233: From a 9-Figure Exit to a $10 Billion Data Center with Jason Van Gaal

AI isn’t just creating a software boom, it’s creating an infrastructure crisis.

As demand for AI explodes, the real bottleneck isn’t chips or models anymore. It’s power, cooling, permitting, and the ability to build data centers fast enough to keep up.

Jason Van Gaal has spent more than a decade solving exactly that problem. After building and exiting multiple data center companies — including one of the largest Canadian tech exits of 2019 — Jason is now taking on his biggest project yet: building a $10 billion AI data center campus in Alberta powered by its own energy infrastructure.

In this episode, we break down the future of AI infrastructure, why data centers are becoming power companies, the realities of scaling massive industrial projects, and what Jason learned from building, exiting, and starting over again.

Mic Drop Moments

• “Scaling too quickly is extremely capital inefficient. So, you only want to do that in very rare circumstances.” – Jason Van Gaal

• From Two Exits to a $10B Swing
• Hire People Better Than Yourself
• Cutting Build Time to 120 Days
• Financing 400% Growth Without Imploding
• How He Invests After the Exit
• Why He Came Out of Retirement
• Why Alberta Won the Build
• Busting the Data Center Water Myth
• Noise, Infrasound, and Tinfoil Hats
• What Happens If Approvals Fail
• Why He Stays in His Lane
• Why Scaling Fast Is a Trap
• Learning Just in Time vs Just in Case

Brad Weimert: Since 2010, you’ve been building data centers; 2013, you exited your first company, Granite; 2019 was exit number two, which was deemed to be the third largest Canadian tech exit ever. And now, you’re onto your third, which is an even bigger swing at AI data centers. I want to dig into all of it. Jason Van Gaal, it is great to see you, man. Welcome to Beyond a Million.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, nice to see you too, Brad. And I’ll just clarify when I went, the 2019 exit is not ever, in 2019, it was the third largest. So, I’m going to throw a little bit of Canadian tall poppy in there for you.

Brad Weimert: I love that. I love clarity. In the world of 2026, the nonsense flies freely and there’s so much nonsense everywhere. It’s good to get the actual facts.

Jason Van Gaal: That’s it. That’s it.

Brad Weimert: Well, nonetheless, in 2019, and you can correct me, spot check any of this stuff, but you had a nine-figure exit in less than five years. What was your biggest mistake through that process?

Jason Van Gaal: Oh, I mean, many mistakes for sure. Biggest mistake, yeah`, I mean, I think if you’re trying to build a large business, it’s really important that you hire people better than yourself in many respects, so areas that you’re weak, supplementing that with other great intelligent individuals and giving kind of people the autonomy they need to kind of execute. And as part of that business, I was the founder/CEO, and we were growing very quickly and I had to bring in actually a replacement CEO. So, I moved to the chief operating officer role and brought in a more experienced individual to run the company. And we complemented each other well, but certainly was challenging for me to kind of give up the reins and step into kind of the number two position that ultimately was the right decision for the business.

Brad Weimert: How did you come to that decision? Was that your decision entirely? Did you have a board that kind of pushed you in that direction? What was the catalyst for that?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, certainly, like being pushed. The board was encouraging that to happen. And thankfully, I realized that that was the right thing to do early enough in the process. It would have been great if I could have maintained that role and brought in someone to kind of report into me to offset the weaknesses that I had. But I think hiring a high caliber individual, yeah, we weren’t able to do that in a reporting role that I needed to report into that person to be able to bring them into the business and attract the type of talent we needed for the speed of growth that we were experiencing at the time.

Brad Weimert: So, your new venture, Synapse, which is a $10 billion data center that you’re working on right now, what keeps you up at night? Is it power? Is it capital? Is it community pushback?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I mean, lots of things keeping me up at night. How do I buy natural gas? How do we make sure that the facility operates in a way that is conducive to what the local regulators require? The cost of ensuring that happens is not inexpensive to achieve those regulatory requirements. Trying to manage misinformation keeps me up a lot, I would say. There’s things that I see clearly as an engineer and somebody that has been in this industry for many years that I take for granted in terms of how these facilities safely operate. But uncommon mistakes and disasters make for very interesting internet videos. And so, no one is clicking on, like, how does a dancer operate really, really well 99.9% of the time? It’s like, what happens in that 0.1%?

And then kind of we need to speak with the community and the province about how we ensure that 0.1% of the time doesn’t happen in our specific location. So, that probably keeps me up the most at night these days is kind of like articulating that. And then, it’s how do you articulate what is a very, very technically complex problem that I don’t fully understand? Because I have a lot of Jasons that are working on the projects, like I know data center as well, but we have missions expert, noise experts, plant experts, environmental experts. And so, all of those parts need to work together well. And so, how do we articulate that in a way that somebody that’s not a professional engineer or an expert in all of those things can understand and have confidence and trust and that we’re going to do it well and protect their livelihoods, which is our focus.

