How This Building Powers the Internet

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Sometimes buildings just don't look as important as they are. This the case of One Wilshire Blvd in Los Angeles. At first glance, its a generic office building in downtown. But, that blank facade is hiding one of the most important pieces of digital infrastructure within the United States. In this video we visit 1 Wilshire Blvd, explain how it works, and chat with Jimenez Lai who wrote a story about the building which explores its outsized role in our digital lives.
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Architecture with Stewart is a KZbin journey exploring architecture’s deep and enduring stories in all their bewildering glory. Weekly videos and occasional live events breakdown a wide range of topics related to the built environment in order to increase their general understanding and advocate their importance in shaping the world we inhabit.
_About Me_
Stewart Hicks is an architectural design educator that leads studios and lecture courses as an Associate Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He also serves as an Associate Dean in the College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts and is the co-founder of the practice Design With Company. His work has earned awards such as the Architecture Record Design Vanguard Award or the Young Architect’s Forum Award and has been featured in exhibitions such as the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Design Miami, as well as at the V&A Museum and Tate Modern in London. His writings can be found in the co-authored book Misguided Tactics for Propriety Calibration, published with the Graham Foundation, as well as essays in MONU magazine, the AIA Journal Manifest, Log, bracket, and the guest-edited issue of MAS Context on the topic of character architecture.
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University of Illinois at Chicago School of Architecture: arch.uic.edu/
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[@DavidL-ii7yn]

Most data centres don't advertise their presence. The NYSE Data Centre in Mahwah, NJ might be a comparison. However, I do know of a card-processing data centre disguised as a dairy farm.

[@dylanakent]

For good reason!

[@robertrusso877]

I’ve see a dry cleaning business disguised as a meth lab.😂

[@okaywhatevernevermind]

Yeah but did you know of the FBI surveillance vans disguised as taco trucks?? TACO: Tactical Analytics Centre of Operations. Wake up sheeple!!

[@situation_zero]

The Mastercard data center in suburban St Louis, through which travels the data from every Mastercad swipe on the planet, is unmarked and has no signage.

[@callumb4980]

@@situation_zero because there is no need to. If they advertised “Mastercard” on the front you can guarantee every grandma with a fraud charge would be turning up looking for customer service.

[@BrandonJXN2]

I remember years ago they were loading air conditioning units onto the roof via helicopter. I knew that One Wilshire was essentially a switchboard for the internet. Great video. I would love to see more content about LA skyscrapers.

[@MichaelNolhan]

I remember being there when that happened haha.

[@dustinhenry5213]

Couple of fun facts...the building has its own version of a "swat team" and it goes 5 stories down. I was allowed to tour the facility back in 2003. Back then it had 5 generators and enough diesel to last several days. Myspace main servers were located in the facility.

[@eustab.anas-mann9510]

Does the NSA have access to this building?

[@davewood406]

@@eustab.anas-mann9510 It's been ages since I've been in there but I have a sense of the scale of the place and I've also installed equipment in other data centers that does the kind of work they would need. So an educated guess... They likely do but they probably only fool with the submarine cables or whatever else is coming there that they don't have access to otherwise. The main issue is space in the building. Fiber taps take up space, as does the equipment that receives the output of those taps. So my bet is that the TLAs are only accessing there if that's the only practical place to do so. Because the sheer scale of tapping what goes through One Wilshire would take up more space than what's available at One Wilshire.

[@san6788]

hehe myspace =)

[@C0ttageChees]

Myspace was such a gem

[@jonsnow7844]

@@davewood406 Lol the NSA have their own access accounts to any and all machines in the building. "Wiretap" implies that the NSA aren't already authorized to access.

[@dopenerd]

A lot of downtown areas across the country are suffering from an exodus of companies and people leaving a whole lot of empty buildings after the pandemic. I think reimagining what and how buildings serve in the future is going to be key, this is a great example of positive re-use.

[@okaywhatevernevermind]

The Twin Towers were actually data centres for the Beast. /s

[@cavemaneca]

Stewart actually made a video about this about a month ago.

[@FlowerPowerNZ]

If only it were that straight forward. Incumbent data centres have a huge advantage because everyone wants to be where everyone else is. Starting a new DC is a real uphill battle.

[@rud]

I maintained a bunch of servers in datacenters once, some where old phone switchboards/central rooms in the middle of the city. Since people were using land lines less and the equipment had shrunk in size, the phone companies rented it out for businesses in the city. Some where in anonymous factory buildings. They made a point of making them look anonymous, in fact, they kept the external old factory building and built the datacenters within the building. So from the outside it looked like a dirty factory building, but inside it was very clean and you had to wear plastic covering on our shoes, walk over sticky paper before entering.

[@johnc2438]

Yeah... I'm a retired cubicle rat these days (Navy, Bechtel, JPL, Toshiba, etc.). But wayyy back in the late '60's, when I was a teenager, I used to drive my mom to the old AT&T building downtown at Fourth and Grand (9:58) where those microwave towers sit and where she worked. Back then, the phone company microwave tower had an unobstructed view to Mt. Wilson's mountaintop antenna farm about 20-odd miles away as the crow flies. Later, I had a tour of one of MCI's early facilities a couple blocks away in an older building when we were learning about that company's plans for expansion. I passed One Wilshire many times over the decades since it was built in 1966, until I moved north. Fascinating video! Thanks.

