Vantage Data Centers Welcomes Emily Friedberg as CTIO

Vantage Data Centers, a provider of hyperscale data centre campuses, has welcomed Emily Friedberg to its global leadership team as inaugural Chief Technology & Innovation Officer (CTIO). Emily has 25 years of experience in business leadership and a proven record for building high-value results in her past roles.

At Vantage Data Centres, she will be responsible for the development and engineering across technology and systems, cybersecurity and sustainability. 

Vantage Data Centers’ Emily Friedberg as CTIO to drive technological innovation

Vantage was first launched by Silver Lake in 2010, as a data centre campus on a former Intel site in Santa Clara, California. Digital Bridge later acquired Vantage in 2017 and has been a key strategy partner ever since. Vantage now has 32 operational or developing hyperscale data centre campuses worldwide, which is why we featured Vantage Data Centres in our ‘Top 10 Largest Data Centres in Europe’. 

Emily has spent her career working for global technology companies, as well as with venture-backed startups. Before joining Vantage, she was Chief Operating Officer at SkySafe, a drone software as a service company. In that role, she led sales, marketing, product and operations teams. At Fastly, a provider of global edge cloud platforms, she served as Global Vice President of Channel and Partnerships. 

Now, as Vantage’s CTIO, Emily will use these experiences to lead Vantage’s technological innovation and sustainability strategy, in addition to ensuring alignment between Vantage and environmental goals and market needs.

Emily will also lead the company’s efforts to implement new technologies, as well as assessing their potential impact on Vantage’s business model within today’s competitive landscape. She is based at Vantage’s corporate headquarters in Denver.

“As part of Vantage’s global expansion, we have deepened our global leadership over the past few years with a number of new C-level positions, including our CISO and now our CTIO,” said Jeff Tench, Vantage’s Executive Vice President, North America and APAC, whom Emily will report to. “We are thrilled to add Emily to our team to shape the role of the CTIO and are confident that her vision and expertise will guide us through a period of rapid technological evolution and company growth.”

Emily said that she was honoured to fill this critical role and join the decorated leadership team which is dedicated to providing high-quality results for our global customers and employees.

“As today’s technological landscape evolves at a rapid pace and advancements like generative AI fuel unprecedented demand, I’m looking forward to drawing from my experience driving market innovation and scale to help Vantage continue growing its position as an industry leader in advanced data centre development,” she said.

Vantage Data Centers expands across Europe

Besides hiring new employees, Vantage Data Centres has been growing across Europe since securing US$2.67bn in funding in October 2023. The company already has a presence in Wales after it bought Next Generation Data, which runs a campus outside Cardiff and a site in Newport, in 2020. Microsoft Azure is a major tenant at the Newport facility and in 2021, Vantage received planning permission for a new 80MW data centre at the Newport site.

Vantage Data Centers has announced its arrival in the Irish market, with a €1bn (US$1,072.bn) investment for the development of a multi-phase data centre campus, to create one of the largest data centre markets in the European continent. 

The Ireland campus will be close to Dublin City Centre, an area populated with other data centres. It will consist of two facilities, one 32MW and one 20MW, with the available land and power to add an additional facility later on. The two facilities are being built in alignment with Vantage’s sustainable blueprint, which will deliver an annualised Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of 1.2, using almost no water for cooling. 

Elsewhere at the company, we chose Robbie Mcghie, SVP Construction (Europe) at Vantage Data Centers in our Top 10: Construction Leaders in the Data Centre Industry. As a driven and dedicated professional with plenty of experience within the European data centre industry, Robbie Mcghie has worked with Vantage Data Centers as Senior Vice President of Construction since 2020. In his role, he is responsible for delivering new data centres across all active European markets on time, within budget and without compromising quality and safety. Prior to his current role, Mcghie worked as Chief Technical Officer for VIRTUS Data Centres and Operations Director for CE Colo/GTS Central Europe.

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