The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:
Dan Wright (Co-founder & CEO of Armada) joins GTMnow to unpack what it actually takes to bring AI infrastructure to the places the cloud was never built to reach.
The cloud covers about 30% of the world. The other 70% (think: oil rigs, the Arctic tundra, military ships, remote mines) is where some of the most critical decisions happen, making latency a life-or-death and billions of dollars difference. Armada is building the infrastructure for that part of the world: modular, ruggedized AI data centers that go to the data, instead of the other way around.
From the first offshore edge computing deployment with the US Navy, to cutting avalanche response times in Alaska from over a day to real time, to sovereign AI installations in Saudi Arabia with Aramco and Microsoft, Armada is redefining what operating at the edge even means.
Discussed in this episode
- Why cloud infrastructure was built for a pre-AI world and what that gap costs
- How Starlink turned every remote location into a potential AI cluster
- What “distributed intelligence” means and why it’s the founding principle behind Armada
- The global race for AI sovereignty and why modular compute is the linchpin
- How Armada goes to market when a product demo involves shipping a 40-foot container to a desert (yes, really)
- Why customer champions are better than any sales rep
- The Microsoft partnership and how Armada extends Azure to places Azure could never go on its own
- Category creation lessons from building a company before the market had a name for the industry
- What’s next: SpaceX, sovereign AI, and why Dan thinks humans are on the moon in two years (yes, REALLY)
Episode highlights
00:00 – Why the cloud only reaches 30% of the world and what Armada actually builds
03:11 – From Saudi Arabia to the Arctic: recent deployments that redefine the edge
04:12 – AI’s physics problem: why distance from data breaks everything
05:31 – How Starlink turned every remote location into a potential AI cluster
07:14 – What distributed intelligence means and why it’s Armada’s founding principle
08:14 – The global AI race: sovereign compute as a national security strategy
09:00 – The Genesis Mission, the White House, and Davos: why sovereign AI is mainstream
12:49 – GTM for a hardware company when the demo involves shipping a 40-foot container
15:18 – Why Armada’s customers do the selling for them (and do a better job than some reps)
17:35 – The Microsoft partnership and extending Azure to the places it can’t reach on its own
18:51 – Category creation: the lesson Dan learned about specificity and business value
21:02 – What’s next for Armada, SpaceX, and why Dan thinks we’re two years from the moon
25:34 – The founder advice Dan wishes more people took seriously
Key takeaways
1. The cloud was built for a world before AI.
Every major cloud provider built their infrastructure 25 years ago, before large models existed, before sensors were on everything, before data lived on oil rigs or in the Arctic. The world has changed but the infrastructure has not. That mismatch is a massive market opportunity.
2. Connectivity unlocked the edge, but without infrastructure it’s useless.
Starlink changed the game for connectivity. But without compute, all you have is faster access to a problem you still can’t solve. Every time Starlink goes live in a new country, Armada is the first mover on infrastructure. Connectivity + compute = the edge finally works.
3. Sovereign AI is here and the US and China are in a global AI race.
We’re in a global AI race. And infrastructure is the battleground. For companies like Aramco and the US Navy, data sovereignty means the data cannot leave the site – by law, by security protocol, by necessity. You can’t send classified sensor data from an oil rig or a Navy ship to a data center thousands of miles away and wait for a response. You need compute where the data lives (that’s what Armada builds).
4. Category creation is about problems, not technology.
Nobody wakes up wanting to buy infrastructure. Dan’s approach from day one was to get specific about the problems (avalanche response in Alaska, split-second decisions on a battlefield, catastrophic failure prevention on an oil rig) and let the technology follow.
5. Write your manifesto before you do anything else.
Before a single hire, before an office, before raising a dollar. Armada had a manifesto – this is why we’re building, here’s where the world is going, here’s why it matters. Dan calls it an unfair advantage. When you can articulate exactly why your company needs to exist, recruiting gets easier, fundraising gets easier, partnerships get easier. You’re not selling a product. You’re building a movement. A 10-slide pitch deck might get you to Seed, but it won’t build a generational company.
Thank you to our sponsor:
HockeyStack
If you run go-to-market, you already know the problem: your data lives everywhere. Spreadsheets, CRMs, sales calls, ad platforms… yet you’re still guessing what to do next.
HockeyStack is the AI platform for modern GTM teams. It unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action. Built-in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close and expand deals, and scale what works. That’s why teams like RingCentral, Outreach, ActiveCampaign, and Fortune 100 companies rely on HockeyStack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions, and make space to think.
Learn more at hockeystack.com
Nooks
Outbound sales today is still built around manual work: writing emails, building lists, and managing sequences across disconnected tools.
