Unifying Our Voice

I started Infrastructure Masons (iMasons) in 2016 with a simple mission. Unite the builders of the age. I wanted to create a platform that allows professionals in our industry to connect, grow and give back. We left our companies at the door and came together as individuals to compound our impact and help shape our industry. Conversely, what we would build together was still unknown. What we did know was that we wanted to create a community that united the builders of the digital age on a greater digital future.

Nearly a decade into this journey, one “how” is clearer.  iMasons aggregates knowledge from our members on key trends, challenges and opportunities to provide an independent perspective on the policies and decisions that are shaping the digital future.  iMasons has become an independent voice for the digital infrastructure industry.

The reach and impact of iMasons has grown organically over time, from the formation of member focus groups and strategic alliances that address key industry needs to the launch of initiatives, coalitions and, partnerships to drive change and impact across the industry. As our members gathered in workgroups, workshops and summits to discuss these various workstreams, I saw a sea of industry knowledge that could be harnessed, aggregated and packaged into reports and presentations about our industry. This knowledge, in turn, is proving to be a critical resource as policy and decision makers come to iMasons for insight and direction.

Today, as iMasons approaches its 10th anniversary, it is clear to me that iMasons should play a role as an influencer in the arenas of public policy and perception. Our members, and our industry, are asking for our support to lay the foundation for a greater digital future. That said, I want to distinguish the influence that iMasons has as a voice for the industry from organizations that are paid to advocate for a specific company, or group of companies, for a specific outcome. iMasons does not act as a paid lobbyist for specific companies for specific outcomes.

When iMasons started, our industry happily existed in the shadows of obscurity and technical complexity that marketers abstracted away as “cyberspace” and “the cloud.” Only in more recent years did digital infrastructure, and more specifically data centers, gain widespread recognition and notoriety as the enabler of AI. In the span of nine years, the infrastructure we build has become bigger and more noticeable and our membership has grown too. Today, iMasons has 6,000 individuals that collectively represent more than 1.5 trillion USD in infrastructure projects across 130 countries. The aggregate knowledge of the people who built this infrastructure can and should influence the path forward.

FINDING A VOICE

Soon after iMasons launched, the industry’s stark gender gap was on full display. Mercy Manning, a long-time industry executive, approached me with the concept of a dedicated group to support women in the industry. The result was iMWomen which has grown into our largest and most impactful member focus group. iMWomen is helping increase the number of women pursuing careers in our industry as well as increasing the visibility and advancement of women currently in the industry. Today, the impact of iMWomen is felt at industry conferences around the world and seen in the growing presence of women in senior leadership positions across the industry. Their success validated my belief in the power of uniting our industry for a greater and more inclusive digital future.

A few years after iMWomen’s successful launch, I met with Lee Kirby, who co-founded Salute, a data center services company that helps address our industry’s talent gap by recruiting and training military veterans for jobs. I immediately saw how iMasons could compound Salute’s impact on addressing the talent gap through a strategic alliance focused on bringing more military veterans and their spouses into our industry. We worked with Lee to establish the iMasons Armed Forces Member Focus Group, the first of several strategic alliances that continue to extend the reach and influence of iMasons. This has turned into the second largest Member Focus Group driving tangible results in recruiting transitioning military talent and spouses.

CHEZ BELADY

In 2022, iMasons took a step further into the policy arena when the Advisory Council and invited guests gathered at industry veteran Christian Belady’s home near Seattle to discuss how the digital infrastructure industry can reduce its climate impact. At the time, individual companies had announced public commitments to achieve net zero carbon emissions by the middle of this century and had in place programs to calculate their carbon footprints, purchase renewable energy to power digital infrastructure, and invest in programs and technologies to reduce embodied carbon in materials and equipment. While these individual efforts showed leadership, the iMasons Advisory Council felt they were insufficient to move the needle on climate change. The gathering at Belady’s home, known in iMasons lore as Chez Belady, was premised on the idea that our community can do more. The meeting planted the seeds for the iMasons Climate Accord, which formally launched a few months later to drive decarbonization across materials, equipment, and power. For 2026, the iCA has expanded these key focus areas to include water.

An early sign of the influence that the iCA can have on the digital future came on April 18, 2023, with the release of an open letter and call to action for the use of greener concrete in data center infrastructure. While not a policy or standard, the push for greener concrete has rippled across the industry, showing the impact of industry-wide collaboration. January 9, 2024, the iCA established a strategic industry alliance with the Open Compute Project focused on carbon accounting to standardize carbon disclosure and create digital carbon labels for data center equipment. iCA’s 2nd open letter and call to action issued on July 16, 2024, for greater use of environmental product declarations, or EPDs, across the digital infrastructure industry’s supply chain. Today, iCA members report a significant uptick in EPDs from their suppliers, an indication that the demand signal was received and companies are taking steps to measure, report, and reduce their carbon footprints. A recent defining moment for the ICA was the release of the maturity model on February 12, 2025. It is a guide to help companies on the path of decarbonization across materials, equipment and power.

