While AI might seem abstract, something that lives in "the cloud" is concrete. The AI applications we use every day run on GPUs in physical buildings, and Mark Houpt secures them. As Chief Information Security Officer at DataBank, he's watched those data centers go from anonymous warehouses to national security targets almost overnight.

Mark joins hosts Johnny Hand and Dustin Childs to make the case that the AI era is, at its core, a physical security problem, and why the security fundamentals you already know still work, even when applied to threats that didn't exist two years ago.

You'll learn:

• How GPU scarcity and government export controls turned ordinary data centers into national security targets

  
  



• How the data center threat map has evolved - from employee badge slip-ups to nation-states, “laptop farm” fraud, and foreign-backed activism 

  
  



• Why compartmentalization is back at the center of the cybersecurity playbook, including the individual disk and the cage. 

  
  

Why stick around:

Mark hands you a working checklist for securing AI at the physical layer: how it’s being targeted, who's coming for it, and what to do about it.

Episode resources:

• The AI Security Playbook (for Tech, Media & Communications) 

  
  



• DataBank website

  
  



• Mark Houpt on LinkedIn 

  
  



• Dustin Childs on LinkedIn

  
  



• Johnny Hand on LinkedIn

  
  



• TrendAI on LinkedIn

  
  

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