Colossus 1

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Lately, the canniest 15-year-olds I know are putting all of their allowance towards buying fractions of NVIDIA stock. It only goes up. They tell me. With the wisdom of people who have finally figured everything out in life. My teenage investment advisors inform me that it keeps going up because the AI companies have promised, that one day soon we'll reach a kind of machine superintelligence that, among other things, justifies these vast oceans of investment. It's funny, I do actually believe AI is a very useful, certainly socially transformative technology, for bad and for good. I believe that, and I also believe that we're probably in a bubble. Because a bubble would just mean that, once again, investors have gotten a little too excited about a genuinely promising new technology. The sheer fortunes being spent on AI already are so large, it's hard to find the right precedents to compare to. And what we know is that the size of the bet means we're all, to some degree, in this. Whether this pays off or crashes or lands in between, the AI bet is one of the big stories of our time. But as big as it is, it can also feel abstract. And so a reporter here wanted to go see it. Visit the most prominent real-world manifestations of all this money. The data centers, the buildings powering AI, which have already begun to transform American towns and cities. She learned things that surprised me. About what's happening right now, about the untested assumptions that have led us here, and about how it might look if things go wrong. The story begins in the part of America that has built the most data centers, even before the starting pistol of the AI race had been fired. Our reporter is Shruti Pinamaneni. I'm going to let her take it from here. Chapter 1. The Gold in the Ground. Ashburn sits on the very northern tip of Virginia, right by the Potomac. Driving around on the main roads here, everything looks so flat. It's more lawn than trees, lots of short fences, behind which are these very square, very squat, windowless buildings. So you can see that, you know, we're on Loudoun. County Parkway now, and more data centers here on the left. My guide today is Buddy Reiser, shaved head, dark suit. And this county that he's driving me through, in northern Virginia, Loudoun County, it has the highest concentration of data centers in the world. Second place is a sleepy little town named Beijing. Everything you're seeing is data center. Data center here, data center there, data center there. This is data center alley proper. Honestly, I've read a lot about this before getting here, but the scale of just the construction is mind-bending. Like, everything is being built right now, and that's on top of a whole lot that already existed. That's correct. I mean, often when I take people on tours, they think, wow, I've heard a lot about it, but this exceeds my expectation. And what you have to remember is that this is one of five clusters here. Right? There's the Sterling cluster, there's the Leesburg cluster, there's the. Everywhere you look, there's either data centers or data centers under construction. Cranes abound. This building frenzy, it has certainly gotten an adrenaline shot from AI. Some of the new unfinished buildings we were seeing were AI inference centers. But Buddy told me that construction here has been going nonstop for many years. That really, it began back when we were all first starting to store our data in the cloud. Back then, this was the late 2000s, Google had announced Google Docs. You didn't have to save documents on your hard drive anymore. Amazon had announced Amazon Web Services, meaning startups could borrow Amazon servers. They didn't have to own their own anymore. And the invention of the cloud would be a huge deal. It would change almost everything about the way we use the internet. There was money to be made here, and Loudoun needed that money. The county was reeling from two successes. The dot-com crash, and then the mortgage crisis. And in the wake of those disasters, Buddy showed up. I arrived here in 2007. And you have to remember, we were pretty desperate then, right? We were laying people off. We were raising taxes. And was it that you were losing property taxes because people were leaving because of what? Like, their companies had collapsed? No, it was, you know, that whole fake mortgage bubble. 81% of our tax revenue was coming from homes, residences. So when the housing bubble burst, you know, all of a sudden we lost about a third of our tax base. So that was how I came here. I was our first real proactive salesperson. There was a reason I'd come here to meet Buddy and have him tell me this story. He was doing back then, which is selling companies on Loudoun, inviting big business to town. This happens everywhere. Every town in America needs money, tax revenue to fund schools, roads, fire stations. And so they invite companies to come set up. They try to negotiate good terms. How good a job they do at that. What kinds of corporations arrive. That can really define how life feels in a place afterwards. The story of how things played out in Loudoun would end up contrasting with the story of another city I'd visit later on. Where these same buildings, data centers, would come to represent something very different. But for now, Loudoun. Buddy and his quest quickly learned a couple helpful facts about Loudoun. AOL used to be headquartered here. And during the telecom bubble of the late 90s, a lot of fiber optic cable had been laid in the ground. These are the long glass tubes that carry internet traffic using infrared light. And after the bubble, Much of Loudoun's fiber just sat