Brad Weimert: Well, let’s back out. So, data centers have obviously been around for a very long time, but the value of them today is tremendously different than they were and how they get constructed today is different than what it was. Let’s back out to ROOT, which was the business that you sold in 2019. What I read was that one of the primary functions there was being able to build those things radically faster with ROOT. So, you cut build time from 12 months for the data center to 120 days. Walk me through what that process was like and how you approach that problem.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I mean, part of how we solve that problem is like a modular approach, which is, it’s not unique to what we do. A subset of that modular approach is kind of sizing of equipment and having it kind of readily available as a commodity versus kind of custom sizing with some other data center providers will do. The layout of the facility is critical. Accessing components and how they’re installed and maintained, that kind of feeds into it as well.

And then it’s like, it’s closely coupled decision making between the engineering team and business leadership. And so, sometimes it would take months to get an approval on a technical decision. But having kind of the leading technical individuals also being responsible for and empowering them to make business decisions helps us cut down those times fairly substantially.

Brad Weimert: Walk me through the difference in sort of the demand for data centers at that time in that moment and the competition versus today. So, I think it’s hard to avoid hearing about the lack of data centers or the need for data centers and the need for energy today with AI. Rewinding back to 2016, 2017, 2018, how was the landscape different than today?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I mean the size certainly plays into that. Like, I mean, back then, we built Canada’s largest data center, if not one of the top three, depending on the metric that you look at. And that was a 50-megawatt site on the West Island of Montreal. And today, in the US, like the sites were bigger, I want to say they’re like 200 megawatts, 100 megawatts type thing. And then today, they’re almost an order. In Canada, certainly over an order of magnitude larger than those facilities or the one that we’re looking at building now is an order of magnitude larger, so certainly much bigger in terms of size.

Power availability is something that the industry is having a lot of challenges with. And how do we generate power or how do we purchase power? And before you could, just call up your utility provider and get power and they would kind of find a spot on the grid for you that there is availability. And today, it’s like, they don’t have that capacity. You can maybe find 20, 30, 50 megawatts somewhere, but finding a gigawatt, especially in Canada, is not something that is possible.

So, now you’re not just a data center provider, you’re a power producer, as well, which I mean, creates challenges. I think it’s the right approach. I think it’s the reasonable way for the market to evolve. I mean, utility grids are just not set up to have kind of step functions and power demands occur at the scale that data centers are consuming. So, I think bringing your own power is the right approach for the industry today.

Brad Weimert: Did you anticipate that being a part of the equation?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I mean, early on, yeah, it was kind of that had evolved when I started this project up in November of 2025. The industry had been tilting that direction. It wasn’t like full fledge, that was the requirement, but you could kind of see that that was the direction that the industry was leaning. And so, yeah, I mean, you kind of just lean into it, so yeah.

Brad Weimert: Is what it is.

Jason Van Gaal: Is what it is. And yeah, if you want to bring power online quickly and have it be reliable, there’s really only one kind of way to do that and that’s thermal today. Like, there’s lots of ways to bring power on, but to do it at the availability requirements for data centers, it’s hard to do with solar or wind. Nuclear is great, but takes more than six months or a year to build a nuclear power plant. So, you’re kind of limited in how you can make that power.

Brad Weimert: Well, I want to talk about some of the details of this monster data center, but I want to talk about kind of the transition out of your last company, life after the exit, how you spend your time with that stuff. But before I do, with ROOT, you made a decision at some point to accept Bitcoin for services in 2014. Was that a strategic driver or was that more of a gimmick?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. Yeah, we did, we did. Actually, I’d forgotten about that. But no, yeah, I mean, we had some Bitcoin customers back then, and they’re like, “Hey, can we pay you in Bitcoin?” And we immediately converted it to Fiat, which retrospectively was a mistake. It would’ve been nice if we’d gone to some of that. Yeah, we service Bitcoin customers where our first large customer is a Bitcoin customer. And then one of our data halls at our 50-megawatt facility was, we’re servicing a crypto client as well.

Brad Weimert: So, more happenstance than anything. You were kind of like, yeah, sure, f*ck it.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, more happenstance. There was enough liquidity there that we can make it happen and, yeah, we weren’t speculating Bitcoin, but yeah, I wish we had.

Brad Weimert: Yep. Well, I’ve heard more than one of those stories. All right, so let’s talk about your exits. One of the things that’s always interesting to me is kind of how people approach exiting, what they choose to do after they exit, how it all shakes out. So, you had two different exits, two very different sizes. Granite sold for a little over $6 million. ROOT for well north of nine figures. What valuation levers did you pull the second time? And how did your approach to kind of try to drive to exit change in the second time around?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I mean, I think the facility at ROOT, we had gotten to a point where we had a decision to make and the structure that we had at the organization. And we were in a single market and that market was kind of filling up. And so, we had a decision, are we going to expand internationally or be a single market company? And there was pros and cons to both of those. And we decided to kind of take an exit. We did a process or a couple, actually, we had to do two processes as part of that. And we received a lot of submissions from various groups, mostly strategics or existing data center providers that wanted access to the Canadian market. As a growing market, I mean, we were growing extremely fast, like kind of 400% year over year with a great customer. And so, people kind of saw value in that.

