All right. All right. Thanks. Welcome, everybody. We're excited about the grand opening of the edge data center. Just, you don't have to show your hands, but in your mind, does anybody know or how many people know what an edge data center is? Let me kick off with explaining that. You know, an edge data center is where the data gets accumulated before it's gonna go off somewhere else for that information to get processed and disseminated. I think one of the things that's really important about what we're doing here is that everywhere in the Panhandle's on the edge, right? Whether you're in Amarillo, you know, we're 300 miles from somewhere where that data's gonna be processed.
If you're in places like Pampa or you're in farming communities, there's a lot of data that needs to be accumulated, whether it's the railroads, whether it's farming, whether it's education. Some of that data can be locally aggregated or it's all gonna be locally aggregated and processed. That's gonna really increase the speed of what we're doing, the redundancy, and really bridge the digital divide that we have right now. This is exciting because we have the grand opening of the facility here. We're gonna look through that facility. There's a room there where you can kinda see what's going on with the eyes. By the way, there are breakfast burritos, so if you haven't got one, while I'm introducing myself, go ahead and grab one. I'm Matt Garner.
I'm Executive Director of The RANGE, which is the Regional Accelerator and New Growth Engine of the Texas Panhandle. What we do is we try to get industry, higher education, and the communities to collaborate. The RANGE is kinda where collaboration happens. You can imagine if you're a farmer, who do I talk to about getting internet, right? It would be very hard at this point to reach out to Duos Edge. If they reach out to Jacob or I, we can make that introduction immediately. What The RANGE is really trying to do is have the pulse on the Texas Panhandle, and working with the higher education institutions, the grade school education institutions, and really assess what the needs are of the future. This is not only about solving today's problems.
This is about forecasting what we need in the future and delivering the promises that we are making to our children, our grandchildren, that this is gonna be an excellent place to live and a place where we can stay and raise our families. We started about six years ago, and we conducted about 200 stakeholder interviews, and we came up with five priority areas. Those areas that we're really focused on are water, educating the workforce and developing a workforce of the future, environmental stewardship, health and nutrition, and then data, which is really what we're doing here today. You can imagine a world where farm equipment, machinery gets more automated. How are we gonna do that? How are we gonna have the facilities that transmit that data quickly and robustly and don't fail, right?
If you have automatic robots that are responsible for milking your herd because nobody wants to milk cows anymore, what happens when the power goes out? You're not gonna milk cows for three days. That's gonna ruin your, your farm, and it's gonna have very long-term effects. You're gonna have your production going from 100 pounds a day to 0 pounds a day, and then those cows are gonna come back and milk 25 pounds. Can you imagine if you lost 75% of your productivity because of a power outage for two days? That's the types of realities that we're dealing with, with just the economic engine, which is really agriculture, food, fiber, and fuel of our area. I wanna kick off and introduce to you our first speaker, Chuck Ferry. He's the CEO and director of Duos Technologies Group. He's got an interesting background.
He's a dedicated, he's a decorated infantry and special operations combat veteran with over 38 years of military experience. He earned a Bronze Star for Valor and a Silver Star during his 48 months of combat in Somalia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. From 2016 to 2020, he was COO President of APR Energy, and now he's currently the CEO of both APR and Duos. Duos specializes in railcar inspection technology, edge data centers, and power infrastructure. Chuck.
You're working okay? Oh, thank you very much for the introduction. Only 26 years in the Army, so, a couple days. I just wanted to, so my name's Chuck Ferry. I'm the CEO for Duos Technologies. I work with Doug, and Doug's really the star, at least for our company here right now. I'm very excited to be here. Dr. Larkin, thank you very much for having us. Thank you for the opportunity to build an edge data center, the first one, for us, you know, this go around here at your facility. I think everybody's gonna be pretty excited when you see that, and hopefully some other folks will want one as well as what we're hoping. Who the heck is Duos?
