A podcast from The Nectar Group
AI isn't in the cloud.
It's in the desert.
NKTR goes inside the biggest physical build in human history — the power plants, data centers, and people constructing the body of artificial intelligence. What it takes. What it costs. Who's really doing it.
The show
The "cloud" is a construction site the size of a city — millions of tons of steel, copper, and water, and a power grid stretched to breaking. NKTR follows the story the tech press skips: the build, the bill, and the people who leave their families for eighteen months to raise it out of the dirt. Investigative, not industry. Honest about the cost.
How a city's worth of infrastructure goes up in months — and what breaks when it moves this fast.
The power, the water, and the towns quietly paying for the AI boom.
The operators, engineers, and crews behind the machine — and what it does to them.
What to expect
Your host
Rick Moose spent two decades staffing the capital projects that keep the lights on — the crews, engineers, and project leaders behind California's grid-undergrounding program and the utility-scale battery installations now holding that network together. He's since been building a company in the AI application space. Two ends of the same story, and he has hired for both.
He's not an engineer, and that's the point. NKTR is hosted by a layman with a philosopher's habit — someone close enough to this work to know when an answer is evasive, and far enough outside it to ask the plain question the industry has quietly stopped asking itself. What does this actually cost? Who ends up paying for it? Can it really be built this fast?
Subscribe
Drop your email and we'll tell you the moment Season 1 goes live — plus first access to guests and clips.