Nooks is breaking the mold. With their new AI Sequencing product, Nooks is an agent workspace where AI works alongside reps, helping them understand accounts, prioritize the right prospects, and generate context-rich outreach based on actual first-party interactions.
No more wasting time in multiple tools – it’s one unified workspace for all your outbound channels. Arm your sales team with intelligent outbound. Learn more at nooks.ai.
Follow Dan Wright
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wrightdh
- X: https://x.com/danwrightSF
- Armada’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/armadaai
- Armada’s website: https://www.armada.ai
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sophiebuonassisi
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/sophiebuona
- Newsletter: https://thegtmnewsletter.substack.com
Where to Find GTMnow
- Website: https://gtmnow.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/gtmnow
- X (Twitter): https://x.com/GTMnow_
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GTM_now
- Podcast Directory: https://gtmnow.com/tag/podcast
GTM 182 Episode Transcript
00:00
Dan Wright: We call ourselves the hyperscaler for the edge. Rather than having the data sale to some very far away data center, we can actually bring these data centers to the data. Saudi Arabia. The state of Alaska in the Arctic, US Navy everywhere beyond the cloud providers networks where there’s data.
00:16
Sophie Buonassisi: Dan Wright is the CEO of Armada deploying AI data centers to the most extreme places on Earth. When an AI model is too far from a data source, what starts to actually fracture?
00:27
Dan Wright: It just doesn’t work. Oil rigs, mines, ships. The way infrastructure has been is that it was built for a world before.
00:35
Sophie Buonassisi: AI, and you’re operating in extreme remote environments. And previously these were data desert. How has satellite connectivity like Starlink helped enable this edge first approach?
00:45
Dan Wright: Starlink totally changed the game and now everywhere is a potential AI cluster, a potential AI hub.
00:51
Sophie Buonassisi: We’re now in the age of AI sovereignty. It’s no longer just about who has the best model. It’s more about who owns the infrastructure stock.
01:00
Dan Wright: It is a global AI race and the countries that move the fastest. Those are going to be the big winners. There’s going to be data centers in space. We are going to go to the moon. We are going to go to Mars.
01:10
Sophie Buonassisi: How many years away do you think we are from seeing that on the moon?
01:13
Dan Wright: I would say.
01:15
Unknown:
01:26
Sophie Buonassisi: Dan welcome to GTM now.
01:27
Dan Wright: Thanks for having me on.
01:28
Sophie Buonassisi: Absolutely. It’s a pleasure to have you here.
01:30
Dan Wright: Great to be here.
01:31
Sophie Buonassisi: And I want to start off with what you’re building
01:33
Sophie Buonassisi: because the cloud is king. Narrative has hit a bit of a wall now in extreme environments, even a few milliseconds of latency, the delay it takes to send data to
01:44
Sophie Buonassisi: the data center is
01:45
Sophie Buonassisi: can really be a deal breaker. And Armada seems to be that solution to the problem.
01:51
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah. So for anyone unfamiliar with Armada, how do you explain what you’re building?
01:55
Dan Wright: Yeah, we call ourselves the Hyperscaler for the edge. And what I mean by that is we are building a new type of cloud company
02:01
Dan Wright: the cloud, if you think about what it is, it’s these massive hyperscale data centers,
02:06
Dan Wright: they’re great, but they only cover about 30% of the world. And so we’re building the infrastructure for the rest of the world, which is really needed because a lot of the biggest problems happen there in that area of the world.
02:20
Dan Wright: We call that area the remote edge. Everywhere beyond the cloud providers, networks where there’s data.
02:25
Sophie Buonassisi: I’ve heard Armada mentioned in so many different contexts
02:28
Sophie Buonassisi: from extreme environments, everything from Alaskan drone imagery through to the military. Is there a particular extreme environment that you feel like
02:35
Sophie Buonassisi: showcases this edge first approach best?
02:38
Dan Wright: What’s exciting is that the edge is now constantly being redefined with Armada. When we started the company,
02:45
Dan Wright: people thought of the edge as the edge of the cloud providers networks. When we say the edge, we mean the edge in terms of wherever the data is. And then when I say wherever, I mean,
02:55
Dan Wright: literally anywhere. The reason that we named
02:57
Dan Wright: company Armada is that rather than having the data at Sail to some very faraway data center, we can actually bring these cutting edge modular AI factories, AI data centers to the data, and just a few recent examples.
03:11
Dan Wright: We were the first ones to do that in the middle of the summer in Saudi Arabia with Aramco in partnership with Microsoft.
