Data Center Economics and IBM’s Enterprise AI Infrastructure Play — Ep 59 MI&S DataCenter Podcast

July 17, 2026

Data center expansion is creating new questions around power, water, community investment and the economics of AI infrastructure. In this episode of the Moor Insights & Strategy DataCenter Podcast, Matt Kimball and Paul Smith-Goodson examine how communities and technology providers are responding as compute demand continues to grow.

They discuss Meta’s major Louisiana data center investment and its local economic impact, then turn to IBM’s Z17, LinuxONE and Power platforms. The analysts explore rack-mounted mainframes, enterprise AI data pipelines, post-quantum security and why IT leaders should evaluate heterogeneous infrastructure based on workload requirements rather than broad vendor narratives.

Key Topics Covered

How large-scale data centers affect local power, water and infrastructure requirements
Why Meta’s Richland Parish investment provides a different model for community economic participation
How data center development can generate tax revenue, education funding, workforce training and infrastructure investment
Why state and local restrictions on large data centers could influence where future AI infrastructure is built
How IBM’s rack-mounted Z and LinuxONE systems fit into conventional data center environments
Why mission-critical mainframe data could become increasingly important to enterprise AI inference pipelines
How IBM Z, LinuxONE and Power can operate as part of heterogeneous enterprise compute environments
Why security, reliability and post-quantum protection remain important differentiators for mainframe infrastructure
How CIOs can avoid overprovisioning AI infrastructure by matching compute architectures to specific inference workloads
Why enterprise technology decisions require workload-level analysis rather than relying solely on generalized vendor value propositions

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Disclaimer: This show is for information and entertainment purposes only. While we will discuss publicly traded companies on this show, its contents should not be taken as investment advice.

Matt Kimball

VP & Principal Analyst | + posts

Matt Kimball is a Moor Insights & Strategy senior datacenter analyst covering servers and storage. Matt’s 25 plus years of real-world experience in high tech spans from hardware to software as a product manager, product marketer, engineer and enterprise IT practitioner. This experience has led to a firm conviction that the success of an offering lies, of course, in a profitable, unique and targeted offering, but most importantly in the ability to position and communicate it effectively to the target audience.

Paul Smith-Goodson

VP & Principal Analyst | + posts

Paul Smith-Goodson is the Moor Insights & Strategy Vice President and Principal Analyst for quantum computing and artificial intelligence. His early interest in quantum began while working on a joint AT&T and Bell Labs project and, during 360 overviews of Murray Hill advanced projects, Peter Shor provided an overview of his ground-breaking research in quantum error correction.