I also wanna recognize first, before I talk about Duos and APR Energy, some of our key partners. One is FiberLight. We couldn't have done this without them. When we think about, when we go out back and we look at the facility, we always have to remember it actually has to be connected with fiber to actually make it work. That's one of the key things. Also, Accu-Tech has been a real key partner for us, in basically procuring and manufacturing, getting all the things that we needed to put this data center in. We really appreciate that. There are a number of local contractors here from Amarillo that worked on the pod, and we wanted to recognize them.
I also wanna recognize some of my colleagues that are here with me 'cause they did most of the work. Obviously, Doug Recker. We've got David Irek, and Bill Radford, Fei Kwong , and then David Dorman. If you guys don't know, David Dorman's built like 30 power plants in the past. He's worked for me for quite some time. A little bit about Duos. We're a small company that operates out of Jacksonville, Florida. It's not just any company, in my opinion. It is a team of approximately 90 people right now. We all live and primarily work in Jacksonville. Duos is actually a publicly traded company, even though it's small. APR Energy is a sister company now. We basically do three things.
One, for the last number of years, we were doing what we call a railcar inspection portal where we use a sophisticated set of machine vision, artificial intelligence software, and hardware devices to basically scan trains going at about 100 miles an hour. That business is one of our lines of business. Our second line of business is our edge data center business, which is not quite a year old. Doug and I had met each other probably about two years ago when he was running a company called Edge Presence. At that time, we were trying to merge the companies. It didn't really work out. Doug walked in my office probably about eight, nine months ago, and I literally hired him on the spot. I didn't even ask the CFO or anything. I just said, "You're hired.
You're, so he's, we're glad we're doing it. He and I, the Dual Uptime Onsite Services was generated in my office on our whiteboard in a session. The third business that we have that's exciting for us right now is I used to be the CEO for APR Energy from 2016 to 2020. We just recently kinda reacquired that company back. The company now has 30 large gas mobile turbines, 850 megawatts of fast power. We have a team that has deployed those assets all around the world, and we're hoping to deploy some of those assets very, very soon here into Texas and specifically into Pampa, Texas. I know we have some folks here from Pampa, and we're working on a project there hopefully to put some of that power there along with some edge data centers.
That's a little bit about the company. I will tell you, the company, probably about 35% to 40% of the members in the company are veterans, from the various military services. We have folks that have been in the data center business, some for, you know, 20 to 30 years, folks in the power business, 20 to 30 years. We're just a real collection of very, very hardworking, very dedicated folks. If anything, you know, doesn't go exactly right, you know where to call, and we will come. I guarantee it. Thank you very much, and thanks for coming today.
The next speaker I'm gonna introduce is Doug Recker. you heard a little bit about him, but, you know, he is responsible for managing, designing, implementing, and deploying the EDC infrastructure across the US for all the client sites. he founded Edge Presence in 2017, and then he founded, a data center company, which was later acquired by Cologix in 2014. Mr. Recker was also, a veteran of the United States Marine Corps, where he learned the value of developing strong teams and leading those throughout his career.
I'm gonna stand . If not, you can't see me. I'm only 5'5", so I like to, oh, Chuck, I like to talk and I understand. Yeah, we're so excited about this project. First of all, we're not new to the edge data center business. Before, when we ran Edge Presence, we deployed these mobile data centers, like you're gonna see today, for mobile operators like DISH Network and the carriers. After we sold that business, I came to Chuck and I said, "Chuck, I think you need to invest and bring this company on board, what we're gonna do, and what our focus is, is education and healthcare." A prime example, when we were deploying these other ones for the mobile operators, we saw in these communities, these tier three and tier four markets, that they didn't really have good connectivity.
They had one carrier that came into the market. That carrier goes down. Not only does the Wi-Fi go down, the cellular service goes down. Everybody's connected to Verizon or Comcast or whoever the main carrier was. I said, "That's, that's tough to bring new business into these markets, and that's what they need to thrive, right? We need to bring industry to these businesses." I went to Chuck and I said, "Look, if we put these in education centers and, and help the students learn and get faster connectivity, that's gonna breed other outcomes, which is better connectivity in the market brings industry, brings other, other businesses to that market, which brings more kids to the school, which brings more money to the school." Our plan was to build these and deploy them at education centers.
