Tesh Durvasula is a digital infrastructure and data center industry veteran with more than 25 years of experience across development, finance, sales, marketing, and real estate. He has previously served in a broad range of leadership and value creation roles, including most recently as CEO of Africa Data Centres. Prior to that leadership position, he spent close to a decade at CyrusOne, where he rose to become President and CEO.
What is the significance of Atlantic Convergence 2024 to you?
The Pan-Atlantic region involves high numbers: You’ve got 1.4 billion people in Africa, roughly 450 to 500 million in Europe, 350 to 400 million in North America, and 400 million in South America. So, this conference represents the interest of literally billions of people—half the world’s population. Likewise, from a GDP perspective, you probably also have nearly all of the top 50 GDP-producing countries represented in this conference. From a macro level, that means the event brings together many leaders in the digital economy. If you think about what that digital economy takes, it’s connectivity, compute, and talent. This event has all major carriers, many compute, and storage providers, and hundreds of universities and institutions from four continents.
Looking at the industry’s evolution, it was first about connectivity. Most data centers were around heavily interconnected areas. Then it became about mobility, then cloud computing, and now AI. So, if you take all of those four verticals—interconnection, mobility, cloud, and AI—it’s driving growth in astronomical proportions, and we’re seeing it from all angles. All of these things are converging, and this event brings these things together and explores the continuing evolution of this industry.
How does AtlasEdge fit into the overall interconnection ecosystem model, which encompasses the convergence of subsea and terrestrial fiber, subsea cables, neutral IX, and data centers?
As a data center provider, we have a strong element of network and convergence built into what we do. We serve 800+ customers across 23 data centers connected to more than 70 on-net carriers. We draw on our distributed data center portfolio to bring digital infrastructure closer to the end users and allow customers to plan and shape their technology and network infrastructure.
Specifically with respect to the themes of this event, we are strategically focusing on the ‘non-FLAP markets’ – or what we call the ‘next wave of markets’ – with a particular emphasis on the DACH region and the Iberia region, which of course includes Lisbon – the host of Atlantic Convergence. These upcoming markets are going to dominate the next 15 years of the digital economy.
What do you expect from Atlantic Convergence 2025?
This event already has a lot going for it: It’s at a good time of the year, Lisbon is a beautiful city, and the organizers have the support of all the municipalities. Leading up to the inaugural event, I spent time meeting with ambassadors, presidents of commerce, and representatives of different regions of Lisbon, and it’s fantastic how commercially minded they are and how much they want to support growth, not only in digital infrastructure, but also in universities and STEM education. So, I think this event will be a fantastic conference for the years to come.