AGGREGATING PERSPECTIVE

By the middle of 2023, our industry was at the start of a post-pandemic growth spurt powered by the demand for generative AI. I began to ask our members gathered at meetings to share their top ten challenges to sustaining this pace of growth. I wanted to understand the issues that preoccupied our members so that we could address them together as an industry body. As the volume of top ten lists accumulated, I realized they contained the data for something bigger, a report on the state of our industry. On April 17, 2024, we released the first iMasons State of the Digital Infrastructure Industry Annual Report.

 The report is intended to provide a holistic picture of the importance of digital infrastructure and to guide strategic decisions about where, when and how digital infrastructure is built, operated and maintained. We defined the audience for the publicly available report as policy makers, economic development officers, investors, civic leaders and neighbors in the local communities where digital infrastructure is deployed. In other words, the content of the report is targeted at policy makers and decision makers. By the time of the inaugural report’s release, iMasons was assuming a role as a voice for the industry.

 The report identified four persistent challenges for members of the iMasons community: access to power; attracting and training people to work in the industry; the need to earn a positive public perception of the industry; and sustaining commitments to protect the planet amid accelerated industry growth. We called these challenges the four Ps – power, people, perception, and planet.

CHEZ KAVA

After the report’s release, my team and I began regular discussions with our members about how the iMasons community can collectively address these challenges. These conversations revealed a growing sense of urgency behind the perception challenge. Community push back against data center development threatened to thwart the industry’s growth. Our members felt that the reasons for the growing opposition seemed misinformed, even misguided. We wanted to engage with the communities to gather input, correct the narrative and change the perception of our industry. In response, we formed an industry workgroup to study the issue, dig into its root causes and craft a strategy for data centers to become accepted and active members of the communities where they are deployed. The goal of the strategy is to achieve economic, social and ecological balance with the local community. We call this concept the iMasons Social Accord, and know it requires direct engagement with community members, including public officials.

The workgroup’s desire to review and discuss the Social Accord strategy with the iMasons Advisory Council and invited guests set the stage for another “Chez” event, this one hosted by industry veteran Joe Kava in Saratoga, California, on March 5, 2025. The discussion at Chez Kava yielded consensus on the need for a Social Accord. It also showed how the digital infrastructure industry’s perception challenge is intertwined with the power challenge. Searching for solutions to both through parallel and complementary efforts meant the initiation of a new workstream on ways to address the power challenge.

CHEZ APPLEBY

Power again earned placement as the top challenge in the 2025 iMasons State of the Industry Report and proved to only grow in prominence after its release on April 28, 2025. iMasons members also identified the key constraint causing the power challenge: the growing delays in interconnecting data centers to the grid. Addressing this specific challenge was the focus of the next “Chez” event, hosted by industry veteran Jarrett Appleby in Northern Virginia on November 5, 2025. Chez Appleby brought together leaders from the digital infrastructure industry, utility regulators and power producers. A key learning from the regulatory agencies was the impact in regulatory filings of collective and collaborative input that demonstrates industry consensus. iMasons took this learning and ran with it, submitting comments on December 5, 2025, to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) on behalf of iMasons members showing consensus on issues related to proposed rules on the interconnection of large loads to the interstate transmission system.

This filing was a milestone in iMasons’ journey in becoming an industry voice in the arena of public policy. In parallel to the FERC filing, the US Department of Commerce reached out to iMasons seeking input on the American AI Exports Program. We shared this request with our community and offered to aggregate and submit comments under the umbrella of iMasons. This approach, allowed companies to remain anonymous but important input to be shared. I believe these actions give our members an alternative means to engage with policymakers on behalf of the wider industry.

P IS FOR POLICY

The 2025 iMasons State of the Industry Report identified the protection of data as a key industry challenge. Specifically, where digital infrastructure processes, stores, and transmits data. We called it the data protection challenge, or the fifth P. The protection challenge first came up in discussions about the concept of clean energy zones that iMasons introduced in the 2024 report. Clean Energy Zones are master planned towns or city-size areas developed around concentrated sources of clean energy to serve multiple industries including multi-tenant data center complexes. If these complexes are built outside of the United States, US-based companies will require guarantees that their data is protected. Further discussion revealed how the data protection trend extended to the repatriation of data from the cloud and the buildout of digital infrastructure in more regions for reasons of data sovereignty.

As we work on the 2026 industry report, and I reflect on the events of recent months, I realize that the fifth P is about more than protection, it is about policy. What governs the protection of data is policy. Policy also shapes access to power, impacts how the industry is perceived, influences the pipeline of people available to build, operate, and maintain digital infrastructure, and dictates the degree of commitment legally required to protect the planet. Bottom line, the iMasons community is being asked to help the industry unite on global policy that will enable a greater digital future for all.

The digital infrastructure industry, and iMasons, are at an inflection point. The global industry capacity has doubled in two years and could triple by 2030. To maintain this pace and keep our commitments to the communities where data centers are deployed and the planet where we all live will require effective policy that ensures that growth is responsible and sustainable. iMasons, through the experience and expertise of our collective community, will continue to expand our role as an industry voice to help inform policy makers.