03:19
Dan Wright: Extending all the things that,
03:21
Dan Wright: you know, Aramco likes about Azure to the edge, but then also bringing cutting edge models,
03:25
Dan Wright: from, you know,
03:26
Dan Wright: the leading new model providers, anything they want to this remote edge, doing the same thing with the state of Alaska in the Arctic, focused on emergency response, helping them cut latency to process data from,
03:41
Dan Wright: drones for responding to avalanches and floods from over a day to real time to save lives.
03:47
Dan Wright: And then we also did the first offshore edge computing ever with the US Navy.
03:52
Dan Wright: taking all of the data from drones, taking these really powerful AI models, bringing them to the middle of the ocean, where you can go on a ship, you can put it in a weapons bay, you can port for, deploy it in a C-17 C-130.
04:04
Dan Wright: those are a few recent examples, but it seems like every week,
04:06
Dan Wright: you know, we’re constantly redefining the edge.
04:09
Sophie Buonassisi: Always pushing the boundaries. Yes. And speaking boundaries.
04:12
Sophie Buonassisi: AIS often talked about is this a serial thing? But in reality it’s governed by the laws of physics. And when an AI model is too far from a data source, what starts to actually fracture?
04:23
Dan Wright: It just doesn’t work.
04:24
Dan Wright: the problem with the way infrastructure has been is that it was built for a world before I. Right? All of the cloud providers built for a world, you know, 25 years ago when we,
04:36
Dan Wright: didn’t have AI in any meaningful sense, we certainly didn’t have these really large, powerful models that we have today.
04:43
Dan Wright: And on top of that, the data was in more centralized, you know, urban locations. But that’s not true anymore either, because now all the data is on oil rigs, mines, you know, ships, you name it, where they’re sensors all over these things. And so the problem is, if you don’t have something like Armada,
05:03
Dan Wright: you can’t actually use AI where you need it most, where the data is.
05:07
Dan Wright: that’s where we come in, is we can take
05:09
Dan Wright: these really powerful models, as you said, you know, they’re not magic. There’s physics involved. So you actually need the infrastructure to run them. We take that full stack to the data and then we solve, you know, really important problems like saving lives or,
05:22
Dan Wright: preventing,
05:22
Dan Wright: catastrophic events at oil rigs, mines, you know, enabling split second decisions on battlefields in a way that can really,
05:30
Dan Wright: solve important problems.
05:31
Sophie Buonassisi: And you’re operating in extreme remote environments. And previously, these were kind of data deserts. Yeah. How has
05:38
Sophie Buonassisi: satellite connectivity like Starlink? Yeah. Helped enable this edge first approach.
05:43
Dan Wright: first of all, I like that term data desert. I think I might steal that from you if that’s okay.
05:46
Sophie Buonassisi: I like my yes.
05:48
Dan Wright: so we have seen that that is one of the big trends that is happening. That was always a blocker to AI at the edge. If you don’t have the internet, then how are you going to get these really powerful AI models to the edge? Right. You have to have them at least to be able to push them to the edge.
06:05
Dan Wright: Then you can run them what’s called air gapped, you can run them disconnected from the internet, but you have to have the internet to push them there. And usually what people want to do is run them and then send the insights or the metadata
06:16
Dan Wright: back to the cloud so they can benefit at all their other sites as well.
06:19
Dan Wright: So Starlink totally changed the game, and most people don’t know. They only launched in public beta in November 2020. So it’s a relatively new product.
06:28
Dan Wright: Now. They’re in, I think, 155 countries right around there,
06:31
Dan Wright: and they’re rolling out in new countries every week,
06:34
Dan Wright: and the service is getting better. When it first came out, it was primarily a consumer product.
06:38
Dan Wright: Then it went into enterprise a couple of years later. And then there was Star Shield for the government. Initially it was being used as a backup, and now the service has gotten so good that it’s being used as a primary source, increasingly
06:49
Dan Wright: the internet.
06:50
Dan Wright: And so what that means is if I get a call like I did the other day and somebody says, hey, can you deploy one of your galleons, which is what we call our modular factories in Antarctica?
06:59
Dan Wright: I could say, yeah, we can do that because Starlink’s in Antarctica, we don’t even need fiber in the ground.
07:05
Dan Wright: And that’s important because
07:06
Dan Wright: everywhere is a potential, AI cluster, a potential AI hub, because you have Starlink and you have reliable internet everywhere.
07:14
Sophie Buonassisi: what is the term distributed intelligence need to you?
