EdgeCore Hires President To Drive Strategy Amid Plans To Double Workforce

EdgeCore President Steve Conner recently worked for Vantage Data Centers as CTO of North America and was previously director of service provider sales at Nutanix.

Data center provider EdgeCore has named tech veteran Steve Conner as its president as the Denver-based company plans to double its workforce by the end of the year to meet a surge in demand from hyperscale customers.

As the demand for data center capacity continues to climb, EdgeCore said it has grown its team, increasing the number of employees by 80 percent since February. The company has also revamped its operations and strategy teams to find more ways to tackle the next-generation requirements of its facilities as customer demand for AI workloads ramps up.

In May, the company announced that it had purchased 48 acres around its Phoenix campus to expand that facility to 450 megawatts of capacity. In September it won $1.9 billion in financing to expand its total network capacity. That was the third investment last year and brought its total 2024 haul to $4.24 billion.

Conner (pictured above) recently worked for Vantage Data Centers as CTO of North America and was previously director of service provider sales at Nutanix. Conner also held senior-level sales roles at Cloudistics as well as senior-level technical roles at Arrow Electronics

His background in the data center industry revolves around an expertise in engineering, power provisioning, sales and customer solutions, EdgeCore said in a statement. As president at EdgeCore, he will be responsible for leading the company’s internal day-to-day operations, drive strategic execution and ensure the growth of the overall business.

“I plan to draw on the experiences-both good and bad-I’ve had throughout my career to ensure EdgeCore chooses the right path forward in our growth," Conner said in a statement. "I’m thrilled to be a part of this dynamic and growing team during such an important time in the evolution of the data center industry."

EdgeCore was acquired by private equity firm Partners Group in November 2022. In its announcement at the time, Partners Group said it set aside $1.2 billion to pay for EdgeCore as well as a planned data center expansion.

Current EdgeCore CEO Lee Kestler, a data center veteran who previously worked as chief commercial officer for Vantage Data Centers, was brought on in 2023 to lead the organization into its next phase of growth.

“We have a deficit for the number of people that are needed to work in this space,” he told CRN that year. “We’re growing this company. We intend to hire people at the early stage of their career and take ownership and accountability for their development. EdgeCore, by the time the clock ticks seven or eight years, will be bigger than $10 billion and a leader in all of the things that people care about.”

Kestler said in a statement that Conner “will enable EdgeCore to increase our ability to meet our customers’ current and future requirements for high-density data center space. By leaning on his prior experiences, Steve will accelerate the transformation of our Operations, Strategy, Sales and Engineering functions and be an invaluable technical leader across our organization.”