How a morning in Spain changed the way I view data centers

I’m walking back to the hotel after an early morning loop through Málaga, Spain, the kind of walk that clears your head before the city fully wakes up. I’m looking forward to one thing, coffee, a simple mission, a basic human requirement and the quiet satisfaction of returning somewhere that already feels familiar.

I cut past the port along Paseo del Parque, where the air tastes like salt, laced with that familiar perfume of diesel fuel. As I continue my walk, the harbor looks like it’s been rearranged overnight. A few yachts sit there as they arrived on silent feet, absurdly sleek, the kind €100M buys and they don’t so much dock as announce. They’re beautiful in the same way a private jet is beautiful, engineered, expensive, slightly unreal. I stand for a second longer than I meant to, watching the water lap against hulls that probably have their own power plant and their own security perimeter.

Then I turn inland and start making my way back toward my hotel. The city shifts as I move, from the soft green of the park to the formality of the boulevard. Paseo de Reding carries me like a corridor, a grand, historic promenade with 19th-century bourgeois architecture and broad sidewalks that feel designed for a slower era. And then the Jacaranda trees begin to tint the morning. Their purple canopy settles into the scene, shadows mixing overhead, cooling the light and changing the mood.

And then the gate appears.

The first thing you notice is the arch.

Not the city, not the sea, not even the morning light, that soft Málaga glow that makes white buildings look newly painted, even when they’ve been standing there longer than your assumptions. The first thing is the gate, the kind that doesn’t just say welcome, it says you are crossing a line.

“GRAN HOTEL MÁLAGA” curves overhead in bold letters, iron and authority, framed by palms that look like they’ve been patiently rehearsing this moment for a hundred summers. Thin strands of lights hang like quiet rainfall. They’re off, because it’s early, but they still feel present, like the place can change moods on command.

Entering through the gate, the world narrows into two options.

Two paths.

One that looks obvious, polished, expected.

And one that feels… less rehearsed.

I think of Robert Frost, not the poem’s fame, the moment inside it, that small internal turning where you choose a direction and accept that it will shape the story you tell later. I choose the one that feels less traveled by and I step in.

The perimeter is not the experience; it’s the beginning

As I follow the winding path after passing through the gates, the air changes.

Not dramatically, no cinematic gust, it’s subtler than that, like the temperature drops a degree and the sound drops two. The city’s edge softens, replaced by a pocket of green that feels almost impossible in the middle of a vibrant coastal capital, yet here it is thriving. Leaves layer themselves in ways that make you forget, for a moment, that traffic and schedules exist. Palms fan overhead. Dense shrubs and climbing vines pull the eye inward. The path curves and with every step, the hotel disappears and reappears through leaves like it’s teasing you, letting you approach only when you’re ready.

This is where I start thinking about data centers, which is probably not what most people do when they walk through a garden in Spain, but that’s the point of choosing the less obvious path. It changes what you notice.

Because the gate, in a data center, is where most conversations begin, fences, badges, cameras, guards, zero trust. We treat the perimeter like the story, when it’s really just the threshold. The true experience starts after the checkpoint, where design either welcomes you into coherence or drops you into chaos.

The best facilities, like the best places, don’t just stop bad things from getting in. They create a feeling of inevitability, this sense that everything inside has been thought through, aligned, maintained, respected.

I keep walking.

A palace disguised as a decision

Then the building reveals itself and it does not do it quietly.

The façade is bright, stately, symmetrical, the kind of white that holds light like marble holds a chisel mark. Over the entrance, the words “PALACIO MIRAMAR” sit with the confidence of a name that doesn’t need explanation or beg for attention. It assumes it.

I climb the steps and each one feels like a transition from the organic to the engineered, from garden to geometry, from wild growth to deliberate structure. The doors open and suddenly I’m inside a lobby that behaves like a cathedral built for light.

Columns rise and repeat. Arches curve and frame. A glass canopy overhead turns the ceiling into a soft grid of daylight. Chandeliers hang like captured constellations. The floor gleams, not flashy, just certain, solid marble, polished with intent.

And right there, under that ordered beauty, the metaphor lands hard.

A data center is a modern palace, whether we admit it or not.

Not because it’s luxurious, it often isn’t, but because it is the physical home of what our world now worships, computation, connectivity, availability, speed and the quiet miracle of “it just works.” We don’t bring tourists through them. We don’t wrap palms in lights at the entrance. We don’t let people feel what they’re entering.

Yet almost every part of modern life passes through those walls.

Healthcare decisions. Financial trades. Airline routes. Emergency response. Your photos. Your messages. Your business. Your identity. Your privacy. Your risk.

A data center is where the invisible becomes physical, where cloud becomes concrete, where “digital” becomes cables, switchgear, chilled water loops, batteries, generators and human beings who notice the faint sound that means something is about to break.

The path through the restaurant, the path through the stack

I don’t take the shortest route.

I let the hotel’s architecture guide me the way good choreography does, subtle cues, effortless flow, one space handing you to the next without ever feeling like you were told where to go.

I pass through Príncipe de Asturias and out toward the terrace and the space does that quiet thing great places do, it folds time.

I’m back at last night.

My wife and I had dinner on the terrace, the one that spills into the stairs leading down toward the pool. As you go down, the hotel doesn’t fall away, it swells behind you. With each step, the building grows more present, arches and balustrades rising in your peripheral vision like the place is reminding you who built it. Below, the pool sits framed by neat rows of loungers and folded blue umbrellas, everything arranged with the calm confidence of something that will work exactly as intended.

