Keeping Up With the Demand for Data Centers

DC BLOX provides connected data centers, from colocation facilities in growing markets to globally connected cable landing stations to hyperscale-ready build-to-suit campuses. 

DC BLOX also provides integrated regional network services and dark fiber solutions to meet the connectivity requirements of modern business.

In the dynamic landscape of the Southeastern United States, a confluence of factors is driving unprecedented demand for digital infrastructure. The proliferation of connected devices is revolutionizing how we live and work. 

Businesses are striving to build and enhance digital services to meet growing customer expectations while social media platforms are expanding, fostering connections across communities. 

Cloud infrastructure is being deployed closer to users, with artificial intelligence poised to unlock even greater efficiencies and advancements.

More data centers are required outside the major cities nearer to edge markets to house the necessary technology to run services closer to data producers and consumers.

New fiber networks are required to move massive amounts of data to and from these facilities. 

As a vertically integrated digital infrastructure provider, DC BLOX owns and operates edge-market data centers, boasts a regional network spanning the Southeast, and manages the critical cable landing station in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. 

Its commitment extends further as it acquires land, secures power commitments, and collaborates with top-tier partners to meet the escalating demand for customized hyperscale-ready data center solutions with integrated dark fiber connectivity.

“With businesses like DC BLOX coming in, bringing their talent, bringing their ideas, connecting us with the rest of the world, there is no limit to what our state can do,” South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster has said.

Jeff Uphues, a 30-year veteran in the information technology industry, leads DC BLOX. 

He is a tireless tech-savvy executive and business strategist who has held C-suite leadership roles for Liquid Web, Cbeyond, Bandwidth, ACSI Network Technologies, MCI and WilTel.

Uphues serves as an active board member in several technology firms, is a graduate of the Harvard Business School, Rice University’s Jones School of Business Executive Education program in Finance and Accounting, and completed his undergraduate studies at the University of Texas at Arlington. 

He lives in Tampa, Florida, with his wife, Aimee, and they have two daughters. When not working, Uphues can be typically found road cycling, playing golf, or on a lacrosse field with his youngest daughter.

In an interview with David Dykes, editor of Integrated Media Publishing’s five business magazines, Uphues discussed his career and his Atlanta-based company.

Q. Let's talk about DC BLOX. The data center boom is on us, and I want to know how you are balancing your core business with a massive demand for AI infrastructure these days.

Uphues: Yeah, that's a challenge for so many people in the industry, whether it be data center developers like ourselves, speculative land developers who think that they have a site that could be useful for a data center project, or even the power utility companies in trying to wade through what is the real demand and how soon is that demand going to be here. 

Everything seems as if it's completely off the chart with both demand of how much electricity we're going to use, to how many data centers do we actually need to win this battle of AI in the race to stay a step ahead of China as well as satisfy the demands of what all the benefits that AI can bring. It is really a big challenge. 

We are staying ahead of it because in many ways, we have stayed true to our business model that we set out nearly 10 years ago in how do we really become the dominant player, or how do we become a company that is solely focused on the Southeast to delivering digital infrastructure solutions for the world's greatest companies. That's morphed over a period of time, but certainly we've stayed true to that.

When you stay true to an overall vision and purpose for why you exist and where you go, business becomes a little easier to navigate because we've been tempted through the years of, hey, let's go to the West Coast, or let's go to the Mountain West, or let's go to the Northeast United States. We've kept a really, really maniacal focus around staying focused in the Southeast. By doing so, I think it's helped us navigate some of these new hurdles that we have in this world of AI.

Q. How is DC BLOX leveraging this regional focus to attract customers away from the major metro markets? The Wall Street Journal has reported that the data center boom has been eating up a lot of land, and Atlanta says it's gone too far. So that's the Southeastern market right there. How do you approach that?

Uphues: Our approach has been one of, look, when we come into a market, whether that's in Atlanta or whether that's Greenville or whether we're building a new one in Augusta, North Augusta, right now or one we put in Myrtle Beach, we build these with a purpose in mind ... how is it going to serve locally, and how is it going to connect globally on behalf of our customers? 

And customers change from time to time. It's really falling in love more with your market of the customers you serve, and you'll be able to pull customers in if you stay true to that market. 

For us, looking at luring customers away or anything else, Atlanta happens to be the epicenter of the Southeast United States when it comes to internet traffic and where some of the largest or the largest companies on the globe have chosen to invest more into there. … It's really the hyper scale clientele. … It's really referencing five type players or five type companies.

That is Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle. Then you add in others that are in the mix. Many of those are web scale companies that are driving the internet content and social media. It's also companies who we refer to as AI NEO clouds or AI companies who are providing an AI platform for enterprises and others to use. Those type of companies want to go to where there's great accessibility of network, great accessibility of land, an abundance of power, and the capability to be connected to the global backbone of the internet, just about anywhere within those markets, seamlessly. 

