Crain’s Detroit Business offered readers a glimpse into one of Michigan’s most sophisticated data centers in today’s article, “Michigan already has 70 data centers. Here’s a look inside one of them.”

123NET’s seven-story, 136,000 square-foot facility functions as “Southeast Michigan’s digital backbone.” The building, which sits atop the state’s most fiber-dense intersection, moves 10 terabytes of data every second – enough capacity to allow each attendee of a sold-out University of Michigan football game to stream a high-definition movie on their smartphone simultaneously.

123NET’s building is also the state’s largest “carrier hotel,” linking 40 internet service providers and hosting servers for automakers, health care systems, banks, social media companies and gaming operators. According to Chief Revenue Officer Chuck Irvin, about 60% to 70% of the company’s business is fiber connectivity, with data center services making up the remainder. The building contains thousands of miles of fiber-optic cable and houses millions of dollars in computing equipment within secure, climate-controlled server rooms.

While hyperscale data centers have become flashpoints in public debate due to their immense energy demands, Irvin emphasized the distinction between those facilities and 123NET’s role. “Hyperscalers are a completely different animal,” he said. “They are 300-times larger and on an entirely different scale. They are about the lowest cost on a massive scale. We’re a carrier hotel, which is way more about connectivity and community than anything else.”

Crain’s overviewed the building’s capabilities, technical specs, security infrastructure and even the value of equipment inside: “A single server cabinet measuring roughly 7 feet tall and 3.5 feet wide can contain millions of dollars in equipment,” Irvin said.

Crain’s said that industry experts have predicted that the rapid growth in AI will increase spending on data center infrastructure to exceed $6.7 trillion by 2030 — a figure twice as large as the GDP of France and larger than the GDP of every nation except the U.S. and China.

Crain’s Detroit Business subscribers can read the full article here.