07:17
Dan Wright: Yeah. I mean, distributed intelligence is the
07:20
Dan Wright: founding principle of armada. And
07:22
Dan Wright: what that is, is
07:23
Dan Wright: the world
07:24
Dan Wright: moving from a situation where you have these really large hyperscale data centers that just train these big, you know, AI models, right?
07:33
Dan Wright: To a world of inference, a world where you can use those models anywhere and you can have it distributed the same way that,
07:42
Dan Wright: energy is distributed.
07:44
Dan Wright: Right? Because there’s lots of stranded energy around the world that can be used to power these high data centers. That’s also been a big block or too I,
07:51
Dan Wright: I talked about the connectivity, but then energy as well.
07:54
Dan Wright: But also data is distributed because of the rise of IoT devices and the fact that cameras and sensors and drones have gotten so much less expensive, about ten less expensive over the last five years, now, it only makes sense that you would have distributed intelligence, because, again, that’s where the power lives, and that’s where the data lives.
08:12
Dan Wright: And that’s where the most important problems live.
08:14
Sophie Buonassisi: And Dan,
08:14
Sophie Buonassisi: we’re now in the age of AI sovereignty.
08:18
Sophie Buonassisi: It’s no longer just about who has the best model. It’s more about who owns the infrastructure stock, a theme that we see with your work on the D.o.e. use Genesis mission. That’s right. And in your AI dominance whitepaper, you actually framed this as a global race between the US and China.
08:35
Dan Wright: Yes.
08:36
Sophie Buonassisi: Why is modular compute such a linchpin in the global race for AI domination?
08:41
Dan Wright: first of all, we live in such an interesting time. Like is as an entrepreneur,
08:45
Dan Wright: it’s like, this is the time.
08:46
Sophie Buonassisi: Yeah, this is.
08:47
Dan Wright: What you want to be building best.
08:48
Sophie Buonassisi: Us.
08:48
Dan Wright: And
08:49
Dan Wright: this past year, obviously we’re in 2026 now, but 2025 was kind of mind blowing. And,
08:55
Dan Wright: you know, there was an event, the winning the AI race, summit that I went to in July, and that was for the US,
09:04
Dan Wright: kind of a coming out party for sovereign AI. The fact that we were declaring that we’re really serious about beating China in this global AI race,
09:13
Dan Wright: really serious about AI dominance.
09:15
Dan Wright: you know, there’s a few pillars to the AI action plan that was announced that day which match almost exactly our white paper, which we had already written. You know,
09:24
Dan Wright: we were talking to the say, some of the same people, but we didn’t know that they were going to release it at that event. And we just happened to do ours the same day.
09:31
Dan Wright: But it was very aligned. And the first pillar of the action plan is all about rapidly
deploying infrastructure domestically,
09:38
Dan Wright: using these really powerful AI models on critical industries, you know, oil and gas rigs, manufacturing mines,
09:46
Dan Wright: to
09:47
Dan Wright: boost GDP, improve our economy, create jobs,
09:51
Dan Wright: but then also to have a really fast R&D loop
09:54
Dan Wright: on our AI stack
09:56
Dan Wright: from the silicon all the way through these, you know, models themselves.
09:59
Dan Wright: Right?
10:00
Dan Wright: then the third is, okay, once we do that, we need to also export ROI stack to allied nations faster than China can buy a wall way primarily.
10:09
Dan Wright: when that happened, I was like,
10:11
Dan Wright: we knew that the world was going in this direction. But like, Armada is the perfect enabler of this.
10:16
Dan Wright: the second thing that happened is Genesis mission. And there was a,
10:20
Dan Wright: event that I attended at the white House
10:22
Dan Wright: were there with some other partners, collaborators on Genesis Mission as well as Secretary. Right. Dario Gil,
10:28
Dan Wright: And what we talked about was this need to create a common AI platform across all of the national labs, leverage the decades of data at these national labs, and then have huge leaps forward,
10:43
Dan Wright: in science and engineering, which would again enable all the things that I’m talking about.
10:48
Dan Wright: It would boost GDP. It’s going to solve diseases that were never possible before.
10:52
Dan Wright: But it’s also going to make sure that we have the best models and the best AI stack in the world so that we can then export that to other countries.
11:00
Dan Wright: to kick off 2026, there was a moment just last week when I was in Davos and Sovereign.
11:06
Dan Wright: I was like the new hotness. Everybody wanted to talk about sovereign AI. And I’m thinking, right, we’ve been doing sovereign AI. That’s what we do. Yeah, you know, and so it was really cool to be able to talk about
11:18
Dan Wright: level,
11:19
Dan Wright: that most people haven’t even thought about. Like, for example, the work that we’re doing with Aramco and a lot of these state backed energy companies or with the US Navy,
11:28
Dan Wright: they talk about data sovereignty, they don’t just mean data sovereignty.