That's why a market like Atlanta has done really well. It's also bolstered with low power rates compared to where some of the other areas of the country are. It has a great workforce of talent that you need to operate and run and own these facilities. 

It also has some very good tax incentives where, in an economically friendly environment like what Georgia has been in the example of Atlanta, it's worked out very, very well as they've leaned into saying, “We want you into these markets.” 

When you take all those combinations of low power rates, good workforce, abundance of land, lots of network connectivity, and what I mentioned, abundance of power, it really allowing –  it's more like a magnet.

I'll say that Atlanta is not the only market for that. South Carolina has done exceptionally well and continues to do well. I mean, in fact, we feel that South Carolina is a market where we're going to continue to make larger and larger investments in, just because of some of the things happening in the state around the nuclear energy renaissance and what is the potential of things at VC Summer. And with 55 percent of the energy resources being nuclear already in South Carolina, it's about the only way from a constant energy that we're actually going to get ahead.

Q. You've got locations in South Carolina and you've got development in Berkeley County. Where else would you look in South Carolina right now? 

Uphues: Our criteria for where we invest, it's based upon No. 1, where is there available power? 

No. 2, where is there a market need where there is an opportunity where we can serve in that community and have availability of workforce, have good tax incentives, and as well as also make a difference in that community. 

So today we've got facilities in Greenville, South Carolina. We have another one we're putting in currently. It's under construction in North Augusta, just outside of Aiken. We have another facility that is in Myrtle Beach, which is our Myrtle Beach cable landing station. We have property in the North Charleston area that we're continually looking at of what's the right client fit to put on to that facility. There's other areas around the state that we've looked to put future deployments in, and whether that be more into the Upstate between Greenville and Charlotte, as well as south of Charlotte. Think of it in the general Rock Hill area, and then certainly over into areas around the SRS site, which is in the Savannah River site.

Q. Talk about your relationship with the utility companies, because the data center market is dominated by power availability, which you've said. So how would you assess that relationship you have with those utility companies?

Uphues: I would think it's very good. I know just about all the utility companies in South Carolina on a first-name basis from the CEO on down. It takes both of us to be able to do this. There's a lot of education that goes into what does it really take to develop a data center? What type of power does it take to bring a data center to life? Over what time period? 

There's a lot of consideration related to areas of how much transmission and substation infrastructure is needed that in virtually every case, we're paying 100 percent of what those costs are just to enable the type of customers we have.

It's also something that rates are very, very important as well. I mean, if you have higher rates in certain areas of the state versus lower areas, and that may be different from who you're dealing with. You may be dealing with Santee Cooper in one area, or you may be dealing with Duke in another or Dominion in another. Or you may be dealing with an electrical combination of things that happen where you're fed by behind the meter gas or you're fed by other opportunities that say, “How can I get energy to our projects?’

Each and every relationship that we have with the utility providers is very transparent. I've sat down many times with Jimmy Staton at Santee and had open dialogue of here's what we're planning. Here's what we're thinking. I've done the same thing with Tim Pearson at Duke. Our ability to execute, same thing with Dominion, we have to continually operate in a very transparent and collaborative way in order to do this. Having the right forecast of how much power we're going to use on what timeline is critical so they can get into their planning because they're balancing what are all the requests, what companies like us are actually going to do. We've got a proven track record of delivering these projects, which is something that they can bank on. It's just a matter of, can we get alignment around what those expectations are, and how much does it cost over what period of time. I would say, David, it's a long answer, but I would feel that our relationship with utilities is very, very strong, and it has to be.

Q. Talk about the regulatory landscape. Do you feel like you've got a good approach to that to minimize any objections or naysayers?

Uphues: Well, I do. In many times, some people will look at these if you're thinking about zoning. Putting a large-scale data center next to a residential community or neighborhood, it can work, but it has to be with complete transparency on the things of what we do. 

It's like, No. 1, most people find in every market we've gone into we've had unanimous votes from city councils or county councils in approving our use of a tract of land for a data center. 

The reason for that is, is we spend a lot of time educating because there's a lot of misinformation that is out there as well. 

When you compare a data center to a truck terminal that most of these properties typically say, “Hey, we've got it zoned commercial and you could put in some type of a distribution center.”  

We don't bring hundreds and hundreds of trucks in and out of it all hours of the night and day. We are very minimal impact related to roads and related to noise and other things. Our generators that we put on our properties are very, very low noise. It's almost to the sound of air conditioners running in a neighborhood of the decibels that we do.

But we try to put in barriers and berms and other landscaping and other things that dampen any sound that would be coming from where we are. We're pretty low maintenance when it comes to being in the community. 

Probably the biggest one that I would say that we hear about, all the time is, “Oh, my gosh, a data center is going to use an abundance or overabundance of water,” an amount of water of what we would use in a data center. 

