Running the next generation of data centers, the people who do it for a living like to say, is no longer mainly a problem of money or of chips. It is a problem of managers: finding executives who have already built enormous computing and power projects, and hiring them before a rival does. KKR is putting that proposition to the test with a $10 billion project, and the chief executive it installed has just made his first two hires.
Adam Selipsky, who ran Amazon Web Services until the middle of 2024, has completed the first senior appointments at Helix Digital Infrastructure, the KKR-backed artificial intelligence venture, according to people familiar with the matter. Jonathan Lin, the former chief commercial officer at Equinix, the data-center operator, joins as an executive vice president responsible for data-center strategy and execution. Kleber Costa, formerly chief commercial officer of the clean-energy business at AES, the power producer, will run the venture’s power and energy operations. Both executives started this week and report directly to Mr. Selipsky. People familiar with the matter described the appointments as the first batch of a team the chief executive is still assembling.
The two résumés describe the constraint Helix was created to solve. Mr. Lin spent years at Equinix, which operates hundreds of data centers around the world and sells space, power and connectivity to thousands of customers; his job was on the commercial side of a business that has to keep buying land and buildings years before the revenue from them arrives. Mr. Costa spent his time at AES, a company that has positioned itself as one of the power industry’s most aggressive suppliers of clean electricity to technology firms, signing long-term contracts to run data centers on wind, solar and storage. The choice of an energy executive among the venture’s first two officers is a statement about where the real bottleneck sits: developers across the sector say power, not processors, now decides which projects get built and which wait.
The power problem has changed shape quickly. Data centers that a decade ago drew a few dozen megawatts now plan campuses measured in hundreds of megawatts or more, and securing that electricity means years of negotiation with utilities, regulators and grid operators, often before a single foundation is poured. A project can have all the capital it wants and still stall on a substation. Hiring the person who has done those deals before is one of the few ways to compress the timeline.
Mr. Selipsky’s own history explains why the hires carry weight. He helped build AWS’s sales machine in the cloud’s early years, left to run Tableau, and returned in 2021 to lead Amazon’s cloud unit through the period when artificial intelligence demand began to reshape the business. AWS revenue roughly doubled during his three years in charge, to about $91 billion in 2023 from about $45 billion in 2020, as he presided over the expansion of the world’s largest cloud network. His return to the infrastructure business at the head of a KKR venture gave the project instant credibility, and it signaled that the private boom in AI facilities had reached the top tier of cloud management.
KKR is one of the largest infrastructure investors in the world, and Helix is a large bet even by its standards: a $10 billion vehicle devoted to one thesis, that the shortage of computing capacity for artificial intelligence will last long enough to reward patient construction. Nvidia is among the investors, which ties the project to the chip maker that stands to supply much of what Helix builds and shows how deeply the company has reached into the financing of the infrastructure that runs its products.
The appointments also illustrate a hiring market that has become one of the oddest corners of the AI boom. Data-center developers, cloud providers, chip companies and investment funds are competing for the same thin pool of executives who have operated large-scale computing and power assets, and the scramble has pushed compensation to levels that would have seemed extravagant a few years ago. The shortage is not of ideas or capital; it is of people who have watched a multi-billion-dollar construction program go wrong and know how to avoid the mistakes.
The stakes for Helix are straightforward. Dozens of multibillion-dollar AI infrastructure projects have been announced over the past two years, and the difference between the ones that get built and the ones that stay paper will be the operating teams behind them. For KKR, the hires answer an execution question that money alone cannot: who will be in the room when the contracts are signed, the grid connections negotiated and the construction schedules defended.
The executives who started this week are the visible part of a quieter competition that will decide which of the industry’s enormous AI bets are finished on time. Helix now has its capital, its chief executive and its first operators. What remains is the part no announcement can compress: years of construction, utility negotiations and the patience of investors who committed $10 billion to the idea that electricity and concrete, not just silicon, will decide who wins the AI race.