This is our first one, and we're so happy that we met them 'cause they've been the best. They're probably one of the smartest in the business, and we love that. It's easier for us to work together. What we're trying to do is educate the market and say, "Look, you put one of these data centers in your region, like Amarillo, we bring in multiple carriers." FiberLight is our main partner, but we also bring on other carriers, so there's redundancy. What that also does for industry is it brings in competition. Now even the local car dealership down the street who's just paying for one carrier and doesn't really have a choice 'cause he needs a lot of bandwidth, now they can co-locate right down the street instead of co-locating in Dallas or Houston, and we have the connectivity here.
How we build this pod, we'll go into it a little bit later, but we bring connectivity here, but we also connect to the main carrier hotels. Basically, if you're in our box here, you can connect to any carrier in the country that's in that facility. Before, if you're out here in Amarillo, you wouldn't think you could get Cogent. You can get Cogent now, which you can get at very cheap, good service. It brings competition. Within our data center now, you can have multiple connections and multiple bandwidth providers and more bandwidth for what you're paying currently with one. The goal is to bring the pricing down, make it affordable, but yet bring the connectivity and then to drive industry as well. Our partnership worked several ways. They help us educate the market. We bring the fiber here.
We bring the actual connectivity in somewhat of a peering environment, and that's what we're trying to create, that nucleus here. Anything that comes in through the community when they co-locate, we help the actual school system. We help Region 16. They help us. We help them. You'll see the NOC that's here, which is really cool. Basically, everything that goes in our pod here and all the pods that we're gonna deploy throughout Texas here in the next 24 months are gonna be monitored here. They offer a service that we can use, which is a managed service product. Along with the pod out here, now Region 16 can sell their products and services to not only other schools, but, prime example, to the health clinic down the street.
There are so many different avenues of revenue and support and connectivity and all this going on just out of that little box that can help this whole community. Now, we might have three of these boxes in this community. Depends on what, you know, what the traffic looks like and how many people need it. We are really excited about it. We will go through all the product and give you a tour of the facility. We just have a little bit in the pod because we are SOC 2 certified, so we cannot really have customers in there yet. This is a perfect time for us to have the open house. You get to walk through the pod and see everything. You see how the systems work, how everything is N+1 .
This facility that we have here is state of the art, and we'll go through that. Just to give you an idea of the investment that we have and they have in the project, you'll see two generators outside. Those are all N+1 . Everything from the utility from Xcel to your actual cabinet where your server is, is redundant. We have two generators. We have two ATSs. We have two UPS systems. We have two PDUs in the cabinet. This delivers the five nines, what we call it in the industry, that it should never go down. We provide that redundancy. There really isn't anything like that in this region that has that kind of certification. We can do HIPAA. We can do healthcare, storage records, all that stuff. We're really excited.
Thank you all for coming, and I'll leave it over to the smart people here. Thank you.
Before I introduce Ron, I wanna cover something. It's a question that we get a lot at The RANGE and at the Amarillo Area Foundation, which is, why are we doing this? Why don't we just use satellites, right? They're available for $100. Everybody could get to get data. Our response is satellite would be a great thing for David Prescott and I to have at our hunting ranch where it would require, you know, 15 mi of taking fiber and it would have to be powered and all of that stuff and then have to go through rocky terrain and all that stuff. Satellite is really not adequate for what we're trying to do here. This is where FiberLight comes in.
Imagine that you're a hospital and you need end-to-end encrypted data that has to be HIPAA compliant. It has all different types of security measures that are needed. They have to have their own dedicated strand. Or you're a company and you don't wanna worry about people stealing your data. You don't wanna transmit that over the interwebs. Most companies, most school districts, all hospitals, most farms are gonna require, one, more data transfer than is allowed by satellite, and two, they're gonna need the upload and the download speeds for large data. I think that's one of the aspects that we need to talk about when we're talking about covering the panhandle. Yes, we do need satellite technology. That's gonna be really good for a moving tractor, right? You wouldn't want that thing to be tethered.
