
CEOs play a pivotal role in the world of data centres, in shaping the strategies and driving the growth of their companies. These ten data centre leaders are at the front of technological innovation, by ensuring that their facilities meet the increasing demands for data storage, processing and security. This list highlights the expertise that these top executives bring to their companies and how they are guiding the global data centre industry towards greater efficiency, sustainability and customer satisfaction.
10. Makoto Takahashi, President, KDDI / Telehouse
Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan
Revenue: US$45bn
Telehouse is a major carrier-neutral colocation, information and communications technology services provider. The company currently provides services across its 45 data centres in countries across the US, Europe and APAC. Telehouse’s data centres span 560,000 square metres with ~900 MVA of power capacity. President Makoto Takahashi leads them all, since becoming President in 2018. Takahashi has also been SVP and Member of the Board since 2007. He has held other roles including Executive Vice President, General Manager for Value Business Sector and Corporate Strategy Planning Division and Senior Vice President, General Manager for Group Strategy Sector.
9. William Wei Huang, GDS Holdings
Headquarters: Shanghai, China
Revenue: US$1.4bn
William Wei Huang is the Founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors and since 2002, the CEO of GDS Holdings.
GDS Holdings Limited is a leading developer and operator of high-performance data centres in The People’s Republic of China. The company's facilities are strategically located in China's primary economic hubs where demand for high-performance data centre services is concentrated. The company offers colocation, managed hosting and managed cloud services. Previously, he worked as a Director of Haitong-Fortis Private Equity Fund Management.
8. Eric Schwartz, CyrusOne
Headquarters: Dallas, Texas, USA
Revenue: US$1.2bn
Eric is responsible for leading CyrusOne’s strategy and driving growth across the company, including the development of strategic partnerships.
Over almost 17 years, Eric held a range of senior-level roles, including President of the EMEA region, where the company built its market-leading position through investment and acquisitions. Eric was recognised as European Data Center Industry Leader of the year in 2015.
Prior to Equinix, Eric held a number of senior-level roles at BellSouth, Trammell Crow Company, Harold A. Dawson Company and McKinsey & Co. Eric earned an MBA from Harvard Business School and a B.S. in electrical engineering and a B.A. in economics from Stanford University.
7. Abhijit Dubey, NTT Global Data Centers
Headquarters: Tokyo, Japan
Revenue: US$29bn
Abhijit Dubey is the CEO of NTT DATA, Inc. and a member of the advisory board of NTT Venture Capital. With over 20 years of experience in the technology and management consulting industries, Abhijit joined NTT in 2021, after a run as Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company.
Originally from India, Abhijit lives in London with his family and holds an M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University and a B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay.
6. Andrew Power, Digital Realty
Headquarters: Austin, Texas, USA
Revenue: US$4bn
Andrew Power has served as a member of the Board of Directors of Digital Realty since 2022, worked as Digital Realty’s President since 2021 and as Chief Financial Officer since 2015. Over the course of his career, he has been responsible for global portfolio operations, technology development and innovation, service provider and enterprise customer solutions, asset management and information technology, as well as the company’s financial functions across its global platform.
Andy also serves on the Board of Directors of Americold Realty Trust. He received a BA in Analytical Finance from Wake Forest University.
5. Adaire Fox-Martin, Equinix
Headquarters: Redwood City, California, USA
Revenue: US$8bn
Since June 2024, Adaire Fox-Martin has been the CEO and President of Equinix, where she leads the overall strategy and business direction. She has been a member of the Equinix Board of Directors since 2020. Adaire is a graduate of Trinity College in Dublin and has citizenship in Ireland, the EU and Australia.
Previously, she was the President of Go-to-Market for Google Cloud and Head of Google Ireland. In this role, she led Google Cloud's go-to-market teams globally, encompassing sales, professional services, partner ecosystem, and customer success. Before that, she had board-level positions at SAP and leadership roles at Oracle.
4. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta Platforms (Facebook)
Headquarters: Menlo Park, California, USA
Revenue: US$134bn
Mark Zuckerberg is the Founder, Chairman and CEO of Meta, which he originally founded as Facebook in 2004. Mark is responsible for leading the design of Meta's services and development of its core technology and infrastructure.
Meta Platforms (formerly Facebook) is not a data centre itself, it operates data centres as part of its infrastructure to support its online services and platforms, including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. Meta Platforms owns and operates a number of data centres globally to manage the massive amounts of data generated by its services:
- Facebook generates over 4 petabytes of data per day, from user interactions, to photos, videos and messages.
- Instagram generates around 95m photos and videos daily
- WhatsApp handles over 100bn messages per day.
Mark studied computer science at Harvard University before moving the company to Palo Alto, California.
3. Thomas Kurian, Google Cloud Platform (GCP)
Headquarters: Mountain View, California, USA
Revenue: US$9.2bn
Thomas Kurian joined the Google Cloud team in 2019, on a mission is to accelerate organisations' ability to digitally transform their business with the best infrastructure, platform, industry solutions and expertise.
The Google Cloud Platform offers organisations services ranging from machine learning to data analytics and of course, storage. The platform includes Google workspace and public cloud infrastructure. Google Cloud is focused on lowering its environmental impact through energy-efficient data centres, carbon offset programmes and sustainable practices. GCP enables customers to run their workloads on a green and environmentally responsible platform.
2. Satya Nadella, Microsoft Azure
Headquarters: Redmond, Washington, USA
Revenue: US$25bn
Satya Nadella is the Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, a position he has held since 2014. Satya has also had leadership roles in both enterprise and consumer businesses across the company. Joining Microsoft in 1992, he became known as a leader who could transform some of Microsoft’s biggest products.
AWS offers users a private cloud solution - AWS Outposts. This offers AWS users the infrastructure, services and tools for customer premises or co-location spaces. It allows customers to run AWS infrastructure locally, using the same hardware and software infrastructure as in AWS data centres.
Originally from Hyderabad, India, Nadella lives in Bellevue, Washington, with his family. He has a BA in Electrical Engineering from Mangalore University, one Master’s degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee and a second Master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago, where he also serves on the board of trustees to his alma mater the University of Chicago.
1. Matt Garman, CEO, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Headquarters: Seattle, Washington, USA
Revenue: US$24bn
In 2005, Matt Garman chose Amazon Web Services for his summer internship. Two decades later and he is leading the company.
A prominent data centre company, AWS’ cloud computing allows the ability to leverage a new business model and turn capital infrastructure expenses into variable costs. AWS has grown to be able to reduce costs, become more agile and innovate faster. With data centre locations in the US, Europe, Singapore, and Japan, customers across all industries can take advantage of AWS’ low cost, elastic, open and flexible, secure platform. Notable AWS customers include NASA and Netflix.
Delivering secure and operationally excellent services for AWS’s customers is, and will always be, AWS’ top priority.
“Our customers are not simply using AWS as a ‘nice-to-have’. They’re literally trusting us with their critical business operations, with their most important data, and with how they serve their own customers,” says Matt.
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