Scaling With Intention And Innovation
How EdgeConneX is continuing to put its customers, its people, and the planet first
When you first started EdgeConneX, you were selling kilowatts to support content providers, then you progressed to selling megawatts to support cloud service providers, and now you’re selling gigawatts to support AI service providers. What has remained the same, and what has changed over the last 15 years operating EdgeConneX?
What has remained the same and will always remain the same is a relentless focus on customers—they are at the heart of everything we do. The scale in which we do that for them has certainly changed, but it’s always about giving the customer what they want, where they want, and when they want capacity. Meanwhile, making sure we recruit the best talent and then take care of those employees who take care of our customers is also essential. The culture at EdgeConneX is critical, and I’m incredibly proud of what the teams around the world have accomplished. And lastly, building out our global data center platform in the most sustainable way possible. Our Customers, Our People and the Planet: Those three pillars form the core of our focus and mission at EdgeConneX, and while the scale and speed of our business have certainly changed, those pillars have not over the last 15 years.
When EdgeConneX was acquired by EQT, you stated that the firm brings significant financial resources and digital infrastructure industry experience that EdgeConneX can use to accelerate growth. Can you share with us how that journey has been and what this partnership has helped EdgeConneX achieve so far?
This partnership has been absolutely outstanding and has served as a critical catalyst for our tremendous growth over the last five years. EQT has certainly invested significant capital, but even more importantly, they’re extremely savvy in digital infrastructure, power, fiber, and sustainability. Right after EQT acquired us, they challenged us to think even bigger; they asked, “Tell us what you can do if we put no restrictions on your capital needs. Tell us how you’d prioritize and where you’d invest.” So, when they first bought us, we could create a five-year plan that was greatly accelerated from any plan we had ever put together.
In addition to agreeing with us on what strategic bets we needed to make in terms of certain markets to add to our global platform—what would be flagships and where we needed to be ready based on what our customers or the market was indicating—they also said go invest today for growth tomorrow. They knew how to look to the future and invest in it, so that, as we stand here today, we have over 90 data centers across more than 25 markets.
Now that we’ve entered the AI era, combine that forward-thinking approach with their power infrastructure capabilities—whether it’s renewable energy, behind-the-meter onsite generation, microgrids, or battery storage technologies and solutions—we’re really able to bring a power-first strategy and integrated delivery to our customers. In a capital and power-constrained world, this collaboration enables us to create an integrated offering that meets the speed and scale our customers require to support their AI factories.
EdgeConneX is known for its customer-centric approach to capacity, configurations, markets, and deployment timings. How has that approach informed your expansion over the last five years since working with EQT Partners, and where do you anticipate it will take you moving into the future?
That customer-first approach and focus helped us enter challenging markets, particularly in Asia. Our joint venture in India and our move into Southeast Asia have worked out really well so far. Simultaneously, we’ve been able to expand into more geographies across Europe, where the partnership with EQT has been especially valuable. In the first year after they bought us, they supported and accelerated our land-and-power banking strategy.
A couple years into the partnership, it became very clear that AI was going to dramatically change things (certainly in the last 12 to 18 months), and they were there to support the expansion of those campus strategies to be larger to support the need for AI factories. You can see that in some of our large North American campuses, which require unique power solutions.
Our customer-centric focus is about both build-to-suit and build-to-density. Our AI-enabled data center solution called Ingenuity allows customers the peace of mind that we can support today’s requirements, both cloud and AI, and also scale up to meet tomorrow’s densities, which will surpass 1MW per rack. Funny enough, our original Edge data centers weren’t much bigger than the densities that these racks will soon reach. Meanwhile, in the near term, we will make fewer but much bigger bets. We will be focused on building out gigawatt campuses in key AI hubs around the world.
They knew that if we listened to the customers, we’d be able to put land and power banks where they needed to go. That’s also when the power challenges became very clear, and that’s when we pulled in the rest of the portfolio to help.
Innovation has also been a key part of EdgeConneX success over the years. From going to the edge and filling a much-needed void in the market to spinning out an EV charging business called Voltera, in what ways is EdgeConneX solving the challenges to deliver AI factories at the speed and scale required by service providers?
Innovation and entrepreneurial spirit are part of our cultural norms. We founded EdgeConneX to meet our customers’ needs, with a focus on solving their challenges in innovative ways. Over the past 15+ years, we’ve embraced that innovative spirit in all aspects of our operations, whether it’s operating the first unmanned, remotely managed edge data centers, or when a decade ago we were one of the first ones to recognize that in some markets data centers were going to be required to bring their own power to help with the grid challenges.