11:30
Dan Wright: It’s like a country level,
11:32
Dan Wright: or even a state level. They mean it at a state level.
11:35
Dan Wright: Like the data cannot leave the site because you have things like cyber attacks that are becoming more and more prevalent.
11:42
Dan Wright: Because a lot of those sites are,
11:44
Dan Wright: critical national infrastructure. They’re classified in such a way so that
11:47
Dan Wright: by law it can actually be moved off the site.
11:50
Dan Wright: So when they talk about sovereignty, they mean sovereignty down to the site level.
11:54
Dan Wright: And that’s where the world is going. I think, you know, people are still thinking about data sovereignty the way that we talked about it, you know, five, ten years ago. But now,
12:02
Dan Wright: way the world is now, you’re going to have these on every one of your sites.
12:06
Unknown: A quick pause for company where a huge fan of yours. If you run go to market, you already know the problem. Your data lives everywhere. Spreadsheets, CRM, sales, calls, ad platforms. Yet you’re still guessing what to do next. Hockey stack is the AI platform for modern go to market teams, unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action.
12:25
Unknown: Built in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close and expand deals, and scale what works. That’s why teams like RingCentral outreach, Active Campaign, and fortune 100 companies rely on hockey stack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions and make space to think. Learn more at Hockey stack.com. That’s hockey y esta SI.com.
12:49
Sophie Buonassisi: how do you make a case for sovereign? I was such a wide variety of customers. Are they already quite a lot in.
12:53
Dan Wright: Well, that was the great thing about Davos is
12:56
Dan Wright: I’m not the pitch sovereign AI. Everybody knows that they need to do sovereign AI.
12:59
Dan Wright: The question is who’s going to move the fastest? Again, it is a global AI race, and AI is not one of those technologies where it’s like a little step change.
13:08
Dan Wright: It’s a complete game changer.
13:10
Dan Wright: And so the companies, and the countries that move the fastest to adopt this infrastructure and then put those
13:18
Dan Wright: powerful AI models
13:20
Dan Wright: to work fine, tune them for their data, for their workflows.
13:25
Dan Wright: Those are going to be the big winners. And the thing about AI is it has a compounding advantage, right? Like the leaders
13:31
Dan Wright: just will absolutely dominate, and then the laggards will, be left in the dust.
13:36
Dan Wright: And that is true at a country level and is true at a company level. And now we’re seeing that play out in real time.
13:41
Sophie Buonassisi: Let’s shift gears and talk about your go to market. Because damn selling software is one thing. But shipping ruggedized solutions to remote areas is a complete other. And what does your go to market look like when a product demo is shipping a giant 40ft container to, say, a desert?
13:58
Dan Wright: The beautiful thing about our platform is it’s a very flexible. Right. So we can show a demo,
14:04
Dan Wright: of the platform, you know, remotely. We have these data centers all over the place. If somebody wants to run one of their own models or one of our
14:12
Dan Wright: kind of cutting edge AI models,
14:14
Dan Wright: we can run it on one of our existing galleons.
14:16
Dan Wright: We also,
14:17
Dan Wright: have smaller form factors. Even something the size of a suitcase called a beacon. We can do some stuff with that.
14:22
Dan Wright: we have a series of these, and then usually what will happen is we will go hands on with the customer and do like a workshop and catalog all of their different problems at the edge.
14:35
Dan Wright: And then we’ll pattern match. We’ll say, okay,
14:37
Dan Wright: well that problem is exactly like this use case that we did with this other very similar type of company or country. And here is the value that we were able to deliver, because ultimately,
14:48
Dan Wright: there’s a little bit of like AI fatigue. I think a lot of people have,
14:52
Dan Wright: tried different things and haven’t gotten to value.
14:55
Dan Wright: We view our job is helping them accelerate time to value, get value from these,
14:59
Dan Wright: models. And we do that again full stack. So we make it easy. And we also do it,
15:05
Dan Wright: with both our technology and our team. And we have the expertise of having done this with a lot of others.
15:09
Sophie Buonassisi: So you’ve got the proof points of doing it with other people. How do you showcase that ROI that you clearly have. But when you’re operating in really hostile remote environments?
15:18
Dan Wright: Yeah. The best thing is,
15:20
Dan Wright: our customers do it for us. So we just came out with, a partnership,
15:24
Dan Wright: video with Alaska,
15:27
Dan Wright: they talked about the work that we were doing with them. We didn’t say a word in the whole thing. And if you listen to it, they’re talking about
15:34
Dan Wright: how they had all of this latency to process this huge amount, you know, terabytes of unstructured data in remote areas throughout a very remote state.
