joining me and we're pleased to welcome a couple of guests from Core Scientific for the first time to theCUBE. We have Jim Benedetto, Chief Data Officer and John Curran, the SVP of Business Development. Gentlemen, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you, pleasure to be here. So John, we're going to start with you, give our audience an overview of who Core Scientific is, what you guys do, what you deliver. Sure, well, we're a two-year-old startup, headquartered out of Bellevue, Washington. And we really focus on two primary businesses. We have a blockchain business and we have an AI business. In blockchain, we are one of the largest blockchain cryptocurrency hosting companies in North America. We've got facilities, four facilities in North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Kentucky. And really the business there is helping companies to be able to take advantage of blockchain and then position them for the future. And then on the AI side of our business, really we operate that in two ways. One is we can also co-locate and host people just like we do on the blockchain side, but primarily we're focused on creating a public cloud focused on GPU-centric computing and artificial intelligence. And we're there to help really usher in the new age of AI. So you guys were founded, you said two years ago, from what I can tell you haven't raised a ton of dough. Is that true or are you guys quiet about that? We're very well-capitalized. Okay, so it hasn't hit crunch-base yet. Yeah, no, so we're very well-capitalized company. We've got, you know, to give you- Because what you do is not cheap. No, no, we've got about 675 megawatts of power under contract. So, you know, each one of our facilities is about 50 megawatts plus in size. So, no, it's not cheap. They're large installations and large build-outs. To even give you a comparison, the standard data center is about five to 10 megawatts. We won't even look at a facility or a plot of land unless we can supply at least 50 megawatts of power. So, I was going to ask you to kind of describe what's different between a sort of blockchain hosting and conventional databases or data centers. You kind of just did, but are there other sort of technical factors that you guys consider? Absolutely, I mean, we custom-build our own data centers from the ground up. We've got patent-pending technology and if you look at virtually every data center in the world today is built with one thing at its core and that's the CPU. The CPU is fundamentally different than the GPU. And if you try to retrofit CPU-based data centers for GPUs, you're not going to fully maximize the performance and the capabilities of the GPU. So, we build from the ground up, data centers focused with the GPU at the center and not the CPU at the center. And is center in quotes because, I mean, you have all this alternative processing GPUs in particular that are popping up all over the place as opposed to traditional CPU, which is okay, just jam as much as I can on the real estate as possible. Is that a factor? Well, there's also a lot, the GPU at the center, but there's also a lot of supporting infrastructure. So, you've got to look at first off, the power density is very, very different. GPUs pull, they require significantly a lot more power than CPUs do. And then also just from a fluid dynamics perspective, it's very, the heating and the cooling of them is, again, fundamentally different. You're not looking at standard hot, cold aisles and raised floors. But the overall goal also is to be able to provide the supporting infrastructure, which is from an AI-ready design, is the interconnect networking and also the incredibly fast storage behind it. Because the name of the game with GPUs is different than with CPUs. With GPUs, the one thing you want to do is you want to get as much data into the GPU as fast as possible, because compute will very rarely be your limiting factor with the GPU. So, the supporting infrastructure is significantly more important than it is when you're doing with the CPUs. So, the standard narrative is, well, I don't know about cryptocurrency, but the underlying technology of blockchain is a lot of potential. I personally think they're very much related. And I wonder if you guys could comment on that. You started during the real sort of the latest, most recent sort of big uptick, big uptick. I know it's bounced back in cryptocurrency. And so you must have had a lot of activity in really in your early days. And then maybe the crypto winter affected you. Maybe some of those companies were so well capitalized. It was kind of their time to innovate, right? And yeah, there was some bad actors, but that's really not the core of it. So I wonder what you guys have seen in the blockchain market. We'll get to AI and pure and all that other stuff. But this is a great topic, so I wonder if you could comment. So, yes, there's certainly cyclicality in the blockchain market, right? And I think one of the key things is, being well capitalized allows you to invest through the downturns, the position you come out stronger as the market came out. And we've certainly seen that. Our growth in blockchain continues to really be substantial. And we're making all the right strategic investments, right? Whether it's blockchain or AI, because you have such significant power requirements, you've got to be very strategic about where you put the facilities. You're looking for facilities that have large sustained power capabilities, green. We've seen carbon taxes come in that'll adversely affect folks. We want to make sure we're positioned for long term in terms of the capabilities. And then some geopolitical uncertainty has certainly affected the blockchain side of the business and has driven more business to North America, which has been fantastic for us. To me, you're hosting innovation. You're doing blockchain and AI, I like saying, include crypto in there. I'm sure you've got, you have some cryptocurrency guys, right? And so we do cryptocurrency