By Lance Ware, Founder, DEC LLC
Sometimes the biggest opportunities reveal themselves through the smallest communities.
Five years ago, I started asking a simple question: why does Catalina Island—home to 4,000 year-round residents and over a million tourists annually, just 22 miles off the California coast—still depend on aging copper lines and limited microwave links for its connectivity? The answer led me to found AVX Networks, a California telephone corporation now building a redundant submarine fiber cable system connecting Catalina to Huntington Beach, creating resilient infrastructure that serves both communities.
What began as a telecommunications project quickly became something more. Catalina Island Health, the island’s sole healthcare provider, operates with the same infrastructure constraints as everyone else. When your only hospital relies on legacy connectivity for telehealth, electronic records, and emergency coordination with mainland facilities, bandwidth isn’t a convenience—it’s a lifeline. Solving connectivity and enabling modern healthcare became inseparable missions.
This month, the California Public Utilities Commission approved a $37.5 million federal grant to complete our submarine cable system and fiber buildout across the island. The funding validates what we’ve long believed: underserved communities deserve infrastructure investment, and the private sector can deliver it efficiently when regulatory frameworks align.
But Catalina also taught me something else. The infrastructure gaps I encountered on one island exist at national scale. As artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and electrification reshape our economy, America faces a fundamental shortage of data center capacity—and the power infrastructure to support it.
That realization led to Ark Genesis Infrastructure Corp.
Through DEC LLC, I’m now developing next-generation data center infrastructure designed for the demands ahead. We’re positioning for the Department of Energy’s Genesis Program and other federal initiatives aimed at expanding domestic compute capacity and strengthening national security. Our approach spans three domains: Ark Terra for terrestrial facilities ready for immediate deployment, offshore platforms leveraging existing energy infrastructure, and a long-term vision for distributed computing in space. Each domain addresses different constraints—land availability, cooling efficiency, latency requirements—while sharing common engineering and regulatory frameworks.
Island economies taught me to think differently about resources. When everything arrives by boat or plane, you learn to maximize every input and find value in every output. That mindset shapes how we design facilities today: waste heat becomes feedstock for adjacent industrial processes, shared sites support multiple supply chains critical to both economic competitiveness and national defense, and efficiency isn’t an afterthought—it’s the architecture.
A submarine cable project and utility-scale data centers have more in common than you’d expect: both require navigating complex regulatory environments and maintaining focus on the communities these systems ultimately serve.
Infrastructure isn’t abstract. It’s the connection that lets a patient on Catalina video-call her cardiologist on the mainland. It’s the compute capacity training AI models that transform medicine and manufacturing. It’s the foundation everything else depends on.
At DEC LLC, we build that foundation—from island communities to national scale.
Lance Ware is the founder of DEC LLC and its portfolio companies including AVX Networks and Ark Genesis Infrastructure Corp. He can be reached at lance@ware.net.