Brad Weimert: When you say you went through two processes, you mean the process of marketing the business for exit?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, that’s right. We did one that was kind of like a smaller process. And we courted one group, and we were kind of midway through the sale and then, I think, they ended up getting purchased by somebody else and that kind of like killed the transaction. And so, then we went out to a wider group of companies through and working with a broker. Yeah, and then we kind of took it across the finish line with that one.

Brad Weimert: What lessons did you learn through that process? Like, everybody has sort of different, not everybody. There are a lot of horror stories going through the exit process. It’s very common for people to get through the process and say, if I would’ve known or this is what I do differently next time, what were your takeaways there?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I mean, I think the advice I give other young entrepreneurs that ask me that question that are going through a process is kind of like, and then this was advice that was given to me, it’s, you kind of know when you’re going through that process if the CEO wants to make a deal or if they’re just looking for ways to kind of get out. And so, kind of just like being aware of what is going on. If they’re working with you to get it done or if they’re kind of working against you to drive valuation really with potentially just the intent of figuring how to kill the deal because something has shifted in their organization and they’re looking for a way out of it. So, I think just kind of being aware or attuned to that is probably an important part of driving value through the process.

Brad Weimert: You’re talking about the acquiring CEO?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, exactly. If the acquiring CEO wants to get it done, there’s lots of ways that you can make a model, a financial model support a valuation. And so, the CEO and the CFO of the acquiring company kind of get to decide what that model looks like and present that model in for approval. And so, you pick a figure and you pick a valuation, you say, this is how the business is valued. Yeah, and you just want to give them the tools that they need to be able to support that internally.

And what we were doing at the time, we were growing really quickly. So, our kind of message to people was if you don’t want to buy us today at this price, you can buy us in a year at a higher price when you look at the growth trajectory that we’re on. So, I think that was helpful.

Brad Weimert: So, you mentioned 400% year over year demand, so growth with the business. It seems like data centers are a pretty heavy capital-intensive business. How did you think about supporting a 400% year over year demand growth without completely exploding your capital expenditures?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I mean, initially, we raised, I mean, well, my initial seed round was like $3 million. And that got us kind of like the model home built for the data center. And then we raised 25, around mid-20s. I don’t remember the exact numbers, around mid-20s. That was to kind of finance a large customer contract. And we thought that that would kind of last us for a number of years, and then growth kind of accelerated. And so, then we had the problem of, oh, crap. Our payback period was about five years. So, in our models, we would recover our capital spend if we grew faster than expected. We weren’t recovering the cash quickly enough to redeploy it. Yeah, so just things started to take off a lot faster than we expected. And then we’re like, crap, we got to go get more money or we have to say no to new deals. And so, then we went out and did about $100 million. It was $90 or 100 million subsequent financing to cover that off.

Brad Weimert: Damn.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. So, that was cool. It was stressful. It worked out. You want to raise money when liquidity is good in the market, when interest rates are low. That’s helpful, yeah.

Brad Weimert: And were they? What was that point in time when you did that?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, there was lots of demand for data centers at that time. There was a traditional way of financing these deals, and then people were getting kind of more aggressive in how they were lending and how they were looking at deals. So, timing was good for us on that. I would say in the data center industry, people have gotten even more aggressive in how these deals are structured since that point because data centers have kind of shifted from like a bit of a niche asset class to probably more of like a mainstream kind of retype model, where it’s kind of viewed as a similar kind of adjacent structure to commercial or residential. So, the cost of capital has come down considerably since we started in the data industry many years ago.

Brad Weimert: So, it sounds like from the beginning, this was intended to be a funded play driving towards an exit. Is that a fair assessment?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I mean, I would’ve been happy to grow the business further, which is probably why I’m back at it again. But yeah, I mean, if someone’s going to pay you too much money to buy your business or you think it’s too much money to buy your business, you can sell it, unless you have a vision where it’s going to be worth more than what they’re willing to offer you, right? And as probably a conservative Canadian, I was okay taking that money and so was our management team and their ownership. But yeah, I mean, I’m happy when I’m learning, I’m happy when I’m trying new things, and I’ve kind of learned over the years. I’m like, I’m the 0 to 80 type guy. It’s like, how do I go 0 to 80 really fast?

And then there’s other people that are great at like the 80 to 100 and taking their time, making everything really, really nice. And so, when a business slows down or when challenges get less intense and more operational, then there’s other people that do that much better than I do. And we were kind of at that point with ROOT where, at least for me anyway, we were kind of like operationally stable and, yeah, like the fun kind of like can’t sleep at night stuff was behind us, which for many people they don’t like the they can’t sleep at night stuff, but entrepreneurs tend to.