mining for ourselves as well. For yourselves, okay. But so, I mean, my take on it is a whole new internet is being built. And the crypto craze actually has funded a lot of that innovation. New protocol, I mean, it was last, I mean, the protocols of the internet, SMTP, HTTP, I mean, they're all government funded or education funded academic institutions. And the big internet companies sort of co-opted them. So you had a dearth of innovation, that's now come back. You guys are hosting that innovation. It's kind of how I look at it. And I feel like we've seeded the base and there's going to be this massive explosion of innovation both in blockchain, crypto, AI, automation and you're in the heart of it. Yeah, I agree. I think crypto currencies or digital currencies are really just the first successful experiment of the blockchain. And I see, I agree with you. I think that it is revolutionary and is going to change as many industries as the internet did. And we're still in a very nascent stage of the technology, but at core, we're working to position ourselves to really be the underlying platform, almost like the Akamai of the early days of the internet, the underlying platform and the plumbing for both blockchain and AI applications. Right, I mean, whether it's smart contracts, like I say, new innovation, AI, it's all powering a next generation of distributed apps. Really, okay. So, sorry. I love this topic. I know you do. Okay, so where do these guys fit in? So do we. I mean, it's so exciting. I think it's misunderstood. I mean, the people who are into it are believers. I mean, like myself, I really believe in a value store. I believe in smart contracts and immutability. You know, and I believe in responsibility too and all that other good stuff. But so, innovation in private blockchain is just starting, right? You know, if you look at it, there's just, I think going to be multiple waves in the blockchain side. And you know, we want to be there to make sure that we're helping power and position folks from both an infrastructure as well as a software perspective. Every financial institution, you know, you had VMware doing stuff, Libra, I loved Libra, even though it's getting a lot of criticism. It just, you know, shined a light on the whole topic. But, okay, bring us back to sort of commercial mainstream, what are you guys doing here? What's going on with Pure? So we have built, we were the first AI-ready certified data center and we've actually partnered very closely with Pure and NVIDIA. And as we went through the selection process of what type of stores we were going to be using to back our GPUs, we went through a variety of different evaluation criteria and Pure came out ahead and we've decided that we're going with Pure. And we, again, for me, it boils down to one thing. As a chief data officer is how much data can I get into those GPUs as fast as possible? And what you see is if you look at existing, you know, current cloud providers, you'll see that they're retrofitting CPU-based data centers for GPUs and you see a lot of problems with that where you're just not, the storage that they provide is not fast enough to drive quote unquote warm or cold data into the GPUs. So people end up using adding more and more GPUs to actually just increase GPU memory when they're usually running around a couple percent, like one or two percent, five percent compute, but you have to add more just for the memory because the storage is so slow. So you had, Jim, you were saying before when we were chatting earlier that you have had 20 years of experience looking at different storage vendors working with them. What were some of the criteria? But you talked about the speed and the performance. But in terms of, you also mentioned, John, about that green was a very important, is an important component of the way that you build data centers. Where was Pure's vision on sustainability evergreen? Where was that a factor in the decision to go with Pure? If you look at Pure's power density requirements and things like that, I think it's important. One thing that also, and this actually does apply from a sustainability perspective, where a lot of other storage vendors say that they're horizontally scalable forever. But they're actually running different heads and a variety of different ways. Pure is the only storage vendor that I've ever come across that is truly horizontally scalable. And when you start to try to build stuff like that, you get into all the different things of supercomputing where you've got, you know, split-brained scenarios and fencing and it's very complex. But their ability to scale horizontally with just, not even disk, but with just the storage is something that was really important to us. I think the other thing that's certainly interesting for our customers is you're looking at important workloads that they're driving out. And so the ability to do in-place upgrades, business continuity, right, to make sure that we're able to deliver them technology that doesn't disrupt their business when their business needs the results is critically important. And so Pure is a great choice for us from that perspective and the innovations they're driving on that side of the business has really been helpful. I read a stat on the Pure website where users of Core Scientific's infrastructure are seeing performance improvements of up to 800%. Are these, are you delighting the heck out of data scientists now? Is that what, those are the primary users? That is, that, it references what we see with people using GPUs in the public cloud. Again, going back to the thing that I just keep hammering on, driving data into that GPU. We had one customer that had somewhere around 14 or 15 GPUs running an analytics application in the public cloud. And we told them, keep all your CPU compute in one of the large cloud providers, but move just your GPU compute to us. And they went from 14 or 15 GPUs down to two, GB 100s in a DGX1, and backed by Pure Storage with Arista. And from 14 GPUs to two GPUs, they