The data center industry’s explosive growth in the AI era is transforming how projects are conceived, financed, and built. What was once a real estate-driven business has become something far more complex: an engineering and infrastructure challenge defined by power availability, network topology, and local politics. That was one of the key themes in this recent episode of the Data Center Frontier Show podcast, where Editor-in-Chief Matt Vincent spoke with Michael Siteman, President of Prodigious Proclivities and a longtime leader and board member within 7×24 Exchange International. Drawing on decades of experience spanning brokerage, development, connectivity strategy, and infrastructure advisory, Siteman offered a field-level view of how the industry is adapting to the demands of AI-driven infrastructure. “The business used to be a pure real estate play,” Siteman said. “Now it’s a systems engineering problem. It’s power, network topology, the real estate itself, and political risk—all of these factors that have to work together.” Site Selection Becomes Systems Engineering For much of the early data center era, location decisions revolved around traditional real estate considerations: available buildings, proximity to customers, and nearby fiber connectivity. That logic has fundamentally changed. “Years ago, the question was: Is there a building? Are there carriers nearby?” Siteman recalled. “Now it’s completely different. Power availability, network topology, community acceptance—these are the variables that define whether a site works.” Utilities themselves have become gatekeepers in the process. “You go to a utility and ask if there’s power,” he explained. “They might say, ‘We might have power, but you have to pay us to study whether we actually have power.’” In many regions experiencing rapid digital infrastructure expansion, the answer increasingly comes back the same: there simply isn’t enough grid capacity available. Power Becomes the Project In the gigawatt-scale era of AI infrastructure, power strategy has moved