[@robertharker]

Due to its lack of coolers and small number of diesel generators, this building is mostly office space. The heart of the building is the 4th floor Meet Me Room with its network of fiber optic trunk lines to the outside world. The actual computing resources, the servers and disk storage, are located elsewhere. The cooling units on the roof is enough for a few floors of servers. But not a skyscraper filled with computers. The building probably started out as one of the original CIX or Commercial Internet eXchanges built in the late 1980's. This led to most of the long haul carriers installing fiber trunks to the building. As the Internet started to take off and different companies wanting to exchange data with each other, more fiber was installed. These fibers connect the MMR with the actual data centers of the different companies.

[@brosnan]

Yeah not being a purpose built facility, I am sure it has lots of limitations, and there would be buildings in Virginia with far more connectivity.

[@davewood406]

It's been 20 years since I've been in there, at the time the hotel floors were 15th and lower. It's 30 stories IIRC so about half. So yeah it's the meet me room then whatever provider has a suite or a floor that houses the transport equipment. There are "real" data centers dotted around the the area doing the rest. I did a battery plant upgrade there, this company had basically a quarter of the floor they were on but like a block away they had a couple floors(at least) of another building.

[@GeographRick]

I work for AT&T in a similar building in my city. The internet speed in my office is insane!

[@avsync-live]

What is it?

[@okaywhatevernevermind]

Have you tried to play gta online? lol

[@boomergames8094]

I worked at an office with 100Gbit. I had a virtual server on 10Gbit. I could not find a speedtest site that would rate more than 1GBit.

[@hariranormal5584]

@@boomergames8094 Because at that rate, the actual peering sizes and even TCP's overhead and other shit comes to play. Such a huge amount is not all supposed to be use by a "single thing", rather is aggregated traffic. Seriously, you can find "100Gbit" almost anywhere. It just depends which point are you actually looking at

[@boomergames8094]

@@hariranormal5584 Yep. That is one reason why there are large packet options for local networks.

[@_narcosis]

I used to live across the street from this building and the internet connection was amazing, one of the first us locales with gigabit fiber

[@jfmezei]

Every major city has a carrier hotel. And there are 2 major aspects needed: floor strenght and cooling. For instance, in the case of Toronto, 151 Front Street was the former telegraph building purpose built to support heavy switching equipment. It is also located next to the main railway line which provides the path to intercity fibre trunks. It makes heavy use of Enwave, a company that draws cold water from depth of Lake Ontario and distributes it to nearby buildings, including 151 Front, so every air conditioning unit in building uses the cold water as heat sink and the hot water returned to Enwave. In this case, 151 is entirely carrier hotel. If One Wilshire is mixed use and still has offices with humans, it would provide for interesting challenges for security, fire code (securing fire stairwells) etc.

[@shaunlaverty8898]

Spent some time in 151 Front 😂. And a few others.

[@kennixox262]

I would imagine old telco switching offices might be a good venue as well - built to take the weight.

[@tomthetitan101]

This is very cool to know

[@augurseer]

I end up down at 151 almost once a month. Glad to see it mentioned.

[@Horwitz86]

It does not have offices any longer

[@NeilFraser]

That poor serial port at 1:41. Ouch.

[@LinusTechTipsTemporary]

how can someone be so observent?

[@LOL_CATZ]

rofl i caught it too. supermicro servers always the first to get beat up lol

[@clearsmashdrop5829]

I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw that jacked port.

[@michaelcharley8384]

A "sister building" in NYC is the ATT Longlines Building in Manhattan's Tribeca area. Unlike One Wilshire, the Longlines Building was originally designed to house telecommunications equipment and is or close to windowless and built to withstand a serious bombing attack on the city.

[@mike4402]

Low airflow hah

[@AdvancedGemini]

33 Thomas Street. It still houses telecommunications systems too: There’s still at least a couple of long distance switches operating there (4ESS’s). The “other” long lines building at 32 Sixth Ave is now a data center too if I remember correctly. A lot of AT&T’s and New York Telephone’s (now Verizon) old buildings are now data centers or internet exchange points.

[@carbonking53]

AT&T thought their center in downtown Nashville was bomb proof, but some lone guy with a homemade RV born explosive device took it offline. It shut down the 911 systems over a large area as well as many other systems. ATT said the building was bomb proof and all 911 systems were redundantly backed up by other centers in the area. Both were lies or proved wrong. The 911 systems that went off line who had been promised seemless redundant back up raked ATT over the coals after the failure. I know people who were present at the meeting following the center failure and ATT engineers and executives were unmercifully hammered by 911 system directors. AT&T's failure could have caused catastrophic loss of life if the event would have been part of a larger plot. The whole incident was swept under the rug so the general public didn't get to fully understand what a snowballing cluster f##$ it was and how bad it could have been if a larger attack had unfolded.

[@nyssfairchild2244]

It was designed to withstand an indirect nuclear blast. Technology has advanced and now hypothetically a nation could directly hit it, but given the state of a few of them, it's extremely unlikely for the missile to even leave the tube.

[@johnyoung5820]

Love the content, Stewart! As someone who did his undergrad in architecture, but worked in telecom and now software, and teaches IT to business and MIS undergrads, this stuff is my jam. Other interesting examples of carrier hotels are 60 Hudson Street in New York and the Dallas Infomart, which is an homage to the Crystal Palace built in London in 1851. Thing is, most people never realize that some of the nondescript tilt-up warehouses they drive past every day are in fact colocation data centers that house the edge sites for things like Facebook, Google and Amazon. That has to do with physical security and "security through obscurity."

