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Inside DataBank’s Third Wave: Kevin Ooley on Water, Power and What Happens After the A.I. Gold Rush

The incoming CEO of one of the country's largest private data center platforms on closed-loop cooling, capped neocloud deals, and why he wishes he'd built bigger five years ago.

Kevin Ooley has spent 15 years watching other people misunderstand what he does for a living. For most of that time, even his own family didn’t have a clean answer to the dinner-party question. Now the industry he’s spent a career building is impossible to avoid—implicated in every heat wave water advisory, every grid complaint, every anxious headline about whether the A.I. boom is a bubble waiting to pop. Ooley, DataBank’s President and CFO since 2011, becomes the company’s next CEO on January 1, 2027, succeeding Raul Martynek, who will move into the role of executive chairman. The board’s decision followed a full search process and was approved unanimously.

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DataBank, founded well before anyone was talking about large language models, has ridden three distinct waves since Ooley joined: the outsourcing of corporate data centers starting in 2011, the cloud explosion of the mid-2010s, and, beginning in late 2022, the A.I. wave that has reshaped the scale of everything the company does. “Data bank’s been along for each of those waves for the ride,” Ooley tells Observer. The arithmetic of that ride is blunt. When DigitalBridge acquired DataBank in 2016, the company was running at roughly $25 million of annualized EBITDA; DataBank expects to close out this year near a $1 billion run rate. It has grown from six data centers in three markets to what Ooley describes as the largest geographic footprint of any data center provider in the U.S.—around 65 to 66 facilities across 26 markets, with roughly ten more under development. The company hit its thousandth employee, or “data banker,” in March.

What’s changed since 2022 isn’t the growth trajectory so much as its shape. DataBank used to build with optionality—a 10-megawatt facility, fit out a couple of megawatts, sell it, build the next hall. As workloads scaled, the company began buying adjacent land on existing campuses. Now it’s breaking ground on 200-to-300-acre campuses built explicitly for expansion, and selling into that capacity faster and further in advance than........

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