Observer’s profile of incoming DataBank CEO Kevin Ooley is a candid conversation about what it takes to build durable infrastructure through three successive technology waves. Ooley, who becomes CEO on January 1, 2027, has spent 15 years at DataBank watching the industry transform from a back-office curiosity into front-page news.

The growth tells the story. When DigitalBridge acquired DataBank in 2016, the company generated roughly $25 million in annualized EBITDA. It expects to close this year near a $1 billion run rate, growing from six data centers in three markets to approximately 65 facilities across 26 markets, with ten more under development.

What has changed since 2022 is not just the pace but the nature of demand. Pre-leasing timelines that once required a finished, ready-to-tour facility have collapsed entirely.

“In 2019, you needed to have a data center white floor available, ready to tour with the client. Now you’re having conversations once you’re getting permitting, and you get your utility agreement in place. You might be pre-leasing twelve, eighteen months in advance.”
— Kevin Ooley, incoming CEO, DataBank

On water, Ooley pushes back on a persistent industry misconception. DataBank’s newer facilities, built on closed-loop cooling since 2017, use roughly as much water as five households. The older evaporative cooling technology does consume more, but those are the company’s smaller legacy sites, not the large AI-era campuses drawing public scrutiny.

On bubble risk, Ooley draws on personal experience from the dot.com days of 1999-2000. He is aware of the risks of overextension but points to concrete AI applications already running in DataBank facilities, from pancreatic cancer detection to fraud prevention, as evidence of durable, real-world value.

Customer discipline has been central to the company’s strategy. In 2023, DataBank deliberately capped allocations to neocloud providers to protect long-term capacity for its enterprise base, which represents 70 percent of the business and drives 80 percent of growth from existing accounts.

Ooley describes his priorities as incoming CEO in straightforward terms: execute the existing plan, expand employee ownership, find power in the right locations, and treat host communities as a fourth constituent alongside investors, customers, and employees. If he could do one thing differently, the answer is simple: he would have built bigger and faster five years ago.

Read the full profile at Observer.