there, unused. And so what was here, underground, was the data equivalent of miles and miles of pristine, mostly empty highway. This area right here, this intersection of Loudoun County Parkway and Waxpool is basically main and main for the internet. There's more fiber in the ground here than anywhere in the world. Wow, right here? Right here, this intersection. When you think about. Fiber, it's about capacity and it's about latency. It's about being close to that center hub. So this land around here is some of the most expensive land you'll find. And it's because the proximity means speed. Proximity means speed. I do want to point out there's a bunch of ducks on this intersection, data center alley. Yeah, it's this here. Are those ducks or geese? Geese. Here on the left, here's the. So, Loudon was trying to recover from the popping of past bubbles, but those bubbles had left behind infrastructure that was actually very valuable, ready to be taken advantage of. The high-speed fiber in the ground, but also these big empty buildings that had been built before the dot-com bubble burst. And so, Buddy presented his idea to the board. Let's find some rich tech companies to fill the buildings, and that is where we will get our tax base. I remember sweating through my suit, thinking, you know, how am I trying to sell this? And one of the board members looked at me and said, Mr. Reiser, I don't understand why we need data centers if everything's going to the cloud. And I'm just like, dumbfounded, because, well, obviously, the cloud is in the data centers. It's not really in the clouds, right? Right. It's funny, to Buddy, this is just an amusing anecdote, but I found myself thinking about it a lot here. What we call a new technology really shapes how we understand it. The name, the cloud, picked probably to make us feel safe, to make us feel like we're not putting our data and trust in other people's computers. The name also has this side effect of making you forget that the internet isn't a thing that's invisible in the sky. It's very physical. It's made of cables and servers that all have to be put somewhere. Buddy explained this to the board member, and then he said, We've never given $1 of local incentive money to data centers to bring them here. Not $1. What we did, part of our pitch was, we understand data centers. We know how to get them to market. We're going to make it fast. We're going to make it predictable. And that was the pitch. That's what I was out on the road selling to, you know, Amazon and Microsoft and Google and all the rest of them. The pitch worked. Every tech company under the sun would arrive. The big ones, the new ones, many you've never heard of. And as the cloud grew, invisible to most of us, people in Loudoun could see all these concrete boxes blooming across the landscape. When the cloud started to take off, you know, I really say about 2017 is when that really took off. Then we had a real big growth spurt there. Then, you know, when COVID hit, we had a real big growth spurt there. And then, you know, we had a real big growth spurt there. And everybody started working from home. And we were, you know, stuck watching TV. And we were streaming videos. And we were communicating and learning and working and everything through the internet. All of a sudden, there was another growth spurt. I had no idea. Yeah. You were seeing the internet from a completely different angle than the rest of us. Yeah. And we were seeing that demand. And there's not been a single day without data center construction in Loudoun for going on two decades now. That's pretty crazy. You know, fast forward from 2007 to 2025, we've been able to lower our tax rate by 48 cents on the dollar. We had 10 straight years where we were building elementary schools, middle schools, and one high school. 10 straight years we were doing that. And that money comes from the data centers. You know, we'll get a billion dollars in local tax revenue from the data centers this year. I do need to fact check Buddy here. The county made, almost a billion dollars from data centers this year. 895 million, to be exact. That enormous amount of money is perhaps why, even though you do find people in Loudoun complaining about the data centers, nobody wants a new transmission line going through their backyard, the general sentiment seems tolerant. Chapter two, inside the cloud. No, Vincent, you can describe what you see, but you will never, ever, Say the name of what you see. Michael Whitlock, general manager of the SABIE data center in Ashburn, he's actually much friendlier than he sounds over here. That area still is off limits no matter what you want. That's not an issue. No, not an issue. The main thing that Michael is trying to keep secret is the names of the companies that are renting server space here. I asked why those names were so secret. It was indicated to me via hand gesture that that is also a secret. Oh, it's secret. Okay, that's fine. But Michael was otherwise happy to show us how this cloud data center functions. And what I'm going to show you today. The giant block of a building is organized in layers, kind of like an onion. So we're here on our loading dock adjacent to our generator yard. The outer layer outside the building is all the power infrastructure. So there's this power substation pulling electricity from the grid. If you look over top of those colas, you'll see a giant substation. This is the wax pool substation. Virginia's data centers use a ton of electricity. Nearly 40% of the state's estimated power use this year will be just for data centers. However, most of the air pollution being created by that power generation, that pollution is not actually happening in this