If we think about our mobile phones and those towers, those towers are all connected to fiber, right? If we want more internet or we want more cellular towers, 5G towers, we're gonna need things like FiberLight. What's very exciting about FiberLight is they've made a commitment. They're spending a lot of money on the front end to run fiber all throughout the Panhandle. I wanted to introduce Ron. Ron has been working in this industry and is drawing on 30 years of construction experience and 20 years of cell experience. Now he's working on one of the most advanced network expansions and large projects in the country. They're not just doing this here. They're doing this all over the state of Texas. They're doing this all over the country.
I'll let Ron kinda tell, tell us about what he's up to.
Yeah, man, I should probably just let you do our presentation 'cause he did a great job. Took half of my stuff I was gonna talk about, but, no, I appreciate it. Ron Kormos, Chief Strategy Officer at FiberLight. Been at FiberLight for 25 years this coming June. Was one of the founding members of FiberLight, and FiberLight has got roots that date back about 25, 27 years. We actually became FiberLight 20 years ago this year, but we had roots prior to that. We're a, what we call a mid-mile provider. We enable mid-mile. One of the things that Matt said was very important, you can have internet. Internet's great, right? If you're gonna attract large businesses, hyperscales, they need more than internet. They gotta have that major connectivity.
We're working on a huge project right now in Abilene, which it's all been all over the news. The amount of bandwidth that's coming out of that Abilene data center is unbelievable. Just one customer, we turned up 32 400 gig circuits. That's just one of the hyperscalers that are going in there. There's multiple hyperscalers. Those are type of industries such as the, you know, the projects going up, Mr. Keough's project in Pampa. That is gonna require much more than internet, right? I mean, you've gotta have major connectivity. And our network is capable of 400 gig, soon to be 1.2 terabits. We enable, we have over 200 last mile providers that we enable. We do not do residential. We do business. We do hyperscale carriers. We enable them.
We have, like I said, those 200, we do business with over two dozen co-ops and ILECs because they need our connectivity to go back to Dallas or Houston or San Antonio. Today it's not, it's more than just connectivity and single thread. These hyperscalers are requiring multiple connectivities. They want, they don't want one carrier. They don't want two carriers. They want three carriers to provide connectivity back to the major data centers. We're in over 120 data centers in the state, just in the state of Texas. We have over 13,000 miles that we own and operate in Texas. That's the largest geographical network in Texas of any carrier. AT&T's got more network, but it's consolidated into, you know, the metros. Our partnership with Dr. Larkin and Michael here and the rest of Region 16 has been something special.
We, we, we FiberLight, I took it to the board and we, we are investing millions of dollars in the Panhandle. This is not something that we just, they're paying for everything. They are not. We are, we, we, we, the board approved $8 million for us to build out Panhandle. And when we're done, we're gonna have somewhere in the neighborhood of about 1,500 miles just in the Panhandle of Texas. We'll go to every city in the, in the state or in the Panhandle area. And we'll, we'll provide services. We will provide the ILECs to come back, the, the co-ops that services back to Dallas where they can get better internet, where they get redundancy. We'll also hopefully serve some of the, the data centers going in, in Pampa. Anyway, that's kind of what we do. We're a mid-mile provider. We do construction mid-mile.
We have very simple business plan, but we enable, you know, whether it's carriers, hyperscalers, businesses, things like that. Our partnership with Duos Edge, I've known Doug for a while and he's a great guy. Wish he'd come out of his shell a little bit, but other than that, he's pretty good. I really appreciate the opportunity to be here with y'all. FiberLight is committed to this project, and we're committed to bringing education, high bandwidth to this area region. I think it'll pay off tremendously. Thank you for the invite.