Brad Weimert: Yep.

Jason Van Gaal: So, I have lot of fun, I can’t sleep at night stuff now, so.

Brad Weimert: So, it seems. Well, we’ll get to that in a second here.  So, for a lot of people, I mean, a lot of people think about exiting and being done and riding off into the sunset, so to speak. It sounds like the right number hit, and so you would feel foolish not taking that money and moving to the next chapter. You close the deal, you wake up the next day, how do you feel?

Jason Van Gaal: Oh, like the same. Yeah, the same. Maybe a little bit less stressed, but then you go into this kind of like expansive optionality, where you kind of like, you don’t know what to do with yourself because you’ve always had your business that told you what to do and now you have all this time and no structure, and you’re like, what do I do? So, that kind of takes some time to work through and you go through maybe some existential crises, where yeah, you have to realize you’re more than just a part of your business and figure out that and what gets you excited.

Brad Weimert: What steps did you take to go through that process?

Jason Van Gaal: To go through like my little existential crisis? Yes, I spoke with lots of other exited entrepreneurs, and what did they do? What fulfilled them afterwards, life outside their business? Kind of focused in on trying to figure out personal hobbies that I would be into. I built a house, so like I got to design and build a house, like I was in the dirt shoveling. And I did all the electrical work myself, all the mechanical stuff myself. That was really fun. It’s still like, it’s 95% finished or 97% all the– there’s trim and things that need to get done, but I’m like, ah, it’s close enough. Probably should get someone to finish that off or do it myself, but it’s been a couple years. Yeah, my wife says if we build another house, I’m not allowed to do it because she wants to…

Brad Weimert: That sounds reasonable.

Jason Van Gaal: She wants it fully finished, not 97% finished, so.

Brad Weimert: Sounds reasonable. So, one of the things that you transitioned to at some point was starting your family office. How do you think about investing from a family office perspective versus an individual perspective? Does your approach change? Does the thesis change? What does that look like?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, in terms of investing from– yeah, I mean you kind of have different buckets of capital and you kind of figure out what percent you want to allocate from each bucket into different kind of risk categories. And yeah, I guess, like, build a strategy that kind of works for you. Yeah, I mean, I’m probably like, I’m pretty risk– in some ways I’m risk adverse in my asset allocations. In other ways, I’m like, I’m not. Yeah, I mean, we put about like 5% or I put about 5% of my capital into kind of early-stage companies and kind of recycle that. And the rest is kind of in public markets and fixed income. So, a lot of it is kind of like boring stuff at this point, yeah. And not everyone’s Warren Buffett. So, sometimes, passive indexes are better than trying to actively pick winners, even if you think you’re going to be good at picking winners.

Brad Weimert: So, keep the money is your choice.

Jason Van Gaal: It’s a lot easier to lose it than it is to make it, that’s for sure.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, no question about it. No question about it. What do you look for? So, you mentioned 5% is seed and you’ve also said that free cash flow is king. What early free cash flow signals do you look for before writing a seed check? How do you pick the winners or how do you think about that?

Jason Van Gaal: Oh, how do I think about that? Yeah. So, I think like, and my process has evolved a lot in that since when I started investing in early-stage companies, but I think TAM, like, TAM is really important. I think there’s a lot of companies that if you don’t have a big enough TAM, they can be great businesses, but the cash, as like a VC-type investor, kind of can tend to get stuck in the business. So, you could do an investment as like a free cash flow, kind of multiple in any type of value business. And that’s great as well, like an electrical company or like, there’s a variety of businesses that you could invest in on a free cash flow basis. But yeah, I guess for early-stage kind of VC-type companies, the TAM is really one of the big items that we looked at.

The other item is, I mean, there’s like the founders. And then there’s kind of the why. The why now kind of question is a really important one that I didn’t fully understand before. And I tell founders, I’m like, you got to make a good why now slide because investors are really lazy and there’s, I don’t want to do the research to figure out who your competitors are and how you’re positioned. So, if you give me a really good why now slide and you explain to me like how the market has pivoted or changed around your business, that helps me understand that maybe you’re going to be a leader in the space or you have an opportunity to be a leader in the space, and I can kind of get behind that. So, the why now slide, I put a lot of weight on. And that plays into timing. The timing and luck element of any business is that kind of why now slide.

Brad Weimert: Why now, founders, total addressable market.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I’d say those are the three biggest things that we look at for early-stage investment.

Brad Weimert: All right, let’s talk about, let me paint a picture. It’s 5 a.m., I’m in a lodge in the middle of nowhere, British Columbia. I stumble out of my room, walk into the kitchen area. And in the corner of an otherwise dark room, I see Jason Van Gaal sitting, drinking coffee, hammering away at his keyboard. And when I sat down, I found out that you were building a $10 billion data center. Why come out of retirement for this?