county. It's happening elsewhere, in other parts of Virginia or other states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, because that's where the grid is pulling power from. Sunny outside. Very sunny. So here, today, the skies are blue, the air is clear, and the people of Loudoun County are not dealing with the side effects of their power needs. Inside the building, Michael shows us the next layer of the onion, the cooling layer. So we have now gone into what we call the Cray Gallery. It's a computer room air handler. A long room filled with industrial air conditioning fans, each one about my height, with a maze of metal tubes snaking cold water in and hot water out. And are they. Are there usually people working in here, or is usually this empty? It's empty until we have maintenance going on in here. Have you seen the TV show Severance? I have not. We look like we're walking through the sets of Severance. It's just like these endless halls with fluorescent lighting, and every door looks like the other door. And I imagine it's easy to get lost. This is our longest hallway in the facility. I'd say this. This is a quarter mile. This is a nice long. I thought about what it would be like for some future archaeologists finding the remains of this building, long after we're gone, after the internet's been shut off. What would they think this is for? I realize the place reminds me a little of photos I've seen of the insides of pyramids, a labyrinthine, enormous tomb. Do a lot more people want to see data centers these days? It's always been a hot spot, but. Yeah? It just makes it that much more like, "Hey, what's going on?" Oh, what is going on? This is very loud. You're in what we call our MPOE. It's our main point of entry. This is where the fiber. This is the next layer, where all the fiber enters the facility. And finally, we get to the most important layer of all. So we're entering a data hall, the heart of the building, the place where the computers actually live. Let me give you up and close personal on a place that everybody doesn't get to see. So you're special. I'm going to give you 30 seconds. I get 30 seconds to stand here amidst the tall white stacks. Walking behind one of those stacks, I see an actual server rack. A metal framed rectangle, the kind you'd glimpse in the I.T. closet of your office holding the stack of servers. An unremarkable hunk of metal. But this is where the cloud lives. It's funny, I spend most of my work days living inside of a Google. Doc, but before this story, I'd never thought about the back end that enabled that. Like every time at the office, I type a single letter, say an X into a doc. That X gets transmitted over my Wi-Fi to the router where it jumps to my Internet service provider's fiber onto a fiber optic highway. And ultimately to a data center like this one, to a room like this one, to a server like the one I'm looking at. The data center is infrastructure. And like most infrastructure, or water lines or sewage pipes, it's both an engineering miracle, but also so reliable as to render itself boring. It works, so we don't notice it. For years, that's what data centers were. Boring miracles that nobody except, of course, Buddy Riser ever really thought much about. And then in late 2022, a nonprofit whose stated mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity, quietly released a chat bot that would upend our understanding of the Internet. ChatGPT. And almost overnight, a data center would take on a different meaning. Instead of being boring old pieces of Internet infrastructure, now data centers are being used to train AI, which makes them territory in a war. An enormous, expensive, ego-driven war waged by tech billionaires. After the break, Prometheus, Stargate, Colossus. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Xero. Okay, you're a great small business owner, but math was never your thing. Totally get it. But if you run a small business, you know how important it is to run your numbers. Enter Xero. That's X-E-R-O, as in X marks the spot for the perfect platform that puts accounting, payments, payroll, and analytics in one place. So you always have one clear picture of your business. Xero is more detailed than spreadsheets and just as powerful as other leading software, but it's simpler and easier to use. With visual dashboards, Xero makes it easy to understand your cashflow. You know exactly what's coming in and what's going out. So you can make smarter decisions that can help grow your business without feeling overwhelmed by the numbers. Join 5 million customers worldwide who use Xero to manage their finances. Learn more at Xero.com. That's X-E-R-O. 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Get yourself some of the most comfortable and versatile clothing on the planet at Viori.com slash PJ. That's V-U-O-R-I dot com slash PJ. Exclusions apply. Visit the website for full terms and conditions. Get 20% off your first purchase at Viori.com slash PJ and discover the versatility of Viori clothing. Exclusions apply. Get 20% off your first purchase at Viori.com slash PJ and discover the versatility of Viori.com slash PJ. Exclusions apply. Exclusions apply. I had was how could they possibly catch up to OpenAI? I think a lot of people were sort of questioning, like, okay, how is this startup that doesn't have a lot of money going to get enough GPUs to train AI that's even competitive? And if they don't have a large data center and they don't push out their training runs as quickly as possible, OpenAI is going to get even more steps ahead of them. And so Musk had to prove that even though they were late to the game, that they could catch up and be competitive. I should say here, we