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48 I-CONNECT007 MAGAZINE I AUGUST 2026 achieve 215 MW of power. Nazar Khan, co-founder and CTO of TeraWulf, gave the clearest preview of what we would see during our tour. There were massive mechanical rooms where the building's heat exchange takes place, using coolers and chillers in a closed loop system that uses surprisingly little water (compared to their air cooling predecessors), then seemingly endless rows of server racks, each rack with its own cooling system, and finally, the connectivity for water and power at the rack level and in the floors and ceiling. Of course, the description doesn't do justice to the actual tour experience. We walked quickly, asking lots of questions, with our eyes wide and our minds spinning with amazement at the breadth and depth of the center. Marc Garner, Schneider's global president of cloud and servers, had asked us to make note of all the renewable energies being used as we toured, and called it "a phenomenal example of how we should be producing data centers with clean energy." With abundant power availability and a predominantly zero-carbon regional grid, TeraWulf is building the foundation for the AI economy while helping rede- fine the future of data center development. Indeed, it was impressive and offered me some hope amid the tense societal discussion taking place (including in my own state) around the placement of AI data centers and whether the burden they will poten- tially or inevitably place on surrounding areas will be unfair. The CB4 building was a feat of civil engineering in and of itself, supported by tons of concrete and steel, the two greatest material inputs in any data center build. The concrete walls of CB3 and CB4 were built approximately three stories high, all supported by heavy steel beams. The expansive concrete floors were also supported by steel, and both the floors and the ceilings of the building were designed for an immense amount of wiring and pipe work to support both power and cooling connec- tivity required for an AI data center. The weight of just the building infrastructure itself is massive before a single heavy server rack is moved into the space, of which there will be hundreds. TeraWulf is one of just five power and infrastruc- ture companies identified as capable of building data centers at this scale. Like them, Schneider Elec- tric is one of just a handful of companies capable of partnering with companies like TeraWulf to provide power and cooling infrastructure at this scale. For Lake Mariner alone, Schneider has provided more than $290 million in power, cooling, and digital infrastructure solutions to the project. Earlier in the day, Mark Garner stated, "At this point here, we are looking at AI workloads being around about 35% of all the compute deployed in 2030." When it comes to creating enough infrastructure to support that, he said it "is very much an arms race." As mentioned, Lake Mariner is the only TeraWulf operational data center campus, with anchor neocloud tenants, Core42 and Fluidstack. In this race, neoclouds are vitally important. Unlike their cloud cousins, these companies rent cloud access to high-end AI servers, such as for the NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 Blackwell chips. Like TeraWulf and Schneider in their own categories, the number of viable neocloud companies capable of this scale is alarmingly small. Consequently, a signifi- Marc Garner of Schneider presented data on projected AI compute workload to the journalists on the tour. SPECIAL SECTION ▼