Frankly, that's not the case anymore. I often tell people that DC BLOX currently today uses about a million gallons of water. And that's not per hour, that's not per day, that's not per week. Our current designs, that's per year. And about 60 percent of what we use is predominantly just for our landscaping and irrigation around our campuses. So debunking the myth of a data center is really bad because it creates lots of noise. I think we've covered that. A data center uses lots of water, which old school data center designs have large evaporative cooling towers. Those cooling towers evaporate water out as a way to then bring water in to chill it, to air condition these big buildings.

The technology has greatly changed. And we do all this with closed-loop systems, which essentially says we use water tanks and recycle the water through the facility after filling it up one time. 

It recycles it and it chills the water to the place that it really needs to cool down, which is the chips that are on each one of the servers in our facility. So the ambient temperature in a data center now is north of 80 degrees. And it's not one of these cold rooms you walk into where it needs to be 55 degrees anymore. And you can do this in much more efficient ways.

Q. The 1 million gallons was usage-per-year?

Uphues: Per year. That's on all of our facilities.

That is a snapshot in time of what we used in 2024. For all of our data centers, we used 1 million gallons on an annual basis.

Q. In Myrtle Beach, you're able to locate in the airport industrial park. That would seem to be an ideal location. But is it hard to find those industrial parks that meet all your criteria?

Uphues: Myrtle Beach's facility in a park like the ITAP, that was a purpose-driven place for doing those. Future data centers we’re finding we're needing a lot more land because the size of the facilities have gotten much larger. 

Where Myrtle Beach was purposeful about being close enough to the beach, we had to put in infrastructure out to the ocean and then tie that back to the facility. That's different than what we would put from land and power in a market like North Charleston or in other areas around Savannah River or in other areas around in the Upstate. We're needing more and more land because the facilities have gotten much larger.

Q. Why are those facilities getting so much larger given the technology that you've adopted and some of the things you've mentioned?

Uphues: It depends what customer you're dealing with and who you're attracting to put into these facilities, the growth of artificial intelligence and, simultaneously, the growth of the cloud and how the cloud continues to grow. 

And when I say the cloud, I'm meaning your video applications, your storage applications, your social media applications, applications that are used to run large health-care systems and your electronic medical records and your amount of servers and capability there. 

We're using more and more and more data, which requires more and more and more space for computers. Those rooms have gotten much bigger. AI-only data centers do not require the same amount of size footprint. 

So things that are only going to be processing the large language models or other what we refer to as inference models that are just the output of the large language model that then learns upon itself of further artificial intelligence modeling. Those purpose-only facilities can be 20 percent of the size in a building footprint. But there are more buildings that are required to do that. 

Meanwhile, the cloud continues to take more and more space because it needs more of the computing infrastructure and continues to grow.

So these campuses, what I would say, are becoming more of the norm instead of what you see for us in a business park that was a purpose-built environment in Myrtle Beach.

It's really creating a large scale campus where you could have cloud deployments, AI deployments, enterprise deployments, and others on a single campus with multiple buildings. 

You try to bring them together in larger scale campuses rather than spread out in individual ones like in industrial parks, like what we mentioned.

Q. What's next for your fiber network, especially regarding subsea cable landing stations?

Uphues: We recently announced a new subsea cable landing station to be placed in Florida. That one is strategically networked back to the Myrtle Beach location in South Carolina. 

With two of these, the one in Myrtle Beach has really turned into the largest cable landing station on the Eastern Seaboard, with the capacity to handle the original amount of five cables we planned for that. Now we're adding more infrastructure that will take the facility up to handling 10 cables from around the globe. 

That has been such a strategic asset for DC BLOX, frankly for the state in just the amount of capacity of making South Carolina the key landing place on the Eastern Seaboard to be different than New York or different than Miami.

It's equal distance between the two, which makes it a fabulous location. 

We continue to invest. We are continually expanding our facility in Myrtle Beach. With that expansion of landing more cables, we will use more and more network connectivity from Myrtle Beach on our network that is tied directly back to Atlanta. It's great. 

We brought our fiber network through nine counties in South Carolina. In doing so, we're essentially enabling or creating on-ramps for all of those communities to have access to a high-speed, globally connected internet backbone that's like the Autobahn, and it takes you directly to the core of Atlanta in Atlanta and connects through our cable landing station globally.

It's a huge benefit for every part of the state.

Q. Can you quantify in terms of economic development dollars, how much more you're going to invest in Myrtle Beach?

Uphues: We've invested over 100 million (dollars) already. We anticipate we probably have another 100, depending upon other things. I would imagine probably another 100 million more that would come in, probably over the next, what I would say, it's hard to say the exact date, but let's call it the next three to seven years. 