Jason Van Gaal: I mean, I haven’t built a $10 billion data center before, so it sounded like fun. And I think the why now slide made a lot of sense for me and that the market is undersupplied or was undersupplied, yeah. And there was an opportunity to kind of service that with new supply that I have historically been able to bring on rather quickly. So, that was kind of the whole hypothesis around it.

Brad Weimert: So, timing’s right, functionally. You’re just like, timing is perfect for this and this seems like a fun project to build the $10 billion data center. Let’s do it.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, let’s do it. And I mean, I wanted to do it in Canada as well, kind of patriotically because I mean, a lot of these facilities are being built in the US which is great. But it would be great to have some of that business up here and have some of that infrastructure in Canada from a sovereign perspective. I mean, I don’t necessarily expect that Canadian companies are going to be the clients in the data centers, but at least having that infrastructure in Canada, I think, is important.

Brad Weimert: So, Toronto has the QEW Corridor. Why choose to do it in Alberta with a population of 9,000?

Jason Van Gaal: 9,000, yeah, in Olds. Yeah, I mean to build this, you need an energy source. Hydro is not available, insufficient supply in Canada and probably throughout North America now. So, you need a place where you can turn liquid energy into electron-based energy. And yeah, Alberta has an abundance of natural gas, which has been stranded in the province for years now because of pipelines, insufficient amount of pipeline to carry the gas out of the province. So, you kind of drill a hole in Alberta and gas comes out in many areas. So, yeah, it seems like a good place to do it to get an adequate amount of that liquid energy.

Brad Weimert: So, I would think that, I mean, everything I hear about data center construction right now is confronted with the communities in which you build them. So, what do you worry about from that perspective, if anything? Water considerations, noise considerations, and when you’re working with the city, what concessions are non-starters?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, so I mean, in Alberta, a lot of Alberta, there’s kind of water constraints. And so, when we went to Olds, it became very, very quickly apparent to us that building an open loop kind of evaporative cooling system was not going to be something that would be possible if we wanted the project to move forward. So, we kind of moved off of that, did a closed loop cooling system for both the natural gas plant and the data center itself, which adds some costs. But I mean, admittedly, in Alberta, because it’s a cooler market in terms of temperature than the many US markets, the costs are not as significant as one would’ve expected to do closed loop cooling systems, so…

Brad Weimert: What’s the difference? So, one of the critiques that people, one of the ridiculous things that you hear online is data centers are using all sorts of water and they’re going to steal all our water forever. And so, you just use the term open loop and closed loop, which I feel like probably plays into this. Can you explain the difference between the two?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I mean, well, open loop would be the equivalent of you running your faucet to cool down, I don’t know, a hot pot in your sink. That’s like an open loop cooling system. And a closed loop cooling system would be you running a cooling loop outside your house and circulating cold water inside from that was cooled outside or something or underground. So, the water just doesn’t leave the closed loop so you don’t have evaporation.

And to put into context, the amount of staff in our facility, we expect to have about 1,000 full-time staff. The consumption of water from them is about two times the amount of water that we’ll be consuming on a daily basis from the power plant and the natural gas plant combined. So, it’s not fully closed loop, like there’s some leakage in high pressure systems, but it’s insignificantly small relative to open loop cooling systems that will use hundreds of millions of liters a year in water. Like, a lot of the open loop cooling power plants in Alberta will be connected to rivers or lakes or wastewater treatment facilities because of the amount of water that they need.

Brad Weimert: So, a thousand employees consume twice as much water daily, as a closed loop system does for the same plant.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: What about an open loop? How do we compare that in terms of volume?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I don’t have the numbers on exactly what an open loop system would be. It would just be hundreds of millions of liters a year more. So, I want to say we use less than 99% of the water. And it’s probably like 99.9%. I just don’t want to get in trouble with misciting that figure. It’s like a very, very tiny, tiny percentage of what would be used in an open loop cooling system.

Brad Weimert: Got it. So, the critique of using water for a data center is valid, but only for open loop. And so, closed loop systems, really water is a non-consideration at all.

Jason Van Gaal: That’s correct, yeah. And there are data centers that do semi-closed loop, if you want to call it that, where it’s an evaporative pre-cooling, so it’ll be closed loop most of the air, except when it’s really, really hot out. And then they’ll use water when it’s hot as like a booster to their cooling system. So, that’s typically what you would get in really dry climates, like in the desert, in the US like Arizona, things like that, where they would spray this water mist to cool the air before it goes through the closed loop cooling systems. So, that uses less water, but still uses a fairly substantial amount of water.

Brad Weimert: And it sounds like cost is the main consideration.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, costs, energy prices, like, so closed loop cooling systems use more energy. They use less water.