Now I'd like to introduce Dr. Tanya Larkin. She is the Executive Director of Region 16. I was talking to her a little bit earlier about Region 16 and, you know, they serve 83,000 students. The largest school district would be the ones in Amarillo, which is 30,000 students. They have school districts as small as 45 people. She oversees, you know, a lot of folks here, is working in, you know, the whole Panhandle. You know, she brings a lot of experience. She was in the school, she was in working in the schools for almost 30 years and she's been the Executive Director since 2019. If you could just tell us what you're doing, that'd be great.
If I only knew what I was doing, that'd be great. Doug, I'm gonna stand 'cause I'm not 5'3", so I'm gonna stand. No, I have to give you that a hard time all the time. Welcome everyone to Region 16. We're so happy to have you here. This is exciting for many reasons. We have wonderful partners and it's really just the hope that comes for the Panhandle when you talk about the system that we're putting in place and the work that we do. What is Region 16's part in that? If you don't know what an education service center is, like you said, we serve our region. You may not know that Region 16 was the very first education service center in the state of Texas. It was originally called the Panhandle Education Service Organization, the first of its kind, created the model.
The legislation thought it was so brilliant that they put 20 of them in place. We were not named number one, and I still protest that today. That work is truly about service. It's serving schools, serving the people in the serving in their communities, and making a difference for students and families. When this project came to my desk, we were talking about whether or not to get involved in this work. The reason there was a question is because this is not directly related to our mission. It's indirectly related to enable us to achieve our mission. That is the internet, the speed, the quality that we know is, is needed in our rural schools.
When we were talking about the impact, and we're gonna talk a lot more about that today, and a lot of 'em have talked about economic impact and of course just quality of life impact. What is on our mission is that it should not be a detriment to live in a small community. Every child deserves the best, and we believe that every day, and they can't get that if they can't access the same thing that every school in Dallas can access. Our students are brilliant, they're capable, and they're hungry, and they want access to the curriculum, the content, the opportunity. This is going to enable us to do that. Again, not for just what is available now, but what is available that we don't even know exists yet. Artificial intelligence, just virtual reality.
We have a lot of simulations and, and augmented courses that are available. We have available courses through universities that are free. The problem is the content is rich. It is video, it is real time. With our issues that we have, we have great internet providers now. They're doing great work in their communities. For our schools, they need it to be dedicated for the school so that there are no glitches, no latency, there's redundancy so that school can go on. You know, when you get, when you lose your internet, it's an inconvenience. When our teachers lose internet, they've got kindergartners to entertain for eight hours. It's a crisis. It's, it's important work. Our role in that is to be a convener of all of these people doing great work. We're getting it into our schools, and that's our goal.
Our goal is to make sure our schools can compete, our kids can compete to keep the Panhandle relevant, populated, and successful. That is our purpose. Thank you so much for being here today, and we're excited to share our data center with you.
The last person I wanted to introduce is my friend Michael Keough. He's the Chief Information Officer at Region 16. I was sitting in your office yesterday and I said, you graduated from WT with a bachelor's degree and then a master's degree in 2009. I said, what were you doing before that? He kind of explained what he was doing and he was working in an industry. You know, I think that that's important. I think that it's very important for us to all realize that, you know, a lot of us are gonna have multiple careers over our lives. I think this is one of the things that this system is gonna provide. It's gonna provide a robust system for people to be constantly educated.
I think the passion that Michael brings to this project and the dedication that he brings to the area is super important. I'm gonna let you explain your role and,
Many hats I wear. You know, Dr. Larkin talked about competitiveness, and the thing I wanted to kind of touch on was the competitive edge. Every business in this room, every city in this room understands competitive edge and what that means, but it looks different for all of us. Some of us are after stakeholders and building our stock prices. Others of us, in our case, our stakeholders are our students. What happens after the 12th grade? What happens after college? And where do they go and what do they do? In the panhandle of Texas, if you're here, you probably see that a lot of our kids leave and they don't come back. They stay in Dallas or Houston or Denver, Washington, somewhere else. I want our kids to stay here.