[@johncrandell7339]

Be it a nondescript tilt-up warehoue or a highrise steel frame converted to other uses, owners and operators ought to have taken measures to assure that their structures would ride out severe/sustained seismic jolting. The L A Times has recently broken the issue of steel frame reliability on pre-'94 constructions. Other major newspapers had gotten into the matter years ago.

[@autohmae]

I'm sorry, but their is no 'security through obscurity' of these buildings, they are all clearly marked on websites selling these services, because technical people need to know where to go.

[@johnyoung5820]

@@johncrandell7339 I think it's important to keep in mind that every building is theoretically designed to the relevant building codes of the day. It's a lot like technical order for a weapon system; e.g. the B-52--the warnings in the TO are written in someone's blood, as we used to say.

[@johncrandell7339]

@@johnyoung5820 * There remains the issue of the reliability of steel frame welds accomplished with a now famous brand of welding material. If you check into the matter you will find that the result of such welds is/was such that they are too brittle to withstand severe/sustained seismic shaking. The extent of use of said brand of welding material circa 1960 to 1994 is a MAJOR question in California. Broken welds that occurred in the 1994 Northridge earthquake are/were one thing, what will happen in a much more severe quake?

[@xNYCMarc]

Four blocks away from 60 Hudson is 32 Avenue of the Americas (aka 6th Ave). I think literally the entire world's networks go through 32 Avenue of the Americas. Even North Korea has a peering point in that building. A few more blocks up from there is 111 8th Ave. It's owned by Google, is 15 floors high and takes up the ENTIRE city block. NYC has 5 or 6 huge carrier hotels.

[@kl3nd4thu]

Another thing you should have looked into when in LA is the hidden oil derricks that are still operational around the city but are hidden in plain sight. It's amazing how many derricks there were in the past, they were all over SoCal.

[@asdfssdfghgdfy5940]

Wait are they actually derricks? Or just wells operating under some other method of extraction?

[@scribklu]

@@asdfssdfghgdfy5940 Yep the there are two on Pico blvd, with 5733 pico being the most famous one. There is or was one on the campus of beverly hills high school.

[@makeart5070]

​​@Asdfssdfghgdfy Kind of. There are batteries of wells with permanent re-work rigs, either gantry systems hidden in buildings or mobil rigs on rails. There's on carved out of the west side of the Beverly Center along San Vicente, one at Pico & Doheny, Pico & Spaulding, Adams & Gramercy, Jefferson & Van Buren, between Broadway & Hill north if 14th St, Belmont & Beverly, Alvardo north of Miramar, the Wilahire Country Club, and a few more. There are still a few actual derricks left in Brea where the hills are too steep for the rework rigs to access the wells, and one north of the 91fwy near Long Beach that's now used as a communications tower.

[@zacbackas]

When i saw the title I thought you'd be talking about 350 E Cermak here in Chicago (which I might say I find more interesting visually than One Wilshire) but the scale and proximity to the interconnect between continents certainly makes Wilshire a cool building on its own

[@timgerk3262]

I (my company) was a tenant at Cermak, but never have I ever seen or visited.

[@zacbackas]

@@timgerk3262 My boss says he's visited and it sounds really cool to see as someone semi in that industry

[@PaulFisher]

Yeah, Chicago is in and of itself a massive interconnect point for networking, given its location in east/central North America. This, of course, is in part a direct result of its previous (and current) life as a hub for the movement of physical goods and people-you want long, direct, and accessible rights of way when you’re running cable, and you know who already has those? Railroads. To wit: the SPR in Sprint stands for Southern Pacific Railroad.

[@ferdburfel7447]

@@PaulFisher and even more interesting is that 350 E Cermak was the biggest printing plant in the nation (ran jobs such as the Sears catalogs, Time, Life) and used the rail lines it sat next to to distribute the information it printed. It was exporting information on those some lines, just the same thing they're doing at a radically faster speed today.

[@Pete90]

Anyone else notice the bent pins on the DB9 connector at 1:44

[@theoderic_l]

I can't be the only one who loves visiting these out-of-sight places that frame, support, and power our lives. I've been to powerplants, ports, dams, and rail yards, but somehow I've never heard of this building!

[@sunny-delite]

I can't imagine the amount of precise care it would take to do any civil engineering or infrastructure improvements next to a building like this! If anything goes wrong here, the economic impacts would be so monumental!

[@carkawalakhatulistiwa]

And this building get airpland

[@gunnargu]

While a runaway excavator cutting some fibers might be a bad day at the office, a well designed network should only alert administrators about it and not cause disruption to users. When such buildings are designed, they are designed to have network and power entry from multiple directions, so one project _should not_ be able to entirely disconnect something.

[@NickSteffen]

While this building might be the largest there are other buildings in the city where the companies set up backup equipment. So ideally there wouldn’t be any impact to taking the building offline for most. That said there can often be some side effects to an abrupt failover and of course some people like stress and don’t make things redundant.

[@a2starrz8822123]

Not as bad as you think. A lot, if not all fiber and power has redundancy for that reason alone. Power, if it doesn't have redundancy it will have a back up, i.e. generators or batteries. For example, all the cell towers you see all over. The fiber is on a "ring" going back to the headends (like the one in this video). So if I break (cut) one side of the ring at the tower, it is still being fed the other direction back to the headend (they call this east & west). This will put your ring and simplex and isn't a good but traffic never gets interrupted and that's the end goal.

[@Engineering_Science]

Facts. Enough fuel for 24 hrs only? Thats not enough, that thing should be powered by some kind of dedicated nuclear power plant to be powered for years.

[@Cyberfoxxy]

Some of the most powerful companies in the world. I get the feeling if you stare at it for longer than 30 seconds you get flagged as a threat and hunted down.

