Andrew Schaap is a data center, IT, private equity, and real estate executive with over 25 years of complex transactional experience and multi-disciplinary senior leadership. As CEO of Aligned, he is dedicated to accelerating business growth by driving the delivery of data center solutions with industry-leading technology and adaptive infrastructure.
Since beginning his tenure with Aligned, Schaap has exponentially grown company revenues, completed several successful capital raisings, and cultivated an ecosystem of innovation that advances Aligned’s commitment to reducing the social, economic, and environmental impact of the digital era to position Aligned as one of the top-performing private data center companies in the Americas. He is also a founder and board member of DC Delta, a mentor for the Great Minds in STEM association, an Advisory Council member of SMU Lyle School of Engineering, and one of the global industry leaders honored in the inaugural InterGlobix Magazine Titans List.
Since joining Aligned in 2017, you’ve successfully positioned the company at the intersection of AI, cloud computing, and real estate. Can you elaborate on this journey and the key milestones that have shaped Aligned’s growth and evolution?
My historical experience isn’t actually just in real estate or data centers: I started my career as a software executive by launching a software company right out of university. I built that software company up, sold it to a large hardware system integrator, and spent a good number of years with that hardware integrator before jumping over to data centers in the early 2000s in Phoenix, Arizona. If you think about the context of what we do inside data centers, it’s software sitting on servers in buildings. So, I look at what we do as a way to support hardware that supports software and networking: Our customers are very focused on running applications, networks, and workloads that sit on servers within a data center.
If you consider the entire ecosystem and the spectrum of work that’s happening inside of the facility, we have to be nimble and flexible: Software is changing very, very quickly with the advent of AI and major evolutions and revolutions in the hardware side. I’ve joked that we’ve been talking about these things in our industry for 20 years, and now they’re finally here. One of the things that really sets our leadership team up for success is that we’re always thinking about what’s next so we can be ready for the next iteration in two, four, or six years. We continue to innovate on things we haven’t released yet, but we’re essentially preparing for where we think the industry is going so we have a data center solution that works for clients of both today and tomorrow.
One of the things that sets Aligned apart in the rapidly growing data center market is your integrated approach to innovation. What does “integrated innovation” mean to you, and how does that inform your business decisions and strategy?
In many companies, when you say “innovation,” they think about innovating the product and making that product better. When I emphasize the need to be innovative, I extend that concept to innovation in processes, people, and systems as well as what we build, how we build our solutions, and how we operate. Innovation is so crucial to the way we work that we even have a disruptive innovation award within our organization. It’s awarded every quarter to a handful of people who really go that extra mile in innovating on aspects of the business that create competitive differentiators and speak to what Aligned does.
Specifically, we spend a lot of time and energy with our clients, so we like to innovate with them—the people who are ultimately buying the product from us. Obviously coming up with the idea in our conference room is one thing, but coming up with the idea in a client’s conference room is something completely different. We’re working hand-in-hand with clients on what they see coming and what it is they need and want, and then we—the organization, our teams, our engineers—start thinking about a product change or evolution that our clients may want to see in the next couple of years. I’m a big believer in the idea that clients are the ones with the desire for this innovation, and so we have to work really closely with them on what’s acceptable for their risk tolerance, their application, and what they’re going to do inside the facility.
Given the transformative impact of AI on the data center industry, how has Aligned adapted / innovated to meet the evolving needs of its customers? What are the critical elements that enable Aligned’s flexibility and agility?
I think of three pillars when I consider what makes a flexible, agile company in the data center sector. The first is capital: You’ve got to have a great capital partner and great capital access because it’s such a capital-intensive industry. We couldn’t be more thrilled with Aligned’s capital stack and our ability to execute on behalf of our clients with this capital stack. The second is innovation: Like I mentioned earlier, we’re constantly thinking about what we do and how we do it and finding ways to keep progressing, whether it’s in operations, construction, delivery, or different products or mechanisms.
The third pillar, though, is actually the most important: the people. You can have great capital and great infrastructure, but ultimately people are what make all the difference. So, we spend a lot of time recruiting and hiring the talent that can accelerate the capital and innovation. My view is that you hire great people, you help them understand what the North Star is—what we’re trying to achieve—and then you let them go innovate and find ways to do things successfully. No matter what the product or the challenge question is, we’re always looking for innovative answers to try and improve the business. You can’t do that without great people—particularly great people who are somewhat fearless about making mistakes, trying new things, and maybe even looking foolish. Bad ideas can still create great ideas, because the process of working through them spawns other ideas and other ways of thinking. So, we try to foster an organization with that fearlessness around taking chances.