We spun out a wholesale EV fleet charging business called Voltera based on an innovative solution we developed in the Phoenix market. Voltera was conceived in 2018 on the realization that transport electrification at scale requires the same core competencies as data center development—namely, the ability to source land and power where the customer needs it. Hence, Voltera, also backed by EQT, now takes on the tough challenges of developing and operating EV charging infrastructure to enable fleets to succeed at scale with zero-emission vehicles.
We recently launched Ingenuity, our AI-enabled data center platform. We developed Ingenuity in close collaboration with our AI and hyperscale customers, partners and supplier ecosystem.
Like a backplane in circuitry, our AI-enabled data center serves as a foundation upon which AI deployments can run. The design is flexible to support a range of cooling technologies, which allows for evolving density requirements as technologies change over time. Meanwhile, we not only enable AI, but we also leverage AI to help more sustainably power our facilities. We leveraged AI-based, carbon-free energy models to help advance not only our company but also our customers. We aim to serve as a model for the industry, demonstrating how to operate as efficiently as possible.
Today, you see us doing more and more sophisticated front-of-the-meter and behind-the-meter power solutions. So, it’s part of our ethos and part of how we continue to differentiate. Give us the complex problems—those are the ones we try to solve for our customers.
Another aspect of EdgeConneX’s ethos is that AI and sustainability don’t have to be mutually exclusive. How are you balancing sustainability targets with meeting the demands of AI-related growth?
At EdgeConneX, AI and sustainability can work hand in hand to drive innovation and environmental stewardship. Balancing sustainability targets with the demands of AI-related growth is at the core of our strategy, and we’ve built a model that proves it’s possible to achieve both. We start with getting it right at the unit level. We make sure our unit economics around sustainability are constantly improving, and then we put ourselves on a path to continue that. We have been scope one and two carbon-neutral for years now. We did some work to try to do 24/7 offsetting. We looked at using AI technology to examine predicted weather patterns, pricing trends, and more. We were then able to use that data in such a way that, with an interesting technology partnership, we got to north of 80 percent hour-to-hour offsetting, and actually the price of power went down by almost one cent per kilowatt hour. We’ve also always been cognizant, and I would say religious, about water usage as well. Water is a precious commodity in much of the world, including many states in the US. We believe we need to meet AI demands in a water-neutral or no water usage way. So, you see us relentlessly focused on that, too.
The solution isn’t just one thing. We were some of the first to adopt science-based measurements. We were one of the first to start partnering with hyperscalers to attack scope three issues. We continue to publish our results each year and make them publicly available. The problems get harder, and the impacts get harder, but I think we’re continuing to make progress.
Thinking of where and how EdgeConneX might be building at scale next, what new markets do you have your eye on, and why?
I have my ears on my customer in terms of where we can make the biggest difference. As the next generation of cloud adoption happens, as you see AI making its way as a cloud service, and as you see other enterprise AI and agentic AI use cases become larger components of what our customers’ offer, I think you’ll see us making fewer new market entries but bigger bets.
As of now, we’re in the Americas, EMEA, and APAC, and we’re pretty good on where we need to be there. When our customers are looking for solutions to hard problems, we’ll be standing there offering to help and create value any way we can, and hopefully they trust us to tackle those challenges.
Looking more broadly at the digital infrastructure industry, what message do you have for other leaders in this space about how we can all work together for the betterment of our collective digital and data-driven society?
We need to be cognizant of the amount of negative press that data centers are getting while understanding how data centers enable a great economy—and work arm-in-arm to consider community needs and educate better on the jobs we create. As a data center, we have the opportunity to generate a lot of tax dollars, and we need to ask what that can do for local projects in charities, education, public safety, and youth programs. As an industry, we do a lot for society, but we often do a horrible job of explaining it. Putting the community in which we’re building first will help us create a better mutual understanding based in facts rather than defensiveness.
We likewise need to recognize the importance of designing, building, and operating this infrastructure in a sustainable way. If we’re using resources, we need to replenish them or pay our fair share—we can’t be saddling our communities with a power bill that’s higher than it was going to be without us.
ABOUT RANDY BROUCKMAN
Randy Brouckman has over 30 years of experience in telecommunications, software and data centers. Prior to leading EdgeConneX, he was Partner and Entrepreneur in Residence at TDF Ventures. Brouckman also served as CTO, COO, and CEO at several successful public and private enterprises, including BSG Clearing Solutions, Telispark, Wireless World Solutions, and Iridium. Previously, he worked with Nextel to start and lead its Nextel Ventures division and began his career with Bellcore, where he eventually became Executive Director of Network Operations Systems. In 2025, Brouckman was named as CEO of the Year by TMT Finance, and in 2024 he earned the NVTC 2024 Sustainable Champion Award. In 2023, he was named The Tech Capital Global Digital Infrastructure Leader and also featured on the inaugural iteration of InterGlobix Magazine’s Titans list. He is also an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2014 Award Winner.