[@gopherfan118]

A lot of centurylink or Lumens buildings are not occupied. When i did fire alarm testing there a lot of the facility was designed for switchboard operation. When those jobs became obsolete the buildings now just host servers.

[@gopherfan118]

There are still staff in the building, but the one is sioux falls hasn't been occupied since 2004ish

[@bdykes7316]

One CenturyLink building near me only has five parking spots for a 10,000 square foot building. Most of the parking lot was sold to a business next door. I suspect it has servers now.

[@autohmae]

@@bdykes7316 based on your description this seems very likely.

[@serafinacosta7118]

You meant Century Link the Carrier, aka Level 3 , right ?

[@ShainAndrews]

@@serafinacosta7118 CTL, Level 3, TWTC, Qwest. You have a point you're trying to make? CTL, and Qwest are the only two that had traditional POTS. TWTC had some limited COLO server space... that Level 3 made sure to fuck up post acquisition.

[@checkoutmyyoutubepage]

The building is practically the nerd of the buildings in LA. The tallest one up to US Bank were from before 1990. US Bank reminds me of a Toltec statue.

[@s3cunit]

60 Hudson in NYC and 56 Marietta in Atlanta are other major examples of buildings you wouldn't expect to have such significant importance based on their look, but they have a rich history that lends to their importance. Being from the East Coast I don't know much about LA, but being an old-school network geek I've definitely heard of One Wilshire. Thanks for the deep dive!

[@ShawnJonesHellion]

History? As in what the human clones I summon think is real about their past when I just created them? Lemme guess. You rewrite it every year to make the trap of made up nonsense continue to deceive gods?

[@serafinacosta7118]

In Atlanta , the facility by Swanee, north of Atlanta , houses more servers , I recall it was run by Qtech. Not far from the mall. Google used to run its servers there , occupying 1/3 of the floor. They eventually bought land in Lenoir , NC and installed their own IDC.

[@timmmykk6982]

Many of these buildings in cities were telecommunications AT&T or western union. NYC has a few 60 Hudson, 32 Avenue of the Americas, and 111 8th ave. 111 8th is an entire city block. Google famously purchased this building in 2010.

[@tobybartlett]

I worked for a big multinational telco (not in the U.S.), and our primary carrier hotel for the country was attached to our headquarters high-rise. It was the most secure building I've ever visited. Despite my position in the company, I had to get a government security clearance to enter, and I was given a tour. Since the building is on the government terror protection list, it has incredible security, both in staffing and physical features. From mantrap doors to guards, to tracking devices we all had to wear, to endless corridors with layer after layer of security checkpoints, it really made me understand how blowing up that building would take out the entire country's communications system. I was only allowed the one visit inside, but it was fascinating to see what went on behind a very bland (albeit foreboding) building casually located across the street from a Fairmont Hotel. Looking at it, you'd never guess what was inside and how well it was protected, just like One Wilshire. Thanks for the interesting video! I just subscribed after watching this. Looking forward to more videos. ✌️

[@vatomais]

151 front street sure is a secure building! a unanimously shared secret among the downtown Toronto IT folk, as it is very often an exchange point for many of those in the small-medium size (the big 5 obviously have their own lines), many refuse to speak of the untold horrors of what happens if you look at another company's cage, the guards, all carrying AR-15 style weapons, that escort you throughout the facility, one wrong step and you are barred forever. alas, the uninteresting nature of the building is a very purposeful, speaking from experience, a certain Montreal based bank has a datacenter in Barrie that from the road, looks about 1/10th the size, but is incredibly secure, even for those who work within senior positions in the company. i remember the tales of blocked roads and airways as the helicopters brought in replacement generators and cooling units during 151's refit not that many years ago!

[@SeattleBoatdog]

I was a regional datacenter and PAIX engineer for Akamai for a few years … you would be surprised where we have color’s and data centers are sited, as well as buildings, where 22 of 30 floors are various data service providers and peering exchanges

[@glennmcgurrin8397]

Starting a datacenter isn't crazy hard, but it is very, very, expensive, go somewhere near good hub, get good connectivity through them, build out all the proper expensive core equipment and it's possible. Building a major internet exchange or carrier hotel with a large meet me room, that's hard, there is huge network effects where the more networks there the more networks want to be there, getting critical mass is incredibly difficult.

[@jarvusff7726]

is it plausible for someone to start from scratch to into server buildings?

[@mike4402]

No, impossible. These companies are like safe investments for the mega rich.

[@maxokream6269]

​@@jarvusff7726😂 lmfao went from lemonade stand to server centers

[@j.aspinall574]

Fascinating. I worked as a messenger for a law firm in DTLA after high school and was in this building a lot. Thanks!

[@MadScientist267]

The irony lol

[@orenpeleg9820]

Quick note: the beach you labeled as "Hermosa Beach" in the video at ~2:50 is actually Venice Beach.

[@chrisczech744]

came here to post that

[@God7odTaxationIsTheft]

🏆 good job

[@autohmae]

In most places, these aren't build in office buildings, but purpose build datacenters for colocation. Lots of carrier hotels like these in the US used to be where telephony companies were housed.

[@serafinacosta7118]

Correct. De commissioned central office switching centers.

[@OhhFuckYa]

I’ve spent a lot of time in that building. Pretty cool to see this because people always look at me like I’m crazy when I try to explain what’s happening there.

