Far From Silicon Valley, This Founder’s Data Center Business Is Building the Future of AI

There’s a common refrain among business strategists that it’s better to be a pickaxe salesman than a gold prospector—or, in other words, that the best way to capitalize on a gold rush is to sell tools to the people hoping to strike it rich, rather than trying to hit paydirt yourself. With artificial intelligence currently enjoying a boom of its own—one that some big names have even called a bubble—plenty of companies are stepping in to sell the AI equivalent of pickaxes, such as backend infrastructure and computational power. That includes big-name ventures such as CoreWeave, the AI cloud company that IPO’d earlier this year and counts Microsoft, IBM and OpenAI among its clientele. CoreWeave claimed the No. 45 spot on this year’s Inc. 5000 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America, and is one of the AI boom’s biggest winners so far. But beating it out on that same list was another AI infrastructure company, the Chicago-based Introl, which came in at No. 14 on the list just a few years after its founding. Introl founder and CEO Ryan Puckett launched the company in 2021 while between jobs and looking to work as a freelance project manager. Introl helps set up GPUs, or graphics processing units: the computer chips that train and run modern AI models. A former low-voltage cable technician, Puckett has since built the company up to impressive scale: it’s grown annual revenue nearly 10,000 percent over the last three years, and Puckett says domestic revenue was about $38 million last year. All of that growth is bootstrapped, the success of which the CEO attributes to “managing cashflow effectively and efficiently”—as well as, at least initially, “a lot of credit card debt.” And though Introl was born in Dallas, Puckett moved it to Chicago a few years in; he’d lived in the Windy City during his early 20s, and wanted to go back. “There’s not a better city in the country,” he says of Chicago. “There was no other thought in my mind to build it anywhere else.” Blake Crosley, Introl’s CTO, says the company has deployed “up to 100,000 GPU units in a data center.” Each one needs multiple connections, he adds, requiring lots and lots of fiber optic cable; the company says it has run more than 40,000 miles of the stuff in all. “We don’t actually own or operate the data centers,” Crosley explains. “We basically help design, like, what does it look like to actually get that set up in the space? Once the racks are in place, how are we going to actually connect everything together?” This work, he adds, is known as “rack and stack.” Installation is followed by testing and quality control. NDAs limit Introl’s ability to disclose specific client names, but the company says it has around 45 to 50 full-time employees, plus over 1,000 subcontractors. The startup deploys that workforce to data centers around the country and the planet. Those data centers are so big, Puckett says, that people get around them in golf carts and measure their footprints in terms of how many Costcos could fit inside. Speed to market is the CEO’s biggest challenge, he tells Inc. Companies will sometimes give Introl barely a week’s notice to get people on-site to a data center, he says, and it can sometimes be hard to find enough hotel space to house all those staffers—who will sometimes number in the hundreds for a job—especially in the small towns where many data centers go up. “In a lot of cases, because they are trying to get things online so quickly…certain specific sections of [the data centers] are being built while you’re in a different part,” Puckett says. “It’s a constant flow of trucks coming in, dropping off pallets of cables.” AI is big business right now, but if the fervor starts to die down, demand for the underlying hardware could follow suit too. “I’m not 100 percent sure what our pivot would be [if], say, GPU deployments just kind of fell off the face of the earth,” Puckett says, although Introl’s focus could shift toward maintenance. Right now, he estimates, 70 percent of the company’s work surrounds new installations, while the other 30 percent has to do with maintaining pre-existing sites. For now, though, the company is feeling good about where things are headed. “Obviously there’s a lot of talk about [an] AI bubble and stuff like that,” says Crosley, the CTO. “The players are huge, and the money that’s flowing is even bigger. But from a user perspective, on the side of utilizing AI, I can only see things expanding faster in the total adoption and usage.” BY BRIAN CONTRERAS @_B_CONTRERAS_