emailed XAI for comment on the story, and we received their standard auto-response, quote, legacy media lies. They were not going to talk to us. However, Elon Musk has talked publicly about XAI a fair amount. For instance, the day he announced his startup, he seemed to echo what Anissa just said, that he was beginning this race from far behind. XAI is really just kind of starting out here. So it's not a, you know, it'll be a while. It'll be a while before it's relevant on a scale of the sort of OpenAI, Microsoft AI, or the Google DeepMind AI. Those are really the two big gorillas. For Elon to catch up to the big gorillas, he had to very quickly train up his young chatbot, Grok. Elon believed that the more GPUs Grok was trained on, the more intelligent it would be. So he wanted 100,000 GPUs, just to start. On another live broadcast, Elon talked about what happened next. How he went around to companies like Oracle to ask how quickly they could give him the setup that he wanted. We actually weren't intending to do a data center ourselves. We went to the data center providers and said, how long would it take to have 100,000 GPUs operating coherently in a single location? And we got timeframes from 18 to 24 months. So we're like, well, 18 to 24 months. That means losing as a server. So the only option was to do it ourselves. The only option was to do it themselves. It was a moonshot. Elon obviously had never built a data center himself. And because he wanted to build something faster than anyone thought was possible, he decided to try something new. He would find an existing building, an abandoned factory with immediate access to a lot of electricity. And then he would engineer a way to cram that structure full of NVIDIA chips. For that plan to work, the factory would need to be in a place willing to cooperate. And cooperate fast. Recently, producer Garrett Graham and I flew down to one such city, Memphis, Tennessee, where we visited a white, spacious office. Through a big window. I could see the river. Yeah, that is the Mississippi. It's funny, we've been in Memphis for 48 hours and haven't seen the Mississippi yet. I've been trying. We were about to meet the person in charge here. So let me start by just having you introduce yourself. So tell me your name and what you do. Ted Townsend, president and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber. Ted, a very stylish man. Dapper suit, prayer beads on his wrist. Ted is to Memphis a version of what Betty Riser is to Loudoun County. His job is to convince companies to set up shop here. And in particular, there was an empty factory by the Mississippi River that he and his team had been trying to fill. We'd been marketing this site in Memphis that was home to Electrolux. A very large factory, previously used for producing kitchen ovens. 800,000 square foot facility that they had decommissioned and moved out of. Great space. It was probably one of the hottest buildings in the. in the Southeast market. We were showing it to a lot of companies, a lot of major brands. And give me a sense, just for a little bit of context, because again, it's my first time in Memphis. How much did this city need economic development? Oh, it's in desperate need of that. You know, when you consider going back to the 2008 recession, you know, it took Memphis 10 years to recover from that recession. And that was four years longer than the national average. And we've had generational poverty in some neighborhoods in our community. And we want to solve for that. Memphis did have some old school industry. There's a steel plant in town, an oil refinery. FedEx is headquartered here. But Ted is particularly interested in tech. The part of the American economy that year after year still seems vibrant. He was interested in tech, but tech companies had not been as interested in Memphis. Until March. of 2024, when Ted learned that a mysterious tech company was asking after the old oven factory. As this meeting invitation started getting accepted, he could see the email domains at Neuralink, at SpaceX, at X.com. Ted says this first encounter with reps from across Elon's Hydra-headed tech empire, it was exhilarating. And within days, he got word that Elon himself wanted to meet. It was incredibly thrilling. You know, you open up your, in my case, my iPad, and the boxes start to populate, you know, in the virtual meeting. And there in the top left corner of my screen is Elon Musk. And it was a seminal moment. It was a pass or fail, right? Someone like Mr. Musk moves quickly. He discerns information rapidly. And he was focused on making a decision very quickly. So I was told by his team to, you know, do your thing, Ted. Sell Memphis. And then hand it over to the utility partners to talk about power. And so I began. And Elon quickly cut me off and said, I don't need to be sold on Memphis. I want to talk about power. And I thought I messed up. But handed it over very quickly to my great partners. And we ended it. I was still a little uneasy about how abruptly I didn't get a chance to sell Memphis. But I got over that when it was Sunday night. We got the call. He had given the green light to his team to go with Memphis. So in a week's time, we had won that project. You know him for X, Tesla, and SpaceX. But now Elon Musk is coming to Memphis to build the world's largest supercomputer. An unlikely story if there ever was one. This is a moment. Chapter 5. Play to win or don't play at all. Elon Musk would name his data center Colossus. Reportedly, after a science fiction novel from the 60s. In which scientists build a supercomputer named Colossus. Which later enslaves humanity. The Memphians were just going to call it a supercomputer. Whatever