Vapor IO’s Kinetic Grid platform is now live in a half-dozen markets, with “customer-ready” iterations spread across 26 additional locales, marking important progress for the vendor’s edge data center plans.

The vendor’s Kinetic Grid is now buzzing in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, and Pittsburgh. Vapor IO CMO Matthew Trifiro said the vendor has 14 live sites spread across those six markets.

He noted that one of those sites in Las Vegas is hosting an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Outposts edge data center.

“Draw whatever conclusions you want from that,” Trifiro said of the AWS tenant. “That's as much as I am going to say.”

The vendor also has 26 “customer-ready” markets housing a total of 48 sites that Trifiro explained had the supporting infrastructure in place for one of Vapor IO’s data centers, including a concrete pad, power, and internet connectivity. The vendor is paying ground leases on those sites, which are basically just waiting for a customer to sign a deal for the data center equipment to be deployed.

The customer-ready markets are grouped heavily in the Northeast, Upper Midwest, and Southeast, with the others being in Houston, San Antonio, Denver, and Seattle.

Trifiro said those 32 total markets are either ready today, in the case of the six live markets, or can be up and running within a few months “based on our just-in-time deployment model.”

“What that means is that if you sign a contract and pick a market and work with us, we can have you up and running in one or more markets in less than 90 days,” Trifiro said.

Markets still under construction or in the review process include Miami; Detroit; San Diego, California; and Austin, Texas.

Those 36 total markets harken back early 2020, when Vapor IO raised $90 million in Series C funding with the aim of hitting that deployment mark by the end of 2021.

Trifiro explained the vendor’s four phases for building out a market.

The first is a market design where it sifts through different potential locations based on population density, industrial zones, fiber intersection points, and fiber routes. The next phase is when it starts pulling permits and signing leases for approved sites.

Vapor IO then moves on site construction. This involves pouring the foundation, trenching fiber laterals, bringing in power from the local utility, and connecting dark fiber into the site.

“And those three phases take a very long time,” Trifiro said. “That can take years sometimes, and we've been working on some of them for years.”

This is also the customer-ready phase where Vapor IO currently has most of its markets.

The final phase is the actual deployment of a pre-made data center onto the site, which Trifiro said can be done in as little as six hours. This includes the installation of one of Vapor IO’s all-in-one data center modules that are available in different kilowatt types based on need.

“When a VEM-20 leaves our factory in Arizona, there’s one to five days of travel time to the site, and once it’s on site we can have it up and running, production-ready for customer equipment in six hours,” he said.

Trifiro said this deployment and operational model also makes Vapor IO attractive to other vendors in the ecosystem. For example, he said a hardware vendor like Dell could add a Vapor IO edge data center to a package targeted at one of its enterprise customers.

A cloud provider could partner with Vapor IO if it wanted to maximize the financial benefits of shared infrastructure or hasten time to market.

“I don't care who you are, whether you’re Amazon or Microsoft or Google or Facebook, and you want to put in a new data center, even a 20-kilowatt data center in Portland, Oregon, it can take you two years to get the permit,” Trifiro said.

Vapor IO’s Kinetic Edge work dates back to late 2017, when the vendor unveiled a software-defined version of its edge data center efforts. It was started as a technical architecture for creating virtual data centers.

The vendor then began building an ecosystem of edge data center providers like Packet, Digital Reality, and Crown Castle to help expand the reach of its initiatives. The speed of those plans has wavered, with initial plans to have up to 100 locations live by the end of 2020.

Crown Castle remains a minority investor in Vapor IO and has a seat on its board. Trifiro said the tower giant is also Vapor IO's "largest provider of land and fiber, though not exclusively. For example, in Las Vegas and for our backbone we use fiber from our other partner Zayo."

Vapor IO continues to work with Digital Reality in some markets, including Atlanta.

Trifiro explained that Vapor IO’s focus for the first four years was on design wins, “focused to the industry, to the large hyperscalers, to cloud providers, the VMware’s of the world, the Dell’s of the world.”

“This is the first year we felt all the ingredients were in place to actually have products that enterprises want to buy,” he said, adding that enterprises want to buy solutions, not individual technology like edge computing.

“It’s really taking all these pieces. It’s not just building out the infrastructure, it’s getting the design wins, it’s enabling the service providers, it’s really all those things,” Trifiro added. “This is the first year that we've actually turned from a design win focused company to a revenue generating focused company.”