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The Cascade

The Cascade

Written by: Omid Razbani
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Every week, a story from the news. Every story, a system hiding underneath it. The Cascade is a podcast about the hidden complexity of the world we live in — infrastructure, technology, society, and how they shape each other in ways we rarely see coming. Hosted by Omid Razbani, an associate professor in systems engineering, each episode takes one real event and unpacks the deeper logic behind it. Because things don't just break. They cascade.© 2026 The Cascade Science
Episodes
  • Episode 1: When the Cloud Meets the Grid

    Episode 1: When the Cloud Meets the Grid
    May 23 2026

    We think of the internet as weightless — cloud storage, streaming, AI tools floating somewhere in the digital ether. But behind every search, every prompt, every uploaded file, there is a very large building, full of machines, drawing enormous amounts of electricity from a grid that was never designed for them.

    In this episode, we look at a recent emergency order in the United States that gave grid operators the authority to cut power to data centers to prevent blackouts — and what that signal tells us about the collision between two infrastructures built on completely different logics.

    We cover why the electricity grid and the data center industry are on a collision course, what systems thinking reveals about how this happens, and why this story is just as relevant in Norway, Ireland, Sweden, and anywhere else the global AI buildout is landing.

    Concepts covered: tight coupling, mismatched tempos, hidden dependencies, suboptimization.
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    18 mins
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