15:45
Dan Wright: You know, they say in Alaska, the edge has real meaning. That is the edge trend. And,
15:50
Dan Wright: that’s important because otherwise it would take them
15:53
Dan Wright: days or weeks or even in some cases, like an entire season, to be able to go through all of this data that they get from drones throughout the state.
16:02
Dan Wright: what’s really great is when you watch that video, they, they say that it’s going to save lives, and they say that they have a moonshot goal of having hundreds of these all throughout the state.
16:16
Dan Wright: you’ll see more and more of that from us
16:18
Dan Wright: each of our target areas. And we really focus on,
16:21
Dan Wright: you know, defense. We focus on,
16:23
Dan Wright: you know, sovereign AI critical industries like oil and gas and mining and then critical national infrastructure. You’re going to see more and more of these types of customer testimonials that tell the story for us so that we don’t have to sell.
16:36
Sophie Buonassisi: I mean, that is the ideal scenario, social proof. When customers will actually do the selling for you.
16:41
Dan Wright: That’s the way to go.
16:42
Sophie Buonassisi: And it’s always indicative of a fantastic product. At the end of the day you can’t manufacture that.
16:46
Dan Wright: Well, and what’s cool about us is we’re not selling like a SaaS application. We’re not selling like,
16:52
Dan Wright: something that, you know, maybe is a slightly better chat bot
16:55
Dan Wright: we’re selling something dead
16:56
Dan Wright: is completely game changing. So when our customers talk about what we’re doing, it’s like the Alaska video, where it’s emotional. They talk about saving lives, right?
17:05
Dan Wright: Or, you know, a lot of the ones that you’ll see coming out in some of these other industries, like oil and gas and mining, it’s talking about hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in value.
17:15
Dan Wright: that also gets an emotional response, you know, and so, like, that’s what I love is that we’re we’re doing something that is very needed.
17:22
Dan Wright: It’s solving critical problems. And then, you know, as our customers talk about it,
17:26
Dan Wright: it’s a huge win for them. They feel a sense of of pride. And then, you know, they’re
17:30
Dan Wright: excited to tell the world.
17:31
Sophie Buonassisi: That is fantastic. And you mentioned partnership earlier.
17:35
Sophie Buonassisi: You also have a partnership with Microsoft. And Satya Nadella can be seen on stage shouting out Armada. Yeah. How did the Microsoft partnership come to be?
17:43
Dan Wright: Yeah. So we’ve been talking to Microsoft from the early days of the company, even when we were still in stealth.
17:48
Dan Wright: Well, and I think that’s due to a couple of different things.
17:52
Dan Wright: One is
17:53
Dan Wright: they have realized for a while that the edge is going to be very important. Right? So if you talk to,
18:00
Dan Wright: Satya
18:01
Dan Wright: I remember the first time I met him up in, in Washington,
18:04
Dan Wright: you don’t have to convince him on edge.
18:06
Dan Wright: You don’t have to convince him that the edge is important,
18:07
Dan Wright: they were more focused on. Okay, well, how can we make this,
18:11
Dan Wright: a win for Azure customers, as you would expect. Right. And so what what we did is we talked to Satya and we talked to a lot of the leaders at Microsoft,
18:20
Dan Wright: we sort of,
18:21
Dan Wright: made our platforms very, very complementary in a way that, as Satya likes to say.
18:27
Dan Wright: And he says in that video that you saw, yeah, they, you can take Azure local, you can take these really powerful models,
18:34
Dan Wright: agents capabilities, even hardware like Azure Stack. And we extend them to these more remote locations to the edge and do it in a way where it is local, which people want for data sovereignty reasons they wanted for cyber security reasons,
18:48
Dan Wright: and then they want it for cost and latency reasons.
18:51
Sophie Buonassisi: And
18:51
Sophie Buonassisi: as you scale Armada, you know hyperscale isn’t new to you. You’ve seen that through Appdynamics through Datarobot. But our motto, it feels different. You know, you’re not scaling
19:01
Sophie Buonassisi: an existing category. You’re really creating a new category. What have you learned about the category creation process while building our model?
19:09
Dan Wright: we knew that we were going to be redefining the edge, right? The edge. It’s it’s not a new thing like it’s been talked about for a really long time. But again, it’s been talked about in terms of the edge of the hyperscalers networks. Right. And
19:22
Dan Wright: what we’re doing is, is beyond that. And so,
19:25
Dan Wright: we knew that we would have to do some category creation.
