Gigawatt data center fiber with Quantum Loophole’s Josh Snowhorn

Josh Snowhorn is founder and CEO at Quantum Loophole, an operator of data center campuses in the gigawatt scale. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Snowhorn's key founding and executive positions include time at Terremark, Verizon (NYSE: VZ), Cincinnati Bell, and CyrusOne (NASDAQ: CONE). Snowhorn founded the Global Peering Forum, the annual meeting for the Internet interconnection and peering community, where he serves on the board of directors. He also serves on the advisory board of Telescent, a maker of automated data center interconnection machines. 

 Last August, Cabling Installation & Maintenance (CI&M) reported on the ground breaking of the QLoop, the 43-mile hyperscale fiber ring connecting Quantum Loophole's 2,100+ acre Quantum Frederick data center development site in Maryland to the Ashburn, Virginia connectivity ecosystem. To kick off the interview, CI&M senior editor Matt Vincent asked Snowhorn for an update on construction of data center and fiber conduit infrastructure at the sites from the perspective of half a year gone by, in terms of deployment and installation progress. 

Snowhorn said that Quantum Loophole is building the largest medium haul fiber backbone that’s ever been created. The QLoop network ring network ring offers capacity for more than 200,000 strands of fiber connecting to the Ashburn ecosystem in under one half millisecond Round Trip Time (RTT). "And we are bolstering that with some pretty amazing cross-connect capabilities," he added. "Each property will have access to conduits and thousands of strands of fiber directly into the QLoop system to enable seamless, private and secure connectivity for all of our campus-wide customers.”  

Snowhorn continued, "We have completed our south Potomac river boring, which was over 3000 ft., and it goes 91 feet below the bedrock of the Potomac. That was a huge, 26-in. HDPE sleeve that was pulled through, and then 34 two-inch ducts inside of that. That's been completed and approved and vaults have been put in place. Terrestrial construction has started with multiple crews working laying in the 34 ducts, buried deeply to accommodate the most extreme security standards."

Later in the podcast, Snowhorn further explains that the QLoop fiber ring interconnects "literally hundreds of sites, hundreds of data centers, but we don't actually touch those other data centers once we get into Loudon County."

He continues, "We cross the Potomac, which is insanely hard to do: I now know why nobody tries to do it, because it's that hard. It's just been nothing but a struggle to get it done, but we're doing it. I don't think anybody's going to try and do it again for a long time. Machines blowing up, costs, the approvals -- going 9 stories below the bedrock of the Potomac is insane. The costs are through the roof -- I cannot think of a single thing that was easy about what we've done. We drop down [and] have over 500 vaults on the 43-mile ring, and those vaults are designed to create a massive intersection of splice points, so that people can tie into the system. We're a wholesaler to the wholesalers, so our goal was not to go build throughout the entire Ashburn corridor and interconnect every building and be another competitive carrier. We wanted to be a support mechanism to create an expansion of that ecosystem."

Read the full article about the podcast at Cabling Installation & Maintenance.