Episode Details

Industry analyst Matt Kimball and Steve McDowell, hosts of the archived “DataCentric” podcast, reunite in this Tech Barometer segment to break through the hype surrounding enterprise AI, NewClouds, cloud native and data storage trends, and supply chain constraints.

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Podcast transcript:

Matt Kimball
Oh yeah, the Steve and Matt show. Let’s talk about 2PIC, Steve.

Steve McDowell
2PIC, first let’s talk about us. We are Steve and Matt, host of the Data Center Podcast.

Matt Kimball
Yes. Who are you? Are you Steve or Matt?

Steve McDowell
I’m Steve McDowell, Principal Analyst.

Matt Kimball
Look at you. I’m Matt Kimball.

Steve McDowell
Are you also a Principal Analyst?

Matt Kimball
Principal Analyst. I’m a bunch of things.

Jason Lopez
That’s an excerpt from the Data Centric Podcast featuring Matt Kimball, Principal Data Center Analyst at More Insights and Strategy and Steve McDowell, now Chief Analyst at NAND Research. It ran six seasons from 2018 to 2023 for more than a hundred episodes and covered enterprise IT and data centers. This is the Tech Barometer Podcast. I’m Jason Lopez. One of the reasons their conversations work so well is because they’re not pretending to do a point counterpoint and at the same time, they’re not pretending to be friends as evidenced in exchanges like this at .NEXT 2026 before they knew we’d hit the record button.

Steve McDowell
So you’re agreeing with me. Thank you.

Matt Kimball
I think I said that. I think you tried to repeat what I said but make it more contrarian. See, this is why we’ll never be married or this is why we should be married. I don’t know, one or the other.

Steve McDowell
I miss our podcast

Matt Kimball
Do you? Yeah, that’s good.

Jason Lopez
But once they did know, here’s what we got. A wide ranging discussion from the idea of their doing a podcast to begin with to whether AI is in a bubble to the evolution of data centers in three short years since their last data centric podcast.

Matt Kimball
We used to do these things regularly, right? So it’s been about three years or so. Almost to the day actually. Yes. Since we last did one of these podcasts and we were talking about things like cooling, sustainability and we were talking about chips as well. How much has the world changed in the last three years?

Steve McDowell
We were way ahead of our time. Last time we were talking about why the world might need liquid cooling and the potential. Yep. Now we kind of back the wrong horse on that one but the next generation of servers are gonna be liquid cooled top to bottom. Yep. Right? AI’s enabled that. Jensen said you can’t, I mean have you seen the power numbers for Rubin? Oh yeah. They’re coming up on two kilowatt. Yep. Right? So, you know, immersion cooling has taken over the world. You can’t go to a show now without looking at spigots coming out of the back of your rack. Yeah. It still gives me the shivers. You know, and that’s given permission I think for the CPU guys to also up their amperage. So when they start merging these things they’re not capped by watts anymore. Right? So Moore’s law kind of comes back a little bit.

Matt Kimball
It’s funny though because a lot of what we were talking about was leading up to where we’re at today. And you’re right.

Steve McDowell
As industry analysts, we’re paid to look forward, son. We, if we can’t predict two years in the future with 70% probability we need to go back to our other jobs, right? I need to start wr