September 29th, 2026
In the Spotlight: Abhi Sastri of FLUIX AI
Happy Monday, friends. Today is the third of our “Mission Critical Mondays,” and it's a first for us - we recorded the entire episode on the floor of a working data center. If you hear a hum in the background, that's the servers.
This week, I sat down with Abhi Sastri, co-founder and CEO of FLUIX AI, on the floor of TenHats, a data center in Knoxville. FLUIX builds software that runs a data center's physical systems - the cooling, the power, and the equipment around the servers - on something close to autopilot. It sits on-site, cut off from the internet, reads the building's sensors every fraction of a second, and adjusts the cooling ahead of the workload instead of after it.
Every watt a data center wastes is a watt that could be running compute. Everyone's waiting on the big answers - new nuclear, new transmission, even data centers in space - and Abhi is a fan of all of it. But grid connections are taking five to seven years, and there are about 5,000 data centers in North America right now. Squeeze 10% more out of those and the capacity shows up now, not at the end of an interconnection queue.
What makes this one a Middle Tech story is where he chose to prove it. FLUIX is a Silicon Valley startup, and as Abhi puts it, getting access to these facilities is very tough - operators protect uptime above everything. TenHats, a locally owned Knoxville IT firm whose data center runs systems for hospitals, government, and banks, opened the doors and let an AI help run the cooling. With TVA’s EnergyRight program supporting the deployment, the facility now spends about a quarter less energy on everything that isn't a server.
We also got into the data center backlash, which I've thought about a lot since writing about the TeraWulf project in my hometown of Ashland. Abhi's ask is to go one layer deeper. TenHats is air-cooled, doesn't run cooling towers, and by his estimate uses less water than a restaurant. He's also clear that the big evaporative-cooled sites making headlines are a different animal. That's the point - these projects deserve scrutiny one at a time, not a blanket verdict.
What We Discussed
Cold calls on a lunch break - While working a defense contractor job with no phone allowed inside, he'd head to the parking lot at lunch and pitch hardware makers one line: American-made liquid cooling in under 30 days.
Why cooling is always late - When an AI workload spikes, the fans respond about 15 minutes later and the compressor about 40 - then it stays on after the workload drops. FLUIX's software tries to get ahead of the heat instead.
The big red button - Why FLUIX runs on-site and walled off from the internet, how operators teach the model before it runs on its own, and how a new site goes live in seven days.
The operator's view - Wade on why a data center should run at 76 degrees, the backwards server switch that caused a hotspot he couldn't find, and what happens "if I get hit by a bus."
We hope you enjoy this episode! If you have any thoughts after listening, feel free to shoot me a message at [email protected]
Have a great week, friends!
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