it was. Whatever it was going to be. A science fiction future had arrived in the Mississippi Delta. Ted Townsend, president and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber says, this is single-handedly the largest multi-billion dollar capital investment by a new market company in Memphis history. Ted held a triumphant speech. In a press conference. This monumental recruitment investment marks a pivotal point in our city's trajectory. And will drive continued entrepreneurship and ingenuity. Propelling Memphis to the forefront of global innovation and competitiveness. So Memphis, are you ready? Yes. Let's go. Thank you all. Thank you. Colossus could bring tens of millions in much-needed tax revenue for Memphis. But for all of this to work, Memphis had to move fast. Not city government fast. Not even tech company fast. They had to move at Elon Musk's definition of fast. The city and county would grant permits at record speed. Put agreements in place for power and water. Elon's people would gut the inside of the oven factory. And bring in racks to house the NVIDIA GPUs. Even before Ted had put in the money for the NVIDIA GPUs. Even before Elon Musk had publicly announced the project. He remembers touring the construction site with Elon. And being astounded at the rate of progress. Everyone was just amazed at what was built. You know, Elon did have his phone out and he was taking videos. And I was texting my team back here at the chamber. I was like, has he posted? Has he posted? So he did not. But I was invited into a room where it was after the tour. And everybody sits and Elon is standing at the front. And he's pacing just a little bit. And there's a hush that falls over the room. And he says, we're going to haul ass in Memphis. And he thrust his fist in the air and he says, LFG. And he said it just like that. He didn't, you know, he used the letters. It gave me chills. As a Memphian, I was witnessing history. And then from that one visit, he decided that very day, we're going to double it. We're going to use the rest of this building to double it in size. So you're talking 200,000 NVIDIA chips. I got to visit Memphis. Yeah, yeah. You're going big on compute. Yeah. And you've also said play to win or don't play at all. So what does it take to win? For AI, that means you've got to have the most powerful training compute. So you've got to have the most powerful training compute. Yeah. to do, whatever the people at the front lines are doing, I try to do it at least a few times myself. So connecting fiber optic cables, diagnosing a faulty connection, that tends to be the limiting factor for large training clusters, is the cabling. So many cables. This one episode is eight and a half hours long, which leaves the two of them plenty of time to nerd out on the complexity of Colossus' cabling. That was a crazy cable layout. It looks pretty cool. It's like the human brain, but at a scale that humans can visibly see. It is a brain. I mean, the human brain also has a massive amount of the brain tissue as the cables. Yeah. There's something about just listening in on Elon taking a break from his data center sprint to sit for one of Lex Friedman's interviews. The two expressing wonder in matching monotones. It's easy to make fun of them, and maybe just a little bit. But the truth is, the thing that they are describing is remarkable. I looked at a photo posted on the XAI account showing the Colossus' interior, this meticulous Byzantine setup. And while I did not see a human brain, I do see something new and impressive. Rows of tightly packed, dense yellow cables which line the ceiling. It's a much more complex interior than the data center I saw in Loudoun, with a much more elaborate, cooling system. GPUs run very hot. And so instead, Colossus requires liquid cooling. Cold water is piped directly into the servers. And inside those servers sit the NVIDIA chips. Sleek, sophisticated black squares. The whole setup looks very expensive. And it is. In a pre- AI cloud data center, a typical rack full of CPU servers might cost a few hundred thousand dollars. A single rack here, packed with NVIDIA H100 GPUs, might cost a few million dollars. A single rack. XAI never said publicly what all this cost, but a J.P. Morgan report estimated that Colossus took between nine and eleven billion dollars. And up to seven billion of that was just on the AI hardware. It surprised me to learn this. An essential fact about these AI data centers. The GPUs really are the most expensive part. They can be more than half the total cost of the data center. More than the land, the power infrastructure, the cooling. It's really the chips. But in the immediate press all around Colossus, the thing people seemed to focus on was just how quickly this data center had been completed. The company says that they got it done in a hundred and twenty-two days. Again, Anissa, the reporter from the information. A lot of people at the time, and still today, debate just how quickly they did it and what was really up and running when they said the hundred twenty-two days. But the impact of that data center on the entire industry was very palpable. People were making phone calls to their contractors. There was a group that flew a spy plane over the Colossus data center to see what was going on. A group that flew a spy plane? I'm sorry, what? Do you mean like one company or do you mean a bunch of CEOs got together and flew a spy plane? One data center developer flew around the site and snapped pictures of what was going on because it was that important. They were like, this is going to be worth our time and worth the money. We need to see how Musk did this because people were seriously so shocked. For Elon's competition, his speed was shocking in an inspiring way. But in Memphis, that speed would soon read differently. Elon had made a crucial decision that had helped him get Colossus operational as fast as he did. And that decision became a flashpoint. Tinder, for a huge fight that would swallow entire neighborhoods in Memphis. Underneath it all was a question. What happens when the city you live in becomes a battleground in somebody else's AI race? That answer and a look at the billions being poured into Colossus. Where that money is coming from and what it means for the rest of us. All of that in our next episode, which is available right now. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by the new book from Michael Lewis, Blockers. For 30 years, Michael Lewis has written about the people behind the stories in character-driven bestsellers like The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Fifth Risk. Now, in his new book, Blockers, Michael Lewis tells the story of six civil servants who devoted their lives to public service that matters. One kept Americans' most sensitive tax data out of the wrong hands. Another made sure that politicians and civil servants played by the rules. One figured out how to stop wildfires from destroying suburban neighborhoods. Another helped uncover the mysteries of cystic fibrosis. There was also a security guard. In the new Washington, these federal employees discovered that their high standards were their greatest liability. If these public servants can't survive in government today, what does that say about us? I am so excited that this new book is out. Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors. I read everything he writes, and I'm very excited for this one. Blockers by Michael Lewis. Available wherever books are sold. Learn more at blockersbook.com. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Rocket Money. You know how managing money can feel like a full-time job with endless apps and statements? Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel unwanted subscriptions, monitors your spending, and helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. But now, they have made taking control of your cash even easier. Introducing Rowin by Rocket Money, an AI-powered personal finance assistant you can text to manage your money. Instead of digging through bank statements or opening the app, just text Rowin your money questions. Rowin also proactively catches things like overspending, price increases, and savings opportunities automatically, making it easier than ever to stay in control. I've been trying it out lately. Just yesterday, Rowin texted me and said one of my bills had been going up and asked if I wanted it negotiated down. I said yes. Rowin was on it. It takes all the guesswork out of budgeting so you can actually save for those big goals without stress. Try Rowin when you sign up for Premium Plus at rocketmoney.com/search. That's rocketmoney.com/search. rocketmoney.com/search. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you by Framer. We've all seen a quick landing page idea turn into weeks of back-and-forth tickets and painful handoffs. But Framer completely changes how teams build for the web. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work in tandem here. Agents bring speed and scale, while your team brings the taste, judgment, and design control. You can use agents to streamline real-time collaboration, generate custom code components, manage CMS content, optimize SEO, and audit your design before hitting launch. Plus, it's an enterprise-level platform with 99.99% uptime, SLAs, and top-tier security, which is why brands like Perplexity and Miro trust Framer to power their web presence. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today at framer.com/search for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/search. Rules and restrictions may apply. Search Engine is a presentation of Odyssey. It was created by me, Shruti Panamaneni, and PJ Vogt. Garrett Graham is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition, and mixing by Armin Bizarrian. Fact-checking this week by Mary Mathis, and additional production support from Kim Koople. Special thanks this week to Chris Giliberti. Our executive producer is Leah Reese-Dennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey: Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gaynor, Moira Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hilary Schuff. If you would like to support our show, get ad-free episodes, zero reruns, and some extras, please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can join at searchengine.show. Please follow and listen to Search Engine wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you for listening. This episode of Search Engine is brought to you in part by Vistaprint. As a small business owner running a podcast, I'm always looking for authentic ways to connect with listeners, which makes Vistaprint such a valued expert partner for us. I was on their site the other day, brainstorming new things we could make for our show, and the creative momentum took over. I ended up designing Search Engine stickers, and I tried to make a sign for our office. When your physical branding looks this sharp and professional, it immediately communicates credibility and shows your audience that you mean business. Vistaprint truly helps every dollar go further, delivering premium quality and design support that make your company look established without breaking the bank. Whether you need your design tweaked or a total rebrand, Vistaprint has you covered with the expert service small businesses deserve. 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