Brad Weimert: Got it. Okay, but ultimately…

Jason Van Gaal: Because you put the water in the air to reduce the amount of cooling that you need or you evaporate water to reduce the amount of electrical capacity you need for cooling.

Brad Weimert: Yeah. So, net-net though, everybody would use closed loop if it weren’t for it being significantly more expensive.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, that’s right. And the hotter a climate you’re in, the more expensive it is. So, if you’re in a cold climate, it becomes less important. But if you’re in a warm climate, it’s more important.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s super helpful, break some of those myths.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yeah, like low frequency noise is a fun one. Infrasound is a fun one that we’re dealing with, which I don’t quite understand where that stuff’s coming from, but that’s something that people keep asking us about, that my sound experts kind of scratch their heads around, but it keeps coming up. There’s some people that wear tinfoil hats now near data centers. That’s an interesting one.

Brad Weimert: That’s amazing.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I could see the website. There’s like a hat-buying company that you can buy these hats from. So, yeah.

Brad Weimert: I feel like we need to get on Alex Jones podcast to push some of those. So, what happens if Synapse fails approvals? So, you’re right now working with the city to get the approval to build it in Olds, Alberta. It’s a huge proposition financially. If Synapse fails approvals, what’s plan B for a $10 billion data center?

Jason Van Gaal: Oh, boy, I mean, well, if you don’t get regulatory approvals, you can’t build a data center. So, it’s kind of a binary outcome. So, we have to feel pretty good about our models, right? So, like, I ask our engineers every day, or not every day, but pretty frequently. I’m like, “Guys, are there any mistakes in here? Is there anything we need to worry about?” And everyone’s like, “Nope, nope, it’s all good.” I’m like, “All right.” So, yeah, no, but yeah, you have to apply good engineering principles, ensure that the facility is designed in accordance with that. And yeah, I mean, some of these requirements are not easy to adhere to. They can be quite expensive, like noise mitigation, as an example.

The AUC has this thing, we call it the 5-decibel rule. I don’t know if it’s officially called the 5-decibel rule, but you’re not allowed to increase the ambient sounds level, which is like if you open your door and go outside your house, what is the sound level at that point with a new facility by more than 5 decibels and at the nearest receptor? So, the AUC doesn’t care about how loud it is inside of the facility, but they care about what it is at the nearest residence location. And so, we ran some models without sound attenuation and like I want to say we would’ve increased ambient sound level by 15 decibels without proper sound attenuation. And that’s the cheap way to do it.

And I think, unfortunately, some data centers in the US that were built in a hurry did it that way. And so, that’s why there’s great videos online about data centers being not great neighbors. But so, you run these models and then you say, “Okay, like I can’t do it that way. What sound level does my equipment? What is it allowed to produce? And how do I adhere to that kind of 5-decibel rule?”

And then you just design the facility to do that. And unfortunately, I think, there’s some mistrusts that’s developed in various communities with these larger businesses coming in, building these sites that we have to work actively to address and try to demonstrate to people that we are doing this in accordance with regulatory requirements. So, that’s for noise. The other big one is air emissions, as well.

Brad Weimert: So, how do you think about– I mean, you answered some of this, which is basically modeling it. But when you’re taking a swing that’s this big and you know that you have a binary outcome, hey, if we miss approval, we’re f*cked. So, how do you think about the amount of stuff you need to do? What is the process of getting the right amount of commitment from the city, getting the right level of confidence before you raise money, pull the trigger, spend money, et cetera? What are the checks and balances you go through beforehand, before like you’re in it, and even though you haven’t had the approval, you’re in it?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I mean, I guess, to me, there’s lots of like, go/no go points. There’s lots of gates, decision making gates, so it’s like, you have to solve this problem and you make sure that you solve that correctly and then you look at it and it’s going to say, was it solved correctly or not? And if it’s not, then it could be a binary outcome and you kind of just have to say it’s not going to work, right? So, yeah, I mean, unfortunately, AUC process specifically, you don’t know if you’re going to qualify until really the decision is made.

So, you can do everything technically right and be technically compliant with all the emissions requirements and all the noise requirements, but you still are creating emissions and you still are generating noise. So, what the AUC looks at and they say is like, is the economic benefit of this project, does it merit this facility being built given that it’s going to generate noise and emissions? And so, you kind of wait for them to kind of weigh the scales on that and make their decision. And yeah, you don’t really know what that outcome is going to be until it’s happened, so you have to take risks to that point.

Brad Weimert: What are those gates like though? Like, how much money is in, at what gate, right? Because like, I totally understand the go/no go proposition. Also though, once you pass the first gate and you’re like, all right, we’re going, there’s some financial correlation here, and both from like an actual money perspective and a time perspective and a resource perspective.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I put a lot of time on this. I’m not getting paid. My team members are excited about the project and some of them get paid, some of them don’t. So, there’s the human cost for the internal team, and then there’s all the engineering, all the land. Those are expenses that you need to incur today. And then bigger costs come in when construction starts and as you need to purchase equipment and put deposits down on equipment. So, those can be tough to balance because sometimes, you may need to put deposits down on equipment before you have full visibility on permitting.