Another element of Aligned’s ethos that stands out in a time when the digital infrastructure industry is under increasing pressure to be more sustainable is Aligned’s commitment to reducing the social, economic, and environmental impact of the digital era. How have you approached this critical consideration of not only protecting but also giving back to our planet, and what are the key issues you see moving forward?
There are so many aspects of the data center sector where we’re somewhat limited by technology and what’s available in the marketplace. For example, take batteries: There’s innovation coming in batteries, but sometimes it’s slow, and sometimes you can’t always take the thing that’s bleeding edge, because that bleeding edge thing may not have the historical track record for uptime and reliability. So, we’re constantly having to back-balance bleeding edge innovation while getting very aggressive on environmental social governance (ESG). For instance, we need to find ways to use less water, and today we use zero water in our facilities. Yet we also need to find ways to reduce electrical use, unnecessary supplies, and carbon footprints while maintaining the standards our clients expect (100 percent uptime and 100 percent reliability) for these mission-critical assets.
So, we always have to balance these elements simultaneously, and then we work very closely with vendors in our supply chain to help them know that if they innovate on a product set, we are an offtaker for that innovation. We want to reassure them that if they build something and they dedicate some factory time to something, there’s going to be a group like us that actually buys the product. We want to work with these partners and empower them to be more innovative and find ways throughout the supply chain to use less steel, less concrete, less componentry, and fewer resources so we can all better care for our planet.
Speaking of key issues for our industry, AI is continuing to put a massive demand on digital infrastructure. How can we harness AI—the very thing driving such high demand—to help data centers run more efficiently and sustainably?
We’re currently in several test beds with AI, specifically around operational reliability and operational efficiency as well as what we build and how we build. Simultaneously, we’re encouraging our supply chain partners, vendors for general contractors, the people who help build our facilities to start harnessing AI-driven tools to find ways to be more efficient in what we build, how we build, and how we deliver our solution set. While of course we need to be cautious when we’re running tests inside our sites—as we don’t want to disrupt our current highly reliable solutions—we’re running these tests in conjunction with our clients, and they’re very encouraging.
Apart from ESG, adaptability is top of mind for hyperscale and large enterprise customers—they want to be able to scale flexibly and quickly. How do you see unpredictable usage and growth models driving data center delivery models? Does this strategy differ across the different geographical markets in which Aligned operates?
I think this goes back to our core thesis of encouraging and developing these assets in ways that are future-proofed. That term is quite overused in our industry, so we like to use the phrase “expand on demand,” because ultimately, our clients are looking at new technologies they want to roll into data centers, and we want to have the solution set that works for the next generation chip. So, if we do a 15-year lease or a 15-year commitment from the client, we may have five refresh cycles in those 15 years of chips and servers.
If you think about what the client is actually doing, they’re trying to create resiliency within the software and within the network, which may also change in the next handful of years.
They actually use these data centers between availability zones, availability domains, and have failover within those within facilities, which may allow them to have less resilience in the data center and more resiliency at the application and network layer. So, we’ve master-planned our facilities to have that future-proofing or expand on demand—where we can change the densities and change the topologies for clients over the life of their contract—built in.
Finally, as data centers became more and more critical for society at large, do you have a message for the industry or for generations to come?
For 25 years, I remember going home for Thanksgiving and having my family ask, “What business are you in again? Is that like a call center?” Fast forward to today and everybody knows roughly what a data center is—they’re talking about them on everyday news and writing articles about what’s happening in the industry. So, people in the industry—hyperscalers and operators—have to be very thoughtful about ensuring we’re sending out the right message about what data centers do. Data centers are a huge benefit to humanity because we’re making people’s lives better. We’re making you more connected to your loved ones. We’re making the world safer. So, we need to come together and make sure we’re educating people on these benefits. At Aligned, we have a program called Aligned Cares, which is all about giving back to communities and trying to be a good neighbor to the people we serve. I think everyone in our industry should engage with the communities in which they operate and do some sort of give-back programs in addition to being thoughtful in public education.