[@pauliedweasel]

In 2005 while I was for the Union Pacific Railroad Telecom Department in LA my foreman, I and one of our other techs had to remove all the equipment from suite 1520 which was the old Southern Pacific Railroad Telecom center for Southern California. We spent several week removing the equipment from the equipment racks plus dismantling the racks themselves and arranged on a Saturday to have a large box truck park in front of the doors of One Wilshire while a small crew of our techs from LA and West Colton cart the equipment down to the truck and load it up. I got a bunch of cool trinquetes from the place including several prints done by famous railroad artist Howard Fogg. Definitely a cool incident to be sure. The door was labeled Sprint because SP had actually start Sprint because the SP in Sprint stood for Southern Pacific.

[@serafinacosta7118]

That is neat. Oddly enough, Sprint HQ is in Lenexa , KS.

[@pauliedweasel]

@@serafinacosta7118 My foreman was originally with the Southern Pacific and spent some time working out of that office during his career with the railroad and supposedly SPrint started there operations out of that suite in the One Wilshire Building.

[@jimbronson687]

When I first started using the internet in 1988 via modem and text screens only (no browsers or web yet) there were only 2 MAE switches that connected large networks to make the internet. MAE east in NY and MAE west in San Francisco. Now ONE Wiltshire has 3 last I was there. in 2013 there were 319 suppliers of internet contentions competing for connections from co locators. I had two suppliers. One on 18th floor of 1 wilshireq and one on 6th floor with a fiber ran through a wall connecting direct to one wilshire. A old train station not far from One Wilshire has direct fiber to one wilshire so other than a few hundred feet the connections were the same as O.W. I miss that place.

[@adrianmillard6598]

This building is one hell of a target. That's quite scary.

[@woodhonky3890]

Yeah, and he just painted a bullseye on it. Hopefully this video is just misdirection. If not, it's blatant stupidity.

[@shrimpflea]

@@woodhonky3890 It's public knowledge. The security at the building is insane.

[@IanZainea1990]

I could listen to that guy you interviewed for hours

[@M3D1C2121]

Oh hey, I use to work there as an entry level technician doing cable mining and auditing. Fancy way of saying that I took out unused copper and fiber connections. Pretty decent for a first job, especially on a resume lol

[@rayclaudio2574]

Lucky you honestly

[@PCPSolutions]

Pretty crazy how it went from a small California company developing the PIX to giant buildings for data interconnect.

[@mikeinportland30]

Fascinating. I've known that building all my life (one of the most boring visually). And when I lived in LA I used to give historic building tours with The Conservancy that began near the exact spot you are standing in Pershing Square. I had no idea it had such interesting functionality within. Another story layer to the evolving city. Really love your videos.

[@bakedpatato]

There's actually quite a few other data centers like it in DTLA such as another CoreSite owned facility next to Union Station (the one with all the glass right across from Phillipe's), one pretty much across the street from One Wilshire(the entrance is right next to Sugarfish)...you would have never know as they're indeed built to blend in

[@okaywhatevernevermind]

@@bakedpatato all “carrier hotels” should be labelled “ ⚠️ D A T A C E N T R E ⚠️” in huge letters on top of the building so the planes know what to hit 😂

[@ShawnJonesHellion]

How do i tell the fake humans I summon clones of from the others? They always tell me they have these lives an stuff an i just summoned them. So its not like they say "hey I was born last hour in a 80 year old rotting flesh sack"

[@blackcountrysmoggie]

Informative and useful. I have a meeting with the manager of a digital infrastructure fund coming up soon. Great topic to talk about! Thanks so much for sharing!

[@Matt-rx4pm]

Nice job on the Video. I worked in OW upgrading the power and cooling capacity of the building. It was challenging working there because you had to worry if your team screwed up it could take out a chunk of the internet, I would joke we didn't want to piss off the teens because they couldn't get their Tik Tok. From a MEP standpoint it was a pretty cool project that you don't get to see often.

[@sobeso]

5:35 just wow

[@myoldvhstapes]

Thanks! I live in this 'hood. I thought the almost-windowless AT&T building a few blocks east on Olive Street was the telecom (and rumoured spying) hub for the region. It's akin to 33 Thomas Street in Manhattan. I didn't know there was an internet-specific building, as well.

[@steverude]

I tell people about One Wilshire all the time, this is great!

[@COPhill08]

Incredibly fascinating! Thank you for a great video - wild to think this comment will pass through One Wilshire before ultimately making it to your inbox, Stewart!

[@nannerz1994]

Thanks for covering some LA! I'm originally from Chicago so I love your videos but love learning about the new city I live in!

[@BlueFurVR]

9:58 The AT&T/PacBell building is at 420 S Grand Ave, not 400

[@psiga]

Great little story; I learned a lot. (And even your sponsor, Henson Shaving, looks fascinating to me.)

[@ErnestJay88]

Basically just like "Cyber Tower" in Jakarta - Indonesia, the entire building basically just a supercomputer and data servers in all but 2 floors, 1st floor for Lobby and some offices, and top floor basically a dormitory for maintenance and engineer officer who maintaining those servers 24/7

[@artistny0000]

Many data centers are 2 million square feet plus. (The building on Wilshire is considerably less than that). These data centers have to be sited between two separate discrete power stations. They have a need for 200+ watts AC per sf. This building’s volume would barely have sufficient volume to house the AC units required for a large data farm. Most are located far from urban areas.

[@autohmae]

I would say the carrier hotels mostly house routers and other network equipment, not servers. They exist to inter-connect aka inter-networking aka peering and transit.

[@LethalBB]

These buildings don't provide compute other than edge caches, just interconnect. Full of 400g Juniper switches and DWDM gear.

