Nvidia Elite Partner Applied Digital Hires Data Center Veteran To Make Operations ‘Predictable, Repeatable And Scalable’

"It’s exhilarating. It’s exciting,” Applied Digital’s Chris Jackson tells CRN following his hiring as senior vice president of operations. “The great thing about this industry is everyday has never been seen. There has never been a mundane, flatline time in this industry."

As Nvidia Elite partner Applied Digital’s newly appointed Senior Vice President of Operations Chris Jackson puts it, there is no such thing as a “mundane time in the data center industry.”

“It’s exhilarating. It’s exciting,” the 20-year data center veteran told CRN on Wednesday. “The great thing about this industry is everyday has never been seen. There has never been a mundane, flatline time in this industry. This industry grows as the world's demands grow and as the world changes, and becomes more interconnected, the need and necessity to keep technology ahead of what is being asked and demanded of it is now more prevalent than I think anytime previous.”

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The list of demands for, concerns about and outright bottlenecks faced by the data center industry has never been greater: GenAI compute. Power contraints. Land near power. Talent. Each of these demands, to some degree, shape the flow of resources through data center providers.

“If you look at the fact that AI generation has absolutely taken off, in the way that we hoped it would, but couldn't foresee it,” Jackson said. “The challenges there are incredibly daunting. From an operational perspective, it comes down to three things: making sure that what we do is predictable, it is repeatable, and it scales.”

For data center providers, the stakes have never been higher. Years ago, downtime meant lost emails. Now it means interruptions to the complex GPU workloads that enterprise customers are using to build AI into their organizations.

“We are very much in-line with the industry standard, which is a five-nine availability. We will meet that and we will continue to provide that,” he told CRN. “We're also increasing all of our controls and the telemetry to make sure that we have the transparency with both our customers, our utilities and our communities and want everyone to know what we're doing and how we're doing it and why.”

He said Applied Digital is automating its operations across the technology stack from communications to monitoring, control to sequencing -- all of it programmed to deliver repeatable, scalable success.

“Everything has to be automated because no matter how good you are eventually something's going to fail. So those three things from an operations perspective is what is so critical and so awesome about it because now we have more technology to help us do all those things.”

Jackson has previously worked as head of operations at Stream Data Centers and Vantage Data Centers. He has also previously worked at Amazon Web Services, where he managed one of its largest availability zones -- 144 data centers with 1,200 megawatts of capacity, while maintaining a 99.999 percent uptime.

An Nvidia Elite partner, Applied Digital is a Dallas-based designer, builder, and operator of next-generation digital infrastructure designed for high-performance computing.

CEO Wes Cummins recently told CRN the company has deployed 6,100 of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs across three of its data centers and has 1.3 gigawatts of space under development and demand is at a “fever pitch.”

“We are excited about the valuable contributions Chris will bring to our leadership team,” Cummins said in a statement Wednesday about Jackson’s hiring. “We believe his skillset and years of experience will help optimize our operational infrastructure and boost efficiency and scalability across our data centers.”

Jackson is expected to drive operational initiatives to enhance productivity and profitability across all divisions, to position Applied Digital as a leading provider in next-generation data centers.

“Whether it's hyperscale whether it's AI, whether it's a small enterprise, whether it's cloud, or whether it's even mining, everybody needs to know that what we provide in one place is getting provided at every place,” he told CRN.