saw an 800% increase in performance. Now, there's a really important, additional part to that. So let's say, if I'm running a dashboard or running a query and a 0.5 second query gets an 800% increase in performance, how much do I really care? Now, if I'm the guy running 100 queries every single day, I probably do. But it's not just that. It's the fact that it allows, it doesn't just speed up things. It allows you to look at data that you were never able to look at before. So it's not just that they have an 800% performance increase. It's that instead of having tables with hundreds of millions of rows, they now can have tables with billions of rows. So data that was previously not looked at before, data that was previously not turned into actionable information to help drive their business, is now they're not getting visibility into data that they didn't have access to before. So you're a CDO that, it sounds like you have technical chops. Yeah, I'm a tech nerd at heart. It's kind of rare actually for a CDO. I've interviewed a lot of CDOs and most of them are kind of come from a data quality background or a governance and compliance world. They don't dress like you. I mean, they dress like I do. Even quite a bit better. But the reason I ask that is it sounds like you're a different type of CDO. Like even a business like yours, I mean, I almost think I get data scientists. Just so describe your role, because it's- I was with the company from the beginning. So I've held quite a few roles actually. I think maybe this might be my third title at this point. But in general, I'm a very technical person. I'm hands-on. I love technology. I've held CTO titles in the past as well. But I've kind of, I've always been very interested in data and interested in storage because that's where data lives. And it's just, it's a great fit for me. So I've always been interested in this because the narrative is that CDOs shouldn't be technical. They should be a business. And I get all that. But the flip side of that is when you talk to CDOs about AI projects, which is, not digital transformation, but specifically AI projects, they're not intimate. Most CDOs in healthcare, financial services, even government, they're not intimately involved. They're kind of like, yeah, Chief Data Officer, we'll let you know when we have a data quality problem. And I don't think that's right. I mean, I think the CDO should be intimately involved in those AI projects. And so. And I think a lot of times if you ask them, you ask a lot of people, they'll say, are you interested in deploying AI in your organization? And the answer is 100%, yes. And then the next follow-up question is, what would you like to do with it? And most of the time, the answer is, we don't know. I don't know. So what I have found is, as I go into organizations, I don't ask if people want to use AI. I ask, what are your problems? And I think the, what problems are you facing? What KPIs are you trying to optimize for? And there are some of those problems, there are some problems on that list that might not be able to be helped by AI, but usually there are problems on that list that can be helped by AI with the right data in the right place. So my translation of what you're asking is, how could you make more money? That's what it comes to. That's what you're asking, how could you cut costs or raise revenue? That's really ultimately what you get at buying new costumers. I think the other interesting thing about our partnership with Pure, and especially with regards to AIRI, right? AIRI is an exciting technology, but for a lot of companies, as they're looking to get started in AI, there's almost this moment of pause of how do I get started? And then, if I look at some of the greatest technology out there, it's like, okay, well, now I have to retrofit my data center to get it in there. There's a bunch of technical barriers that slow down the progression. And what we've been able to do with AIRI in the cloud is really to be able to help people jump start that, to get started right away. So rather than, let me think for six months or 12 months or 18 months on what would I analyze? Start analyzing, get started. And you can do it on a very cost-effective OPEX model as opposed to a capital-intensive CapEx model. All right, so I got to ask you, and Pure will be pissed off that I'm asking this question, because you're talking about AIRI as a, it's real and I want some color on that, but I felt like when the first announcement came out with NVIDIA, it was like rushed so that Pure could have another first. It was drawing, like, we beat the competition, but the way you're talking is AIRI is real, you're using it, it's a tangible solution, it's a core solution in our facility. It's a core thing that we go to market with and it's something that we're seeing customer demand to go out and really start to drive some business value. So, absolutely. A core component of helping them jump start that AI. Well, you guys just, I think, an hour or so ago announced your new partnership level with Pure. John, take us away as we wrap here with the news. Yeah, so, well, we're really excited. We're one of a handful of elite-level MSP partners for Pure. I think there's only a few of us in the world, so that's exciting and we're really the one who is focused on bringing AIRI to the cloud. And so, it's a unique partnership, it's a deep partnership, and it allows us to really coordinate our technical teams, our sales teams, and be able to bring this technology across the industry. And so, we're excited, it's just the start, but it's a great start and we're looking forward to nothing but upside from here. Fantastic, you have to come back guys and talk to us about a customer who's done a jump start with AIRI and just taking the world by storm. So, we thank you both for stopping by the Cube. All right, John, Jim, thank you so much for your time. Thank you, really appreciate it. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching the Cube from Pure Accelerate 2019.