[@someguy9778]

Yes, this building doesn't exist, and everything you say is correct.

[@alexisaubry3801]

Great video ! Can you please elaborate on the same topic with other datacenters from Microsoft, Google, and so on ? Could be a video about the way datacenters sites are choosen, most of the times for a bunch of reasons : ecologic, fiscals, technicals, and so on. Some places like Dublin are perfectly suited because of the very small difference of temperature between the low ones and the high ones, meaning that the amount of energy needed to cool a datacenter there is quite easy compared to other locations. And the cold and wet air coming from the coast is perfect to cool the datacenter down without the need of lots of AC (compared to other locations, once again). That's a complete science, and a world per se. And BTW, what a great channel you have ! Thanks for all the good work you and your team do.

[@acuteaura]

Dublin is primarily chosen for the taxes. If you want an example of a datacenter that makes perfect sense ecologically and economically, Google's DC in Hamina comes to mind.

[@finnderp9977]

DCs I know are mostly built into old factories or even old powerplant, afaik primary reason is existing power infra

[@CubbyTech]

Datacenter spaces (not in cities) are chosen mainly for cheap power and tax benefits. Actual location for physical cooling isn't much of a factor.

[@serafinacosta7118]

Well, they started building these facilities in land bought out by rural areas. Chief reason being cheap power, lower cost of grazing land , plentiful available water ( data centers consume of cooling water instead of running power hungry HVAC ), and tax breaks. They could afford to string fiber to these outer reaches at their own dime , so it was a non issue. Google , for a while , ran dark fiber all over the US to support its own scattered data centers. As soon as they built one idc , they would cut loose from leasing up colo,space.

[@christopherwaller2798]

In London, strategic industrial land in certain places in west London and near the Docklands is in increasing demand for data centres. However, what surprised me is when I learned that these data centres are up to 12 storeys high, which is far taller than what might typically be sited in these industrial locations. (They are sometimes classed as being in the B8 use class - "storage and distribution" - even though that is more typically applied to places such as Amazon warehouses that store and distribute physical articles rather than data - and therefore they can be built in what were until recently relatively cheap sites "zoned" for industrial use that are still close to the main power lines, financial centres, and data cables). One of the things that is being explored is connecting data centres to district heat networks - this effectively provides cheap cooling for the data centres while providing heat to new residential development as well as large customers such as hospitals and prisons.

[@editingsecrets]

Is Thames water used for cooling?

[@moretoknowshow1887]

Here in Dallas, the InfoMart is a similar scaled Carrier Hotel. Been there quite a few times w/ my IT Teams to review issues.

[@serafinacosta7118]

Me to. Once.

[@Casper042]

I wonder if the orange is just the outer cladding on underground cables or if he really means old OM1/OM2. I would assume at a facility like this, most internal cables would be Yellow which is commonly used for Single Mode fiber which can travel much greater distances. ISPs and Telcos often standardize on Single Mode even for relatively short runs, so they don't have to stock multiple types of equipment. MultiMode (Orange, Aqua, Blue, Purple) are used for up to ~300 meters. SingleMode (Yellow) can easily do 10,000 meters, and some variations can do 40km

[@kesslerrb]

I’m guessing there’s a lot more yellow fiber patch cables in that building than orange ones.

[@mark685]

Telecom uses all single-mode - yellow fiber. Great video otherwise!

[@uncledrax]

Agreed.. the Telecom Provider in me had some nit-picky issues with the video such at the fiber color, but it's overall pretty solid and completely fine for the larger audience.

[@marcberm]

Boston has a similar (but smaller) colo in the same building as Macy's in Downtown Crossing.

[@serafinacosta7118]

Correct. One Summer Street. Above the store. Very non descript.

[@burby-thomas]

I'm on the 10 freeway driving past downtown LA looking right at the building as he's talking about it😂

[@pauld2810]

This was fascinating. Thank you.

[@TheGreatGastronaut]

The magic of One Wiltshire is in its many basement levels underground. That is where the “carrier hotel” portion is actually located and is done so for communications security and robustness/resiliency from external threats.

[@myponyislit6529]

Thanks telling the public about critical infrastructure locations. Very well done.

[@kathyannpardi9888]

IKR

[@LuteaNelum]

You briefly mentioned contingencies for buildings like this, but the more I learned about this place the more interested in the topic I am. I'd enjoy a deep dive into what a building like this does to make sure it stays up and running even in the worst of disasters!

[@Michael-ue9us]

Look into disaster recovery and backup and resiliency techniques for IT networking. Many of these probably apply to this building as well

[@checosa777]

the rasor at the end, i burst out laughing 🤣🤣 it wasnt expected! interesting video!

[@downumop]

I'm sure it's stock footage, but what happened to that poor DE-09 socket at 1:41 ?

[@chains007]

Great video as usual! Quick correction @ 2:49, that's Venice Beach (not Hermosa Beach)

[@andreferrbar4801]

I work in a similar building in Brazil. People around have no idea about its importance... Also the HVAC system is insane

[@DavidJamesHenry]

It seems so tempting for a screenwriter to use it as a plot device in a high tech action film

[@NatesRandomVideo]

Every city has a few non-descript telco hotels and data centers. I helped build 18 of them once. And worked in many more. Additionally most cities have a number of less hidden radio sites that do important work also. People really don’t pay much attention to the things that make their modern lives possible. The days of convincing someone to cross connect your circuit before others with a case of beer are probably over though. Grin.