I want them to know that they have an opportunity here to have high-paying jobs. They have opportunities to learn essential skills in technology, and that we're doing the work to provide that. Our competitive edge and the way that we keep our kids and the way that we keep our communities thriving is that we allow opportunities for technology to come to this area that change the game for what kids can do. Not just now, not just for our seniors today, but I'm thinking for the fifth graders and all of our, and all of our schools today. What job are they gonna be doing? Bell Helicopter is planning their next helicopter for the fifth grade class. We have to plan for the infrastructure of the future, not the infrastructure of today. That is what we've been trying to do.
We made a very aggressive choice to switch from a provider model of internet to a collaborative model, removing all revenue from all sources of internet so that schools had the best possible option. Our schools that are on the consortium, you'll see a fiber consortium pamphlet in front of you. That consortium provides every school, about 52 of them, possibly more in the future, give them 10 gigs of resilient to semi-resilient internet, across the whole panhandle. What that means is that we have multiple loops of this fiber that FiberLight's putting in for us, about a $38 million project. When they put their investment in, significantly more. This creates a foundation. We started with that process saying we have to fix the connectivity problem for our students. As we started going through that, we got introduced to Duos.
We realized there were some other AI options that we could add with these data centers. Not only can we put in a data center to help lower latency, create disaster recovery solutions, enhance security for these schools, but we also have now a unique opportunity where schools that are connected to this network get a unique opportunity to take advantage of really expensive equipment. They get to be involved in, you'll see this NOC, this NOC Network Operations Center over here. Wouldn't it be cool if our kids at our remote schools have an option to participate in some form or fashion without violating our SOC 2 or anything like that, have the ability to participate in what it's like to manage a data center on an enterprise level? Wouldn't that be cool? They're not gonna have that opportunity otherwise.
They're not gonna have that at a local school, but they're gonna have that with the Region 16 as part of this consortium. What about if we had AI systems that are expensive? Living in this building and our students could learn to program those systems, learn to interact with those systems and do it securely, not on ChatGPT, not on some web-based software that we don't know where that information's going, but right here in the data center that the school districts own. Wouldn't that be pretty incredible? Opportunity they probably wouldn't get otherwise. What if we start delving into things like, and I love to say the word, but quantum networking, quantum computing? Are our small schools gonna get that opportunity? They're connected to us, they're connected to these data centers.
They're gonna have opportunities potentially to get access to those types of resources and learn those types of technologies. Those are the things of the future. When we think about Infrastructure 4.0, most communities around the area have internet. I've had people ask me, why are we doing this, this internet project and why are we doing these data centers? I have internet to my house, but it's different internet. The internet we're putting in specifically for the schools, but what's gonna happen intrinsically throughout the panhandle is extremely high speeds, future-ready. It's gonna help us deal with not only the opportunities of the future, but the challenges of the future too, where if we don't have this infrastructure in the panhandle, we're gonna be in trouble because other cities will have it, other communities will have it, and we'll be left behind.
The thing that I wanted to touch on too, because I get to be last, the collaborative group, the space of the Panhandle of Texas, the ability for us to join together with folks like the Amarillo Area Foundation, the City of Amarillo, City of Pampa, The RANGE, Duos, FiberLight, and there are so many more. I could sit there and kind of keep ticking 'em off. We all have different missions. We all have different ways of being competitive. We found ways to join together as a cohesive group to say this community matters and our students matter. The ability for them to grow, learn, and stay is one of the most important things we can do, not only now, but also in the future.
All right. Now we have some questions for the panel.
The first question is, how will this initiative enhance community wellbeing?
I think we could all answer that one, but I'll start obviously with the schools. That's one thing. Community wellbeing, and this goes back to your main points too, is it's not just education, but it's also healthcare. It's access. That is really the key to all of this is fair and good, quick, fast, reliable, but it's access that we currently don't have. Wellbeing is a myriad of things. It's not just a great education system or access to great healthcare. It's having great businesses in your community that contribute back to your community, that have people there that want to live in that community. That helps every business. It helps your churches, it helps your hospitals, your schools, your businesses, your construction. Every industry depends on people being there, wanting to live there and be successful and healthy.
