On key responsibilities at EdgeConneX:
At a top level, as you might guess from my title, I develop and execute the company’s marketing and product strategies and surrounding ecosystems. However, I’m also heavily involved in driving the company’s community engagement programs, particularly with respect to launching education programs related to AI literacy and digital infrastructure for the youth and the next generation in the data center workforce.
On the EdgeConneX education program:
While we continue to collaborate with organizations like the iMasons to develop and support education programs linked to trade schools, community colleges and universities, EdgeConnex specifically launched a new education initiative aimed at inspiring and equipping K-12 students with the necessary skills to thrive in the digital economy. We collaborated with the Duke of Edinburgh Award and HelloWorld CS in order to get access to hundreds of schools and have a customized and certified curriculum we could provide to schools immediately. Within months of launching the partnership, we have already signed on nearly 40 schools that reach over 15,000 students in Atlanta, Georgia, Newark, New Jersey, and Bastrop Country, south of Austin, Texas. Our goal is to continue to expand to dozens of more communities and schools in 2026 and my big audacious goal is to take this program globally and reach a million students by 2030! With this program we’re not just talking about bridging the AI talent gap: We are actively building the pathways that will empower students to become the digital infrastructure leaders of tomorrow. This initiative represents a long-term commitment to our communities and to ensuring we grow and support talent from the ground up.
On developing product positioning:
Our product development and marketing—really every aspect of our business—is built around responding directly to customer needs. In this ever-changeable and frequently evolving digital climate, that means creating infrastructure that is flexible enough to support a wide range of use cases. That is why we launched Ingenuity, our AI-enabled data center offering. We developed Ingenuity in close collaboration with our AI and hyperscale customers, partners and supplier ecosystem. It is a Built to Suit, Designed for AI data center solution. The design is flexible to support a range of cooling technologies, which allows for evolving density requirements as technologies change over time. It’s adaptable to support future densities in a cost-effective manner as compute technologies evolve. Together, flexibility and adaptability mean the data center is future-proofed to protect customer’s investment in AI servers and equipment.
On building sustainability into every aspect of the business:
Another big part of our strategy surrounds positioning sustainability and related innovation as core components of our product narrative—it’s not just an add-on; it’s an integral part of how we develop and position our products and services. We look at sustainability holistically, which means we don’t just focus on energy: We also consider water, materials, and people—any environmental factors—and embed them into product planning. It’s also important that we are transparent with our goals and our performance. Overall, the industry needs to do a better job of explaining the benefits data centers provide from the applications that we enable in our facilities. Every individual and every corporation benefits from the IoT, cloud, or AI applications running in our sites. From the farmer who can get higher yields from their crops while using less water, to the e-commerce site that can more route the delivery of products faster to homes while using less fuel, to hospitals that can better treat patients and find cures to diseases, the list goes on and on. In addition, we should remind folks that during Covid, our kids wouldn’t have been able to continue learning, or we continue working, or continue escaping reality with streaming or gaming services. Data centers were vital to life, school, work, and entertainment continuing while we isolated in our homes.While many our claiming the evils of data centers, we need to do a much better job promoting the facts and the benefits of data centers in general.
On what “race to scale” means and how you get there:
In order to enable AI factories for today and tomorrow, you’ve got to consider both speed and scale. What specifically are the customers’ needs? Can you deliver the capacity in 12 to 18 months? Can you deliver gigawatts in multiple markets around the world? How do you do that? These are the questions we ask continually as we’re considering our next steps. We’ve always been on the forefront of innovation, so now it’s just about making it happen on a massive scale. We like to think of it as build to suit and built to scale—meaning infrastructure is designed from the outset to grow with the customer and market demand. However, one important caveat is that speed can’t come at the expense of reliability, safety, and sustainability. We want to be flexible, adaptable, and ready, but we also need to maintain high operational standards.
ABOUT PHILLIP MARANGELLA
Phillip Marangella brings significant expertise to his role, drawing on 25 years of experience in international marketing, strategy, and business development across the data center, telecom, and technology sectors.
In addition to his work with EdgeConneX, Marangella serves on the advisory boards for Lokker and Accelsius and is actively involved with the Data Center Coalition, Infrastructure Masons, and the Duke of Edinburgh Award Program. His leadership has earned him several accolades, including the PTC’23 Outstanding Diversity and Inclusion Champion Award for developing and mentoring HBCU Capstone Programs and the Datacloud Global Agent of Change Award in 2023. In addition, Marangella was honored at the Infrastructure Masons Champion Awards for Diversity, Inclusion, and Education in 2021 and was recognized by Data Centre Magazine as a top-ten marketing executive. Before joining EdgeConneX, Marangella held key roles at companies like Equinix, Coresite, Verizon Business, MCI, Nortel, Globalstar, and Satphone. He also co-founded a tech consulting firm focused on international technology transfer and venture funding of university-developed technology.
