Digital Edge CEO Samuel Lee Stepping Down, Former Legal Officer to Lead Data Centre Platform

Just over one month after closing on $1.6 billion in financing to expand its Asia footprint, regional data centre operator and investor Digital Edge has named John Freeman as its next chief executive officer, as its current CEO, Samuel Lee, prepares to shift to an advisory role.

Backed by New York private equity firm Stonepeak, Digital Edge is promoting its one-time chief legal officer to its top leadership role in the region less than one year after he became group president, with the firm announcing the CEO move together with a pair of appointments to its board. In a statement, Digital Edge positioned the personnel changes as part of the company’s ongoing development.

“We are very thankful for Samuel’s stewardship over the past five years as the business has scaled, and are excited for John to lead the business into its next phase of growth,” Stonepeak senior managing director and Digital Edge chairman Andrew Thomas said in a statement.

Lee’s departure makes Digital Edge the second Asia Pacific data centre platform to bid farewell to its founding chief executive in recent months after Amandine Wang left the top spot at PAG’s Flow Digital unit late last year to be named chief commercial officer at competitor Empyrion DC in October.

Attorney to Chief Executive

Freeman is taking over a company which had 500MW of capacity across 17 data centre assets in India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, China and the Philippines as of late 2024, with Digital Edge targeting completion of projects in Mumbai and Tokyo this year.

The change in leadership will take effect from the second quarter as Lee becomes senior advisor to the board.

“I am honored to step into the role of CEO, and excited about the opportunity to continue working alongside our partners and the incredibly talented team at Digital Edge to provide timely and diverse AI- and cloud-ready data centers and connectivity solutions to our customers,” Freeman said.

A founding member of the Digital Edge team, Freeman was promoted to group president in April last year after previously serving as chief legal officer.

Before joining Digital Edge in 2020, Freeman spent more than 16 years with Tata Communications, first as general counsel and later as chief legal and compliance officer.

The graduate of the University of Minnesota Duluth and the University of Minnesota Law School had been general counsel for the Hong Kong office of Hawaii-based data centre platform Pihana Pacific when that company merged with Equinix in 2002. Lee, who joined Equinix as vice president of Asia Pacific through the same merger, had served as managing director of Pihana’s Hong Kong branch. The two worked with Equinix until 2019 and joined the creation of Digital Edge in 2020.

“As I transition to the role of senior advisor, I do so with immense pride in what we have built and with great confidence in the future of Digital Edge,” Lee said. “John is a visionary leader with a passion for the team, our customers, and the communities we serve, and I look forward to the company’s continued success under his leadership”.

Board Beefed Up

At the same time that it announced the leadership handover, Digital Edge introduced Maile Kaiser, an executive with Denver-based data centre operator CoreSite, and Stonepeak senior operating partner Eanna Murphy as non-executive directors on its board.

Currently chief revenue officer with the unit of NYSE-listed American Tower, Kaiser has been with CoreSite since 2012 following earlier stints with IO Data Centers, AboveNet, and Oracle.

Before joining Stonepeak in January, Murphy had served as chief operating officer with US digital infrastructure player Yondr after previously spending more than a decade in data centre roles with Google.