Access to that is the biggest thing that I can say that helps the wellbeing beyond the things that first come to mind. And Doug, do you wanna add to that?
The other great thing, like I was saying earlier, when we drop a pod in the community, just, just alone, look at the mobile operator. Right now, a mobile operator has it, say they have 60 towers around this region. Your phone pings that tower, it hits fiber, it goes back to Dallas. Right now, they're limited on how much bandwidth they can give you and how quick the speeds are. When you bring this in, now the actual carriers, the T-Mobiles of the world will actually hit that tower and come 6-10 mi to this box and then shoot back to their core network or hit AWS, whatever their platform is. It makes it more efficient, no more pixeling on your phone, you know, when you're watching something on YouTube. That brings better connectivity.
What happens when you bring better, better connectivity, your phones work, all of a sudden now you have T-Mobile at home, hotspot, and you can work from home. That's a big issue we see and why we are deploying these because remote work is just as good as, as anything else. Procter & Gamble, prime example, I met with them in Cincinnati. They said, we like your pod idea and going to these tier four markets, tier three markets. We have a lot of talent out there that a lot of our workforce works from home, but they do not have the connectivity. We need them to move in closer to the cities. They want to know where we are deploying because that is going to help them recruit people because there are the right people in these communities. They just do not have the connectivity. It sounds crazy, but it is true.
If you don't have consistent connectivity at home, you're gonna, they're not gonna keep you. I mean, that's communication is key and getting access to their software and their platforms that they're running is key. Once you drop this pod, it creates an environment and it starts growing, starts spreading out, not only to mobile operators, it runs to the energy companies, it runs to manufacturing. One more example. In Georgia, there's a small town in Georgia where the university is, Statesboro, Georgia. That's considered a tier four market. There's a university there, but other than that, there's not much there. There's a long haul fiber going through there. We dropped the pod and guess what? Two huge companies came in there and built factories just because we started that process. Other carriers came in.
Now, it's Patrón Tequila builds their glass bottles there. That is employing like 900 people. It's ridiculous. Just little things like that, you don't see it, but it's actually working. It's working behind the scenes and doing this kind of stuff. We're real excited about it. That's really why our second mission is to deploy these because it does, it starts its own little nucleus, its own little virus basically. It's great in a good way.
I'm gonna add just a quick note on that. In order to enhance, you know, it brings a lot of businesses. We worked with good friends down at Deep East Texas Council of Governments, and they had, they've been competing, we're competing with Alabama for a huge manufacturing plant. They could offer 'em all kinds of incentives, but you know what the number one thing was? It was the internet issue, was the connectivity issue. They wanted to have connectivity back. That's important. If you're gonna draw big businesses to some of these cities around, Amarillo may have it, but does CityLine, does Stratford, does Perryton, do they have the ability in Pampa before we came in? Could Pampa provide those for large businesses? Those are great jobs.
You create jobs and you can add onto the schools, the schools will grow. That is what we are trying to do.
Continuing to add that I've been doing fiber now for nine years. Didn't know I'd be doing that for my career, but apparently I've been doing that. Duos, Canyon. Now we decided, let's just hit every city. A lot of the testimonies I've heard, one, in several cities actually, where the land is cheap, the community is great. We had all the boxes checked for why a company would want to come into a small community. I've heard this three or four times. The company starts that process and realizes the connectivity is not what they need to run their business effectively. They leave that community where that could have been a business.
I know of one that's a fairly large one that a community missed a great economic impact just because the fiber was not what they needed to run a fully sustainable business. This is gonna solve a lot of that problem. The other part is access to secure and reliable data. These data centers are gonna provide that, the ability to have that SOC 2 compliance, have that disaster recovery and security operations. These type of things also build the workforce. Those are the three components I see the most: the connectivity, the data, and the workforce. If you can hit those two, you're gonna start building workforce that actually improves the ability for businesses to come here and want to stay here.
Okay. My next question, I want to kind of point to Chuck and to Ron, but just talking about these data centers, these large data centers and these small data centers, what type of educational programs do we need to set up?