[@LECityLECLEC]

Great video happy ur touching the subjects we didnt even know existed

[@boilinabag]

i work in la. i've been in there. its a freakin fortress. lots of security. cant go into areas without credentials. that building is hardened... and primary fiber is under wilshire from the bay and east.

[@Gigalisk]

@ 1:43 - the most jacked up Serial/USB ports i have ever seen. SHEESH.

[@kurtzcol]

you always have interesting videos too me ,keep up the good job sir!

[@calmeilles]

The strangest thing about One Wilshire is that if you sat down to design a building for the functions it now has you would not arrive at this model. Perhaps you might get something like New York's 33 Thomas Street (formerly the AT&T Long Lines Building), but really for all the mechanical and resilience needs of this sort of infrastructure you just wouldn't put it in a city centre at all and you wouldn't build in the vulnerabilities inherent to a sky-scraper into something so critical. The two things that lead to this sort of utility are firstly the slow agglutination of functions. One day one carrier moved in with a small server room and thereafter development wasn't planned, it just snowballed. The second is that no single business wants to make the investment in such a facility but many dozens of them can become the tenants or clients of a development for significantly less individual cost. But that's cost to the business. When you add in the building owners profits the costs to us as users ends up being more than it might have been were a purpose built facility to be erected. The re-use, adapt, repurpose endeavours the minimise stresses on the environment are positives, but come freighted with many other, perhaps less noticed negatives.

[@editingsecrets]

Once you have some people meet at the place where everyone meets, everyone else wants to meet there too. The whole point of downtown, and of a giant telco exchange. DTLA is vulnerable but it's also so important that a lot of effort, manpower, money, and infrastructure goes into protecting the whole area. For data centers Vegas is now quite the place, with basically no major environmental risks for a hands-off tech building other than an earthquake.

[@jackryan1809]

Excellent video; I was thinking of running my own servers. And that's when I realized seemingly empty-well maintained buildings around town are servers. lol

[@yootoob7048]

Amazing, I just now learned that I pass a carrier hotel in Phoenix every day on my way to work. Great video.

[@ingvarhallstrom2306]

I may be wrong, but I think they used One Wilshire as a model for one of the skyscrapers in Sim City.

[@todayonthebench]

"It isn't a building for people, but a building for cables. And the fact that it doesn't look like much means that it can hide in plain sight." 11:55 This is actually an important thing to consider. Now, another term for buildings like these are "internet interchanges", and a lot of these are actually not flaunting their location to the general masses. Most internet interchanges are intentionally hard to find. It is often regarded as highly important infrastructure and is therefor often hidden. Rarely is it a large noticeable building like we see here, or like the windowless skyscraper of Manhattan. But most of these interchanges are just in a random basement.

[@redmig5]

I just did a project related to this building and it’s importance this past semester!

[@Fexiven]

1:43 can't unsee the bent RS232 pins on that connector

[@philipmurphy2]

A Stewart Hicks video is always worth watching.

[@ericcarabetta1161]

That's where the NSA has their tap into the backbone, too, for "national security" reasons.

[@lucaspascual5956]

@1:42 way to secure serial port access. Excellent content by the way.

[@FerroMancer]

Same here, Lucas. I saw that RS232 port and cringed.

[@spdcrzy]

Counterpoint: It's NOT the most connected building in the world. That would be Fort Meade, the NSA headquarters. The sheer amount of bandwidth flowing through that place makes One Wilshire look like a homelab.

[@jamesfrankel7827]

The Utah Data Center built by the NSA. The National Security Agency, operational in May 2014. The 2013 estimate of the UDC having the capability of storing 3 to 12 exabytes. In thoes 10 years, at a rate of increased growth, the UDC now stores between 33 and 133 exabytes, an 11 fold increase According to Kryder's Law is the assumption that disk drive density, also known as areal density, will double every thirteen months. Therefore the estimated storage is now between 6 and 24 zetabytes. Zeta is the prefix for 10^21.

[@lanzer22]

When I worked for telco companies I frequent a large exchange in San Jose, California that served the same purpose. It's a inconspicuous building made to not arouse any attention, but somehow people still know about its existence, and they often get bomb threats and the staff have to evacuate the building.

[@sh0t0kan]

One of my favorite buildings in LA. I love the Address ONE WILSHIRE

[@bdykes7316]

I see an opportunity for a new style of building for servers in city centers. It would focus on physical security, power security, cooling, and aesthetics. Human occupancy would be a minor consideration. It seems like this type of internet hub is too important to allow compromises from reusing an old office building.

[@editingsecrets]

See Matthew Malthouse's great comment here, that the repurposing happens over time as more and more carriers connect. And many commeners have noticed how ohone switch buildings, already big boxy windowless machine rooms to underground main phone lines, are getting repurposed for colo's and data as switches moved from electromechanical relays to all computers.

[@serafinacosta7118]

They reuse old office buildings more than you can fathom. Underscript, good structural integrity. Location is key. If there is a convergence of power grid , fed by separate substations , you can bet your bottom dollar it will be scouted by folks in the data center industry.

[@jimwinchester339]

So it's similar to the once-upon-a-time Hewlett-Packard facility in Florham Park facility in NJ, right around 2000.

[@jonreznick5531]

I like that you mentioned the Matrix--all the references to place in the movie (eg. the addresses of phone booths) are non-existing Chicago intersections.

[@rossmeldrum3346]

The movie the Matrix was filmed in Australia in Sydney.

[@jonreznick5531]

@@rossmeldrum3346 Also true. But none of the street names in the dialogue are Sydney streets.

