Season 2, Episode 8: T-Mobile / Sprint

**David Rosenthal** (0:00)
The reinvention of John Ledger. Of John Ledger.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:04)
Like John Legend. Welcome to season two, episode eight of Acquired, the podcast about technology acquisitions and IPOs. I'm Ben Gilbert.

**David Rosenthal** (0:26)
I'm David Rosenthal.

**Ben Gilbert** (0:27)
And we are your hosts. Today, we'll be diving in to the recently announced, or should I say proposed, but not regulator approved, Sprint T-Mobile merger. David, you're laughing.

**David Rosenthal** (0:41)
I'm laughing. Who knows what's real these days?

**Ben Gilbert** (0:46)
This may be yet another episode where we cover an acquisition, much like the Broadcom-Qualcomm merger, that did not actually happen. And so only time will tell, but now seems like a really fun time to dive into the topic, hear the crazy stories of both of these companies dating back over a century, and dig into the genesis of where most of the technology that we use today really came together here in the northwest, and specifically in Bellevue, Washington.

**David Rosenthal** (1:15)
Well, we'll have to dive in.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:18)
David, don't give me your answer now. Wait till grading, but are we going from four carriers to three or from two carriers to three?

**David Rosenthal** (1:27)
Well, we'll have to wait for that. But it's funny, in our last episode, in the PowerPoint episode, we were joking that there were like, in the 1980s, there were like 11 people who worked in technology, and who knew that there actually was a related industry that had even fewer people working in it. It turns out that telecom and the wireless industry in the 80s and 90s had like six people working in it. And as you alluded to, Ben, almost all of them were in Bellevue, Washington.

**Ben Gilbert** (1:56)
It's true. Well, listeners, if this is your first episode and you like it, or if this is your 50th episode and you've been with us for a long time, we would love a review on Apple Podcasts. Really appreciate any time you could give to doing that. That helps us promote the show to get great guests and to justify the increasing amount of research that David and I seem to be obsessing over episode by episode. If you are new to the show, you can check out our Slack at Acquired.fm. Join the 1,300 of us that are talking about any tech news, really, but big, big mergers, acquisitions, IPOs, major landmark events that are happening between big corporate entities. This is a great time to tell you about one of our very favorite companies, Crusoe.

**David Rosenthal** (2:41)
So, Crusoe, as listeners know by now, is a clean compute cloud provider, specifically built for AI workloads. NVIDIA is one of their major partners, and literally Crusoe's data centers are nothing but racks and racks of A100s and H100s. And because Crusoe's cloud is purpose-built for AI and run on wasted, stranded, or clean energy, they can provide significantly better performance per dollar than traditional cloud providers.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:06)
yes, we talked about that on our ACQ2 episode with Crusoe's CEO, Chase Lockmiller.

**David Rosenthal** (3:12)
The other element that makes Crusoe special is the environmental angle. Crusoe, of course, locates their data centers at stranded energy sites. So think oil flares, wind farms that can't use all the energy they generate, etc. And uses that power that would otherwise be wasted to run your AI workloads instead.

**Ben Gilbert** (3:30)
Yeah. Obviously, it's a huge benefit for the environment and for customers on costs since Crusoe doesn't rely on the energy grid. Energy is the second largest cost of running AI after, of course, the price you pay NVIDIA for the chips. And these lower energy costs get passed on to customers.

**David Rosenthal** (3:46)
It's super cool that they can put their data centers out there in these remote locations where quote-unquote energy happens, as opposed to the other hyperscalers such as AWS and Google and Azure, who need to build their data centers close to major traffic hubs where the internet happens because they are doing everything in their clouds.

**Ben Gilbert** (4:02)
Yep. If you, your company or your portfolio companies would like to use the lower cost and more performant infrastructure for your AI workloads, go to crusocloud.com/acquired, that's crusoecloud.com/acquired, or click the link in the show notes. All right. Without any further ado, David, do you want to dive in to the history and facts of these behemoth, concocted, merged, unmerged and twisted companies?

**David Rosenthal** (4:32)
Well, how long do you have, Ben?

**Ben Gilbert** (4:35)
Yeah, listeners, we're only a couple of minutes in right now, but you know the final episode of Length. We don't. I suspect it ends up being long.