I think we'll be in a position to invest upwards of 100 million more just into Myrtle Beach. Additionally, though, around the state, with this large scale campus as we talked about before, we see that some of these campuses now can eclipse a billion, two billion, three billion dollars or more in continued investment in the state.

Q. Let me switch to leadership now. How does your culture of employees first, customers second, investors third, translate into a competitive business advantage?

Uphues: I've always believed that if you take care of your employees, and employees are very, very, very happy and you have a strong purpose-driven values approach, they will take care of your customers with ultimate care, just like family members. 

If you take care of your employees, they will take care of your customers. If you take care of your customers, they will take care of the financial returns that investors are looking for. 

And for us, we've stayed very true to our core values and our purpose-driven approach that for us, it really comes down to four key elements. 

Those elements are, No. 1, be transparent in all the things you are doing, both internally and externally. 

No. 2, if you're transparent, you will build trust over a period of time. Many times we say in our business, we just don't build data centers. The thing our customers love about us the most is we build trust.

The third thing that is important to us in one of our pillars is really our teamwork for which we work within. If you have transparency and you've built trust with people, the only way you're truly going to get ahead is if you work together as a team.

Then finally, the last pillar that is important to us is really tenacity of execution. 

Tenacity, when you are engaged in doing what you say you're going to do when you say you're going to do it, and doing that with a sense of urgency, always around, let's really lean into getting things done. 

That level of tenacity helps us execute in much faster ways than many of our competitors and peers. 

I'll give you an example. I'll use Myrtle Beach since you've mentioned it before. We showed up in Myrtle Beach, and we had our ground-breaking on, I believe it was October 2nd of 2022. 

On October 10th, of 2023, we opened the facility. … We completed a facility in one year and had that developed and up and operating for our customers. 

Our ability to execute is really that level of tenacity of what we do, of how do we ensure that we are taking good care of our customers and our communities, yet also executing against a plan where we're on time and in budget every time. 

And it's been a hallmark of our company of executing on time and in budget.

Q. Can you give me some specific examples of how you fostered innovation or improved customer service?

Uphues:  Part of it is just building that trust is what I mentioned. When you're building trust with your customers, it takes everybody. I learned a long time ago that if no one takes credit in a project, everybody wins. 

So the mentality of the general contractor you're using, it's the mentality of the trades of what you do. It's the mentality of how we work together in our communities to say, hey, we really need help with these permits to push these through. It's the mentality of our investors and how we lean into it. 

It is a whole economic system of what we've done, of an alignment of interests, of shared values, shared purpose, and shared outcomes for what really helps us execute. 

It's as much of defining the culture for what you want up front, because if you don't define what you want it to be, you may end up with something that you don't like. 

And so we work really hard in aligning those interests between our communities, between our employees, between our vendors and our general contractors, and certainly among our investors.

Q. If over the last 10 years, you could go back and do one thing differently, what would be?

Uphues: Be more patient. 

I'm a pretty avid sports buff, and I learned a long time ago from a great coach through reading. I didn't know him. My dad got to know him, which was John Wooden.

John Wooden said, be patient, but be quick. So be patient for results, but be quick with your actions and quick with what you're doing. 

I think that I haven't been as patient for results, or as patient as what I could have been 10 years ago, because now you look at where we are, and we've built a remarkable company that is now stretched across seven states where we have investments and continued.

It's something of we pushed harder than probably what we should have early on. It's helped us get to where we are, but I would be more patient but stay true to our purpose in our real vision. We stayed true to our purpose and vision. Didn't stray, but I wasn't as patient as what I probably could have been.

Q. What keeps you up at night these days?

Uphues: I look at the national electrical grid of what we have and the importance of artificial intelligence, our ability to continue to lead as a country. 

I don't think enough people understand just the global implications we have of continuing to lead in our race to AI, but more importantly, this is a key thing for our country. 

The utilities have done a great job of managing the growth and managing things in our electrical grid, which is aging. 

I look at that and I say, for us to continue to keep doing it, we and our investments into substations and new transmission lines are helping do our part. 

But that electrical grid infrastructure continues to be something that is an aging portion of our overall energy generation. 

That keeps me up at night, of how do we continue to compete globally? We're going to need good, robust, constant, always on energy. 

Q. Let me ask you about Greenville- Spartanburg. You have more investment expansion plans for that area?

Uphues: We do. When we first came in that facility, we put in two data center halls.

We've already started the engineering on expanding out the rest of the facility as we've got a large scale customer that we're bringing into Greenville that will take care of a lot of that first campus of what we've done. 

We're always looking for new locations. There's other places in the Upstate that we're currently looking at that run between Greenville and the North Carolina border up in Charlotte, which I think are good opportunities for us. 

So across the state and everywhere, we're continually looking to see what is best served, where we can come in and not only have the land and have the power, but make a difference in the community for which we operate in.