CONSTRUCTION
ONE DATA CENTER SERVICE PROVIDER DECIDED THERE WAS A BETTER WAY , SO HE SET OUT TO BUILD IT
As anyone knows who was in business before then , the beginning of the 1990 ’ s was effectively a pre-internet era . Nothing was standardized and few people foresaw the transformations that would take place in the ensuing two decades . All the more remarkable then that a young high school student in Columbia , Maryland , had the vision to start up a business that today owns and operates more than 800,000 square feet of data center space , supporting it with its own private fiber network of more than 10,000 miles .
Deepak Jain was just 17 when he founded AiNET , in 1993 . Mark Zuckerberg would have been nine . “ There were opportunities in the market place that made sense to me at the time ,” he explains modestly . These opportunities were around the area of dial-up internet access , which some of us remember with no affection at all — but AiNET was one of the first providers , and people had to have it . “ I understood the direction I wanted to take — so I managed to borrow $ 300 and set up in my mother ’ s basement .”
To explain this level of entrepreneurship and confidence at such a young age Jain thanks his parents . “ I had used a computer since I was six or seven because my parents did not want to keep buying me toys . They handed me a computer and some books and said if I could learn how to use this I could write my own games . That sums my childhood up in a nutshell !” Without formal IT or business training , it was the potential of technology to change lives that fascinated him : even his business was initially conceived as way to pay for an absorbing hobby , and when the time
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