So, ideally, you don’t have to do that, and you don’t have to do that with every supplier. And we built some unique product in collaboration with some reputable manufacturers to help us address that, which I don’t really want to go into too much detail around, but there’s an innovative kind of solution that we’ve come up with for this project that the team has put together that I’m excited about, so yeah.

Brad Weimert: Love it. Well, that’s exciting. What’s the road map like in terms of timeline for you? So, we’re April of 2026 now. You’re embarking on a $10 billion build. How long does that take to build?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I mean, when we get permits, the data center, the first data center, and it’s kind of one data center per month and there’s 10 data centers. But the first one can be built and ready for customers to move in within four months of shovels hitting the ground, which is very fast. I mean, normally you’d have like six months, but for a large US Colo that has established process. For Canadian Colos, more like a year probably. But yeah, four months is our kind of what we’ve done in the past from having permits. So, that’s the target this time as well. And then, six months to have the power plant turned on. And then, again, one per month for the power plant thereafter.

So, aggressive timeline, but the site’s kind of been laid out in a way that supports that. So, you want to have enough space for trades to work, not stepping over top of each other, things like that. So, that’s all been kind of taken into consideration as part of our design.

Brad Weimert: So, you go from big exit to functional retirement to doing some investing to, oh, sh*t, I’m excited to build a $10 billion data center. Through that transitional period, you learned about yourself and how to balance your life and find other interests. When you dive back into a project like this, do you drop all of those things and go all in and go back into full-blown startup mode, f*ck everything else? Or do you try to maintain some semblance of balance or integration through the process?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah.

Brad Weimert: Or should I ask your wife?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I mean, my wife is great. And she was with me through the last one. And I consulted with her deeply before going into this. And she encouraged me to do this. I said, you know what this means. And I think she wanted me out of the house. So, she got that. But yeah, I mean, it’s hard. Like, if you’re putting in 80 or 100 hours a week, there’s only so much time you can spend on other things. So, yeah, I mean, it’d be great to be in the 60 to 80-hour week range. I think that’s kind of more sustainable.

And then you do have a little bit of time to do stuff. You have to be very selective in what you spend time on, at that point. But yeah, certainly different than before, where I got to go along with bike rides whenever I wanted to. Now, I’m like, all right, I want to do like four. It was something I actually figured out today. I was like, I need to do some exercise because I’ve been like, the last few months, I’ve not had time to do more than like 30 minutes a week. So, I’ve kind of made a deal with myself. I get to do four one-hour bike rides a week, which before, that would’ve been like multiples of that that I would be doing. So, it’s my compromise, but it should be enough to keep me sane for a little bit.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, that’s great. So, figuring it as you go is the answer to that.

Jason Van Gaal: Figure it as you go, learn from the mistakes you made before, right? Your body gives you some signals that you recognize when you’re going too far, that you need to kind of slow down a little bit. Yeah, I was worried, I mean, I’m older now. Everyone’s getting older.

Brad Weimert: That’s how life works,

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I need a lot more coffee now than I used to. I wasn’t sure that I could hold up this number of hours, but it seems like I can. So, you get used to anything, I suppose.

Brad Weimert: So, I see two types of perpetual entrepreneurs. I see people that stay in one industry, in one space, do what they know, and just keep doing it, whether it’s with one company or just several companies in the same industry. Then I see people that seem to not be able to stop themselves from just getting variety in their life and going after a new thing each time. How do you think about that in general? Are you staying in your lane because it’s what you know or because it’s what you like? Or is it a choice to lean on your primary skill set and make sure that that’s going to be the best outcome for you?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I tried between the two data center companies. I don’t know if I mentioned, I tried to build an AI company. So, we had a small team of like 8 or 10 people and we tried to build– so I learned how to program Python, learned that I was much slower than most good Python programmers. I could do it. I took all these courses, these AI neural network programming courses and things like that. I kind of came to the realization that I’m like, I can be okay in this, but I’m never going to be– sorry, I shouldn’t say never. It will take me years to become an expert in where I could develop unique insight into how to generate neural nets or do something that is technically very deep and differentiated.

And so, data centers, I’m not the strongest resource in the world. I do have a unique skill set, I think, in terms of how I blend business and technical elements together. And so, yeah, so kind of I think staying in my lane on the data center side helps drive value and produce value and reduce risks for people or my shareholders, hopefully.

Brad Weimert: I think that’s a good sense of self-awareness. I mean, I think that that’s an inevitable reality, is like, of course, the thing that you’ve done for most of your life, you’re most likely to have the unique insight, capacity, skill set. And of course, if you get into something brand new, the rest of the world’s going to be way the f*ck ahead of you.