[@barryrobbins7694]

Jimenez Lai is right, we are becoming more like machines, at a time when machines are becoming more like humans. This idea is reflected in our architecture - One Wilshire Boulevard. We need to reclaim our humanity and remake our towns and cities to reflect our humanity. They can be more walkable, and more sociable - parks not parking lots.

[@matthewgarcia3356]

Luckily with these mega server buildings, they can sit on a single lot and not have to cut through hundreds of peoples homes and destroy communities like those highways did lol.

[@okaywhatevernevermind]

Luckily every building will be a data centre so I can stream the entirety of human entertainment in the comfort of my dank dwelling without ever having to step outside.

[@editingsecrets]

DTLA historically wasn't much residential. Some SROs in the past, some trendy wildly expensive condos now. Still mostly business and government.

[@serafinacosta7118]

They don’t cut through eminent domain. They reuse and repurpose. Most IDC’s tend to converge in areas with strong power grids. Which is the opposite of what requires to power a residential track. So, by default , they go after industrial sites , granted it is on elevated terrain, way above flood plains.

[@Bill_N_ATX]

The cables aren’t orange anymore. They are blue or other colors indicating their higher speed.

[@leisti]

Square metres are denoted by "m²", not "sm". The latter might be interpreted as "second × meter", which is not a unit I've seen used anywhere.

[@dylanakent]

As a former network admin that worked for a bank and a stock market, isn't it dangerous to point the building's very existence out? Yes, it's interesting but now more people worldwide know about it. Personally, it's better and safer for the country if it's ignored by the general public. I'm sure I'm in the minority in my views.

[@JamesMcGillis]

Critical infrastructure should be as secret and anonymous as possible. One Wilshire resembles an unsecured billboard beckoning terrorists. No card key system is going to keep a dedicated and resourceful terrorist organization from disrupting its mission. Look to Beirut, Lebanon to see what an unexpected explosion can do to a city.

[@colormeinfluenced6997]

At first I thought this was one of those ‘power stations disguised as an office building’ videos, but there are offices in there!

[@MechanicWolf85]

We take the power of the internet for granted but stuff like this reminds me of two things One being the old fotos of the electricity era where cables runned around buildings like a web to connect people to electricity And two being Simon Stalenhag art book of massive towers that at first look like buildings where people live in but are actually mega houses for servers and computers We are surprisingly going in a direction where mega towers are going to be build but nobody lives or works there aside from the servers and the technicians ho maintain them. Not saying is good or bad just an observation.

[@m.o.n.d.e.g.r.e.e.n]

do more LA! thanks this was great x x x

[@user-hq5vx8il9o]

This is the place where everyone is an expert or comedian!

[@5milessep]

I may have missed some important points in this video, so please bear with me. This building started its life as your typical office space complex, then overtime it became a critical telecommunications hub ? The question I have is telecommunications equipment comes with a weight factor that you’d think wasn’t intended in the original design for a building that was build as an office complex. I recall in the 1980s we hosted a telephone switching model (Ericsson AXE) on the 11th floor of an office building, and even though it was only four racks (admittedly way heavier than anything equivalent today) it had to be positioned next the the internal pylons on the floor). This building I’d imagine has every floor packed with equipment, so I’m somewhat surprised.

[@AriBenDavid]

I think it IS very limited in what it can house.

[@apricotcomputers7915]

stewart, thank you🎉🎉🎉

[@craigcook9715]

Interesting that it's a SOM building. I listened to a very interesting podcast on Natalie de Blois, who was an early influential woman architect. She designed, among many other buildings, the Union Carbide building in NYC (which has been since torn down to be replaced by an even bigger building).

[@MikeHarris1984]

Looks like "811" goes crazy around there anytime work needs to be done. Utility line markings everywhere. I wonder how much power goes there. (Immew Here in Phoenix, we have lots of data centers and they all have generators and almost all are on two power grids and providers

[@GeoffCanyon]

Interesting video! When you're talking about the cables coming ashore, you label it Hermosa Beach, but that's Marina Del Rey you're showing.

[@tomaszprzetacznik7802]

Hey Stewat I love your channel and this is very Interesting topic. I have question about this particular building. What about safety, you mentioned that this building was repurposed, but can such large building from 60s be made EMP proof? I am not joking, one of such data centers was finished some time ago in my city, I live in central Europe. And developer boasts that it's state of the art achievement and building is protected against various sources of radiation that can damage hard drives - like sunspots and strong solar winds (those can be devastating for modern infrastructure not only data centers but also electrical grids) or even against aforementioned EMPs. This is important in the case of critical data centers that serve not only as nodes, but also as data farms that function, among other functions, as virtual infrastructure for other companies (thanks to services like as Amazon Web services, Google Cloud, Ms Azure) and thus as places where backup of important data is stored (years of company records, tax calculations and declarations required by law to be stored at some countries for 10 yrs.)

[@editingsecrets]

I'd suppose that some of the tenants have Faraday cages around their equipment racks. But I think this location is much more about interconnect of live communications than about long term archival data storage. You could put a backup storage data center in far less expensive locations, since it doesn't need permanent highest-speed connectivity to the whole world.

[@ln14517]

It is a bad idea to have that all in one building, one earthquake, and that heavy building could collapse in on itself.

[@andrer.mallet2410]

or an attack of some sort

[@editingsecrets]

On the other hand, there's lots of resources to make sure this is an exceptionally well reinforced and maintained building.

[@andydelle4509]

Well as I said in my post, One Wilshire is not the only large CoLo in downtown LA. I'm sure some mission critical services have facilities in more than one local location.