19:28
Dan Wright: I think the the biggest thing that we learned through that process
19:31
Dan Wright: you need to get as specific as possible, as early as possible with customers talking about use cases and business value. Ultimately, people don’t buy technology for the sake of technology. Like nobody jumps out of bed and says, you know what, I want to buy some great tech today like that doesn’t happen.
19:48
Dan Wright: People are people and people and companies and countries. They have problems and they buy technology and they buy partnerships to solve problems. And so I always tell our
19:59
Dan Wright: team, like, we’re in the business of solving our customer’s most important problems. And as you do that, then they become champions. Then they’re wanting to tell
20:09
Dan Wright: not only everybody internally, hey, we need to lean into this and do way more with Armada.
20:13
Dan Wright: But they’re telling everybody else they know.
20:15
Dan Wright: that’s what I always thought is like category creation is around building a movement. It’s around,
20:22
Dan Wright: creating a group of people that understand that these very important problems that were previously unsolvable are now solvable with technology and the value associated with that. And that’s why when I talk about the Armada, you know, the Armada originally referred to our galleons is modular data centers.
20:41
Dan Wright: And then we expanded that and we’re like, no, the Armada is actually also our team, you know, and it’s our investors. It’s everybody this bringing this change to the world. But also it’s it’s our customers. You know, we’re all the Armada that’s making,
20:53
Dan Wright: this happen and solving these important problems at the edge.
20:55
Sophie Buonassisi: Dan, we were fortunate to meet in 2023 when you were raising your seed round. We’re sitting here in 2026 now. A lot has
21:02
Sophie Buonassisi: changed which is talked about. What’s next for Armada?
21:05
Dan Wright: Yeah. It’s wild. I mean, you think about how much the world has changed in a very short amount of time. I was
21:09
Dan Wright: talking to somebody the other day about the founding story of Armada. And, you know, we started working with,
21:14
Dan Wright: you know, space X from the beginning. Right. And then, yeah, I could tell what they were thinking.
21:19
Dan Wright: They were like, well, didn’t you also maybe work with like X, I
21:22
Dan Wright: I was like, no, actually I didn’t exist. Right? Okay. I wasn’t around when we started the company, which is crazy to think given how fast that is growing,
21:31
Dan Wright: And so the world has fundamentally shifted since we started the company, but it’s shifted in ways that are directly aligned with our,
21:38
Dan Wright: kind of founding principles for starting the company.
21:40
Dan Wright: We knew that connectivity was going to become ubiquitous. We knew that there was going to be more and more data generated at the edge, and it’s sort of trapped until you get the infrastructure there. So
21:52
Dan Wright: that had to be resolved because there’s so much value in that data.
21:55
Dan Wright: And then we also knew that things like sovereign AI, you know, data sovereignty, cyber security, they were going to become increasingly important.
22:04
Dan Wright: So in many ways we feel like,
22:06
Dan Wright: it’s gone the way that we thought, maybe even faster than we thought it might. And that’s, you know, a good place to be.
22:12
Sophie Buonassisi: And can you talk a little bit about your relationship with SpaceX?
22:15
Dan Wright: So we’ve been partnering with SpaceX since we founded the company.
22:18
Dan Wright: the whole idea is that Starlink is bringing connectivity,
22:22
Dan Wright: all over the world, you know, and we think in the next five years, I mentioned to send around 155 countries today and next five years, there will be internet everywhere on Earth that is as good as fiber in the ground,
22:32
Dan Wright: and that’s a pretty cool world to think about.
22:34
Dan Wright: But unless you actually complement that connectivity with infrastructure, then you can’t do anything with all that data that’s trapped at the edge, right? Other than,
22:44
Dan Wright: things that are not
22:45
Dan Wright: latency sensitive, things that are not,
22:48
Dan Wright: you don’t have to worry about data sovereignty, cybersecurity.
22:50
Dan Wright: for
22:51
Dan Wright: a lot of the most important problems, you need the infrastructure as well as the connectivity to solve the problem.
22:57
Dan Wright: What we do with SpaceX is we sort of lock arms with them. And every time they they launch in a new country, we’re a first mover with the infrastructure.
23:05
Dan Wright: you’re gonna see that continue to play out. You know, they just went live in South Korea. They’re going live in like a new country every week. They’re lighting up,
23:12
Dan Wright: remote
23:13
Dan Wright: locations in Africa.
23:15
Dan Wright: I mentioned Antarctica. Yeah. And our goal is to always be the first mover on the infrastructure. And then what you’ll see us do,
23:23
Dan Wright: is continue to highlight
23:25
Dan Wright: these killer high value use cases that Starlink with Armada unlocks for the first time, things that were never possible before suddenly being possible.