Jason Van Gaal: That’s right.

Brad Weimert: But it doesn’t keep most entrepreneurs from trying or a lot of them.

Jason Van Gaal: And maybe with the other entrepreneurs, like if you’re a marketing expert and your strength is digital marketing and what you know how to do is like drive down the cost of customer acquisition on online channels, I mean, you can apply that to many different businesses, right?

Brad Weimert: It’s a great point.

Jason Van Gaal: So, like data centers, like I maybe could do it a little bit in industrial real estate development. I could do it. I mean, I learned how to build a house. That was simpler in many ways than building a data center. So, I’m like, if I could build a data center, I’m pretty sure I can figure out how to build like a two-story, 1,500-square-foot house. So, that was fun, yeah, but like building neural nets, different skill set.

Brad Weimert: Yep, entirely. Well, for a new entrepreneur starting out, what advice do you have for them?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I mean, figure out what you like doing and do that. And going to something that’s a growth area is probably a good direction ahead. If it’s growing faster than GDP, then you know the wind is at your back. If you’re going into an area that is growing slower than GDP, then you’ve got headwinds and maybe there’s opportunity there, but generally speaking, more challenging area to go into.

Brad Weimert: Yeah, I love that. Who do you listen to? How do you learn? Who do you pay attention to? Books, podcasts, people, if anybody?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I’ve not had any time, the last little bit to do any learning. I had lots of time before. So, I mean, I listened to a lot of books on Audible back then, kind of going deep on specific topics. Blitzscaling was a fun one. Trying to think of some of the other ones I liked. Anyway, that was one of the good ones that I kind of found fun. My takeaway from that is, scaling too quickly is extremely capitally inefficient. So, you only want to do that in very rare circumstances.

And there was a while and the industry’s backed off of it now, but like, in 2020, everyone was blitzscaling on everything, and it made no sense. And, yeah, like if you’re a Lyft or Uber, if you’re in a market where there’s only going to be one or two winners and you need to put skill, but there’s lots of markets that are fragmented that like, it doesn’t make any sense to burn capital in an efficient way.

Brad Weimert: Do you think about learning from a just in case or a just in time perspective?

Jason Van Gaal: Do I think about my just in case or just in time?

Brad Weimert: Meaning, there’s a ton of stuff that would be good for me to know, but if it doesn’t serve the problem that I’m focused on right now, then it’s sort of a just in case situation. At some point, it would be good to have this in my repertoire, but if I have a problem right now, I can go seek out information about that problem.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. I mean, I think you can learn just in case when you have time to learn about just in case. When you’re drinking from a fire hose, it’s just in time, right? So, yeah, I mean, when you’re an early-stage company, risk management is different than when you’re a mature business, right? So, early stage, probably just in time, and then later stage is just in case. You’re always trying to stay ahead of risks on that. I’m always trying to like, what are the core risks? How do I drive down those risks? But that’s kind of like the just in case thing.

But there’s risks that are so far out there that, I mean, you’re not necessarily going to be alive in six months, sorry, not you, but like the company might be alive in six months. So, it’s like, I can’t spend mental energy thinking about that case because we may not be around at that point. Yeah, so, anyway, off that.

Brad Weimert: Well, I think about it also in terms of the journey of learning, right? So, like, a brand-new entrepreneur, you probably need to do both, right? So, brand-new entrepreneur, you probably need to just educate yourself as much as possible on business, marketing, the industry that you’re in. And all of that is kind of just in case, but it’s also kind of just in time because you don’t really know how to differentiate the difference between those things.

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah. No, I think that’s a great point. And then I think it’s like, okay, you can read a book just in case ahead of starting building your business and that’s like the theory-based part. But until you’ve actually applied it, you don’t quite necessarily know what you’ve like– you don’t fully comprehend what you have read until you’ve had the chance to apply it. And then the challenge is when you’re in the middle of it, building it, that’s like, you don’t have time necessarily to go back and then read about that just in case stuff. So, you got to do it ahead of time. And then when you’re in it, you switch to just in time mode and then maybe if it fails, you go back and go in just in case mode. Or if you get to series C, then you can go back to just in case mode.

Brad Weimert: I love it. Well, Jason Van Gaal, I appreciate the time. I’m excited to see how this $10 billion data center project shakes out. If people want to find out more about Synapse or what you’re doing, where should they go?

Jason Van Gaal: Yeah, I mean you can check out SynapseDataCenter.com. We have a cool page up there called like the We Are Listening page that talks a lot about the technical items that we’re focused on solving for the community, ensuring the data center is safe and built in accordance with the regulations that we need to adhere to. So, there’s a lot of cool videos that we built that has a lot of great information on that page as well.

Brad Weimert: Awesome. Dude, great to see you. I’m looking forward to seeing how it shakes out and looking forward to our next session in Baldface snowboarding.

Jason Van Gaal: Thanks so much for hosting me today.