We split a bottle of 2017 Viña Ardanza Reserva, the kind of wine that slows your pace without asking permission. Our table was simple and perfect, white linen, black chairs, a balustrade between us and the sea. Beyond it, the Mediterranean stretched out in layered blues and later, after dinner, it turned dark and metallic, holding a thin band of moonlight like a path you could follow if you were willing to trust the dark.

I was in Málaga as my wife’s +1 for a conference and that first dinner was ours, quiet and unhurried. Nearby, a larger table was having a great time, laughter rising and falling with the clink of glasses, the kind of joy that travels easily across warm air and candlelight. It was the kind of evening you don’t plan. You just accept it.

And then you wake up and the same spaces play a different note.

This morning, I’m moving through that same architectural dance, this time with coffee on my mind and the stack in my head.

Port to boulevard to gate to garden to lobby to restaurant to terrace, each space a different layer, each layer changing what the next layer can be.

That’s the stack.

Data centers have stacks too, even when we pretend it’s all cloud and APIs:

• Perimeter and physical security: the gate.
• Facility design and resilience: the garden that hides complexity with calm.
• Power, cooling and structured cabling: the steps and stone, the unseen load-bearing decisions.
• Compute, storage, networking: the lobby, repeating columns of capability.
• Platforms and orchestration: the restaurant passage, where raw capacity becomes usable service.
• Applications and experience: the terrace and the sea, the point of it all.

The mistake we keep making is treating the stack like a parts list instead of a guided experience. We buy racks and megawatts, negotiate colocation contracts, argue about PUE, chase uptime and forget the only question that matters when everything is on the line:

What kind of path are we building for the people and systems that must rely on this place?

Coffee and the unexpected panel

I get the coffee. It’s exactly what it should be, strong, honest, restorative, no drama. The kind that doesn’t ask for attention, it just does its job.

I sit with the cup warm in my hands, the Mediterranean laid out in front of me like a calm, blue certainty. Then I put in my earbuds.

Not music.

Bloomberg.

The 2025 Qatar Economic Forum, Erik Schatzker moderating a conversation with Marcelo Claure, Jenny Lee and Steven Mnuchin. I wasn’t listening for macro debates. I was listening for how serious investors talk when they’re speaking to other adults who manage risk for a living, what they believe will still matter after the noise burns off.

Near the end, Mnuchin shifted from AI as a headline to AI as an appetite, physical, electrical, stubbornly real. The kind of demand curve that doesn’t live in slides, it lives in kilowatts, square footage, cooling loops and interconnects. He talked about data centers, not as a trend, but as the backbone that every AI strategy quietly assumes will exist.

Then he framed it in a way that felt almost old-fashioned and that’s why it worked.

Owning data centers in the U.S., for decades, isn’t something he described like a venture bet or a tech trade. He described it like patient capital, something you hold through cycles because the need doesn’t evaporate.

“We look at that as long-term bonds,” Steven said.

I paused, coffee halfway to my mouth.

Because that single phrase re-sorts the entire tech investment landscape.

Bonds, stocks, options and the infrastructure nobody gets to skip

Most people talk about technology like it’s all one asset class. It’s not.

Some bets behave like options, asymmetric upside, defined downside, but you’re paying for uncertainty. The future arrives, or it doesn’t.

Some behave like stocks, bigger upside if you pick the winners, but you’re underwriting competition, execution and timing. Great companies compound, until the market changes its mind.

But data centers, at least in the way Mnuchin described them, sit in a different category. More like long-term bonds, durable demand, real constraints, predictable necessity. Not because nothing changes, it will. Chips refresh. Architectures shift. Tenants renegotiate. Entire software paradigms come and go.

But the requirement doesn’t disappear.

Compute has to live somewhere.

And that somewhere has to be powered, cooled, secured and connected.

The tide behind compute feels less like a wave and more like a permanent pull.

The morning comes full circle

And that’s the point Mnuchin clarified for me, right there with a warm cup in my hands and the Mediterranean doing what it always does, being steady.

A truly great data center isn’t trying to be admired. It isn’t trying to be exciting. It’s trying to be certain. It lives behind fences and badge readers the way Miramar lives behind its arch, not to keep you out, but to keep the inside predictable. It turns physics into reliability, power into compute, compute into outcomes, quietly, consistently, without asking for attention.

That’s why the long-term bond metaphor works.

The longer I sat there, the more the sea started to feel like an argument for asset allocation. Because what Mnuchin was really saying wasn’t just data centers are attractive. He was saying they behave like duration, the kind of thing you own because you want stability in the mix, something you can hold while everything else rotates.

We spend a lot of time talking about technology like it’s one asset class. It isn’t. Some of it behaves like options, asymmetric upside, paid for with uncertainty. Some of it behaves like stocks, compounding if you pick the right winners, punishing if timing and competition turn. And some of it, if you believe the thesis, behaves like bonds, boring on purpose, quietly producing income because demand is persistent and the constraints are real.

So maybe the right question isn’t, are data centers the future?

Maybe it’s: where do they sit in the portfolio?

Because if a healthy portfolio has always balanced growth and stability, 70/30 or some variation of it, what’s the right mix for the infrastructure era? What’s our 70/30 now and are we building enough of the boring, the quiet, essential backbone, to make the rest of our bets survivable?

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