23:36
Sophie Buonassisi: Is there anywhere that you think is not reachable?
23:39
Dan Wright: No, I don’t think so.
23:41
Dan Wright: I mean, I think that,
23:42
Dan Wright: certainly, like, I guess adversaries, like, we don’t go to China or Russia or North Korea, right? But that’s a choice. You know, I was talking to somebody the other day. I said, I’m very I’m very grateful that SpaceX is an American company because it’s like an unfair advantage that we have with the Starlink and his Star Shield.
23:59
Dan Wright: You know, on the, on the government side.
24:01
Dan Wright: we make a conscious choice that we are a proud American company and we’re going to be a first mover with the US and allies. And hopefully that enables,
24:10
Dan Wright: a dominance, right, to make sure that we, we win this global AI race that’s going on.
24:14
Dan Wright: there are no limits to the edge. You know, I think about,
24:17
Dan Wright: even where we’re going over the next few years, you know, we are going to go to the moon, we are going to go to Mars. There’s going to be data centers in space because you’re going to need them in order to,
24:27
Dan Wright: create bases using armies of Optimus robots to build.
24:32
Dan Wright: You’re going to need local compute. You’re going to need it in order to do things that we do here on Earth that you’ll need to do there. Like, yeah, you know, mining, right? You’re going to be automating all of that.
24:42
Dan Wright: You’ll probably have The Boring Company. They’re building these underground tunnels. You know, it’s going to be
24:47
Dan Wright: just an insane, insane few years ahead.
24:49
Dan Wright: I mean, I said earlier, like, what other time would you want to build? This is the best time.
24:54
Dan Wright: it really does feel like there are no limits to what we can do. I think the only limits that we have is, the limits of our imagination. And then, you know, focus. We got to focus on the right things to to make sure that we,
25:05
Dan Wright: accomplish with technology things that serve humanity, in the best possible way.
25:09
Sophie Buonassisi: And you said a few years. How many years away do you think we are from seeing man on the moon?
25:14
Dan Wright: I would say two years.
25:15
Sophie Buonassisi: That’s not long at all.
25:16
Dan Wright: Not long. I mean, it used to be when people talked about going back to the moon or based on the moon, it was like, you know, a decade out,
25:24
Dan Wright: there’s like five years out, it’s a couple years.
25:26
Sophie Buonassisi: And then if you could leave listeners, anyone building probably an infrastructure, but really any founder, one piece of advice, what would that be?
25:34
Dan Wright: clarity around what you’re building and why is extremely important and underrated.
25:41
Dan Wright: I was,
25:41
Dan Wright: watching something with Mark Andreessen recently where he’s talking about how people who write things down have a lot of power, and I truly believe that. And so with
25:50
Dan Wright: Armada, before we hired one employee, before we had an office, before we did anything with the company,
25:57
Dan Wright: we wrote our manifesto, we wrote,
26:00
Dan Wright: this is why we’re building the company.
26:02
Dan Wright: Here’s where the world is going, here’s why it matters
26:06
Dan Wright: how we’re going to do it.
26:07
Dan Wright: that clarity of thought
26:09
Dan Wright: is extremely important. And I find it’s an unfair advantage because you’re able to build a movement when you talk to people that you’re trying to recruit, or if you want to get investors or if you want people to work with you as a customer or a partner, being really clear about the value of what you’re doing, why it’s important
26:27
Dan Wright: is
26:28
Dan Wright: critical.
26:29
Dan Wright: And it seems like an obvious thing. But like most companies don’t do that. I
26:32
Dan Wright: know a lot of startup founders and, you know, a lot of times it’s like, I’ll do a ten slide pitch deck, whatever is good enough to get, you know, my seed funding in the bank, right? That might get you to your seed funding, but it’s not going to help you build a generational company.
26:44
Sophie Buonassisi: The power of writing it down. That’s great advice. And where can people find you and follow along if they’re interested?
26:50
Dan Wright: I’m on X, I’m on all the social platforms. Not all of them. Some of them, but I’m on X. I also,
26:57
Dan Wright: I’m at a lot of events. I’m spending a lot of time in DC.
27:00
Dan Wright: Yeah. These days. So,
27:02
Dan Wright: hit me up at Armada Sky if you want to email me or just, you know, drop me a DM on X and let’s meet up.
27:08
Sophie Buonassisi: I love it, Dan. Thank you. This has been wonderful.
27:11
Dan Wright: Thank you. Great talking to you.
27:12
Sophie Buonassisi: Likewise.
appeared first on GTMnow.
