I85Cyber.org – As A Tech/Creative Community | As A StartUp Culture… Who Are We?

Earlier in the Spring of 2024 the global tech titan META, along side State of Alabama and local Montgomery County/City officials, announced the construction and operations of an $800 million data center along Interstate 65 just south of the City of Montgomery. This news was been met with much optimism and rightly so.

• 1000+ construction jobs

• 100 high-tech jobs

• City of Montgomery receiving international recognition as fertile ground to launch and scale a tech company and META possibly establishing a regional technology beach head for other global high-tech firms to follow.

All of this is seriously good times for the City of Montgomery, Alabama but what if there were a more of a local and regional tech community building effort that has lurking just beneath the surface of the recent META Data Center announcement? What if for the past five years parts and pieces of a clandestine regional tech community was being built with the most “grass-roots” of methodologies and that META’s recent announcement could possibly serve as a public validation of these “grass-roots” initiatives?

Some would say that this is pretty far fetched and this type of response is genuinely understandable. Shucks, in the minds of many we are simply the “little ole Central Alabama based Capital City” which is driven by city, county, state and federal government, politics and politicians, bureaucracies and a whole heap of civil servants/governmental employees. Surely a tech community building exercise anywhere in the State of Alabama should be left to the experts in Huntsville with its host of engineers, NASA/Redstone Army Base and an array of governmental contractors who support all of the military weaponry needed for our national defense. Or maybe high tech ecosystem building should be left to the city which possibly serves as both the financial and medical centers of our great State – Birmingham. The City of the corporate head quarters of Economic Development Partners of Alabama(EDPA) and its Alabama Launchpad Initiative, Innovate Alabama, the Alabama Power Company with both its Innovation and Economic Development teams not to mention Birmingham being the home of TechBirmingham, Sloss Tech and Silicon Y’ALL. Surely with all of these efforts what at all could the Capital City of Montgomery and the rest of Central Alabama offer in the way of a tech community building effort? Possibly – SIMPLY BEING OUR UNIQUE SELVES…

So what do city, county, state and federal governments, politics and politicians, bureaucrats and civil servants create lots of? DATA. The latest tech and startup community building science states that the #1 ingredient in engaging with this type of work is that the regional community members MUST BE AUTHENTIC TO WHO THEY ARE. What if the City of Montgomery and Central Alabama’s tech community efforts primarily revolved around the “science” and “engineering” of DATA? It appears that the aforementioned Central Alabama based “grass-roots” efforts may have simply cracked this code. Whether it’s Dr James Locke and the AI Research Lab efforts who are seriously crushing it better than any business school in the nation or the non profit Alabama AI Center of Excellence(AAICE) who is currently working with regional HBCUs to train their researchers and students on the latest advancements of Deep Learning and Generative AI while also providing them access to some of the most cutting edged technology on planet earth – the NVIDIA DGX Platform. Marry the particulars of these efforts with those of Mayor Steven Reed and his administrative team extending the peering fabric of the Montgomery Internet Exchange Point(MGMIX) which has a location in Montgomery’s NTTData managed RSA Data Center, to the world class infrastructure within the AUBIX Data Center in Auburn, AL and you have a set of circumstances that creates a seriously powerful story line around a density of colocated levels of governments, bureaucrats and civil servants who create tons of data each and every day.                                                                                                            

But IS NOT the City of Montgomery the City of EJI, Rosa Parks Museum/Southern Poverty Law Civil Rights Memorial Center/Freedom Rider Museums and the State of Alabama Archives Building and Central Alabama, the region of Tuskegee U, Alabama State U and the US Civil Rights Trail with its Interpretive Museums, both the George Washington Carver Museum and the Tuskegee Airmen Museum, etc which all make up one of the major the TOURISM CAPITALS within the Southeastern US? All of this is very correct but I believe a more basic question could be – “What exactly is TOURISM?” One answer might be

TOURISM – the combination of the ARTS, in all of its various forms(visual, literary, performing, culinary,…) and facts, figures and history ie DATA. By the way, our regional ARTS community through both their Buskin and Creative Place Making Efforts is seriously crushing it entrepreneurially.

Again, the City of Montgomery and Central Alabama only need to continue to build its tech community efforts upon its UNIQUE AND AUTHENTIC selves.

Hopefully META and its regional data center building efforts will provide that proverbial “carrot” that will continue to motivate these “grass-roots” worker bees to continue to put in each day’s efforts as we all work together to build a robust regional tech and creative startup community up and down our segment of the I85 Interstate.

– Community Stewards, I85Cyber.org

(This is a revision of a piece that was originally published in the Montgomery Advertiser.  The details of that post can be funder here.)