Data Center Intelligence: Phillip Marangella, EdgeConneX

The Data Center Frontier Executive Roundtable features insights from industry executives with lengthy experience in the data center industry.

Here’s a look at the Q2 2025 insights from Phillip Marangella, Chief Marketing and Product Officer for EdgeConneX.

Phillip Marangella is the Chief Marketing and Product Officer at EdgeConneX, where he develops and executes the company’s marketing and product strategies. With 25 years of experience in international marketing, strategy, and business development across the data center, telecom, and technology sectors, he brings significant expertise to his role. Phillip serves on the marketing advisory boards for Lokker, Salute, Data Center Coalition, and Infrastructure Masons. He holds a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California, San Diego, and a Master’s in Multinational Commerce from Boston University. 

AI Is Reshaping Infrastructure: How Are You Responding?

Data Center Frontier: How is your organization adapting to the infrastructure demands of AI? As artificial intelligence continues to redefine the design priorities for power, cooling, and site architecture, what specific innovations or strategic adaptations has your company implemented over the past year to meet the performance and deployment requirements of next-generation AI workloads?

Phillip Marangella, EdgeConneX: AI has completely transformed the way we need to build and operate data centers. It’s essentially an entirely new product based on how we power and cool facilities. As rack densities rapidly scale past the triple digits and we approach a megawatt per rack in the near future, there’s a need to think very differently about data center capacity.

That is why we have developed Ingenuity, our AI-enabled data center product offering, which is both flexible and scalable to meet today’s requirements as well as tomorrow’s AI infrastructure needs. This ensures that the data center isn’t obsolete by the time it is built. More importantly, as we transition from air to liquid cooling, we’ve also completely reconfigured our operational procedures, training, and readiness to ensure a safe, secure, and sustainable environment for AI/HPC deployments.

Speed to Market Is a Competitive Edge: What’s Your Playbook?

Data Center Frontier: What strategies are helping you deliver infrastructure at speed without sacrificing resiliency? With timelines for data center delivery compressing across both hyperscale and edge environments, what proven approaches—whether in engineering, supply chain management, or partner collaboration—are enabling your organization to accelerate deployment while maintaining reliability, efficiency, and sustainability?

Phillip Marangella, EdgeConneX: Again, AI is dramatically transforming the way we build and operate our data centers. The speed and scale for both hyper-scale and the edge have significantly increased in size by at least 3-5x, and the speed of delivery has been reduced in some cases to half the traditional timeframes.

Things like pre-fabrication, global purchase agreements for long-lead equipment, power reservations with utilities, and the acquisition of larger land banks result in a significantly greater capital commitment upfront. We have to work more closely with the customer to understand their capacity forecasts, design requirements, and required delivery schedules, ensuring we are ready for service on time and on budget.

Standardization vs. Customization: What’s the Right Balance Now?

Data Center Frontier: How are you balancing standardization with client-specific customization in 2025? Given the dual pressures of rapid scaling and the unique demands of AI and hybrid workloads, how is your team navigating the trade-offs between delivering standardized infrastructure and meeting bespoke customer needs? Where do you see flexibility delivering the most value today?

Phillip Marangella, EdgeConneX: At the speed and scale required to build out the capacity needed for AI, combined with the lack of standards and varying customer requirements for AI deployments, it certainly presents a challenge for data center operators. With Ingenuity, we think of the data center as a backplane, which allows us to have a design to give our customer maximum flexibility to support any application density from lower-density Cloud to high-density AI/HPC deployments and any cooling preference our customer wants from air, to liquid, to hybrid, to immersion or any other new technology.

What Does True Data Center Industry Innovation Look Like in 2025?

Data Center Frontier: What does meaningful innovation in the data center sector look like right now? In a marketplace crowded with bold claims and emerging technologies, how do you separate marketing noise from truly transformative innovation? And what is one underappreciated technical or strategic breakthrough your organization believes will materially influence data center development over the next 12 to 18 months?
 
Phillip Marangella, EdgeConneX: The true innovation is coming from chip manufacturers and our Cloud and AI customers, who are providing transformative applications.  

Yes, there are a lot of exaggerated claims by providers about the densities they can support, but the design and equipment in the data center vary little from provider to provider at the end of the day.  

Where I think a significant difference will be found is in the operational readiness, skills, training, and expertise of the people operating all these cutting-edge technologies.  

The costs and importance of these deployments mean that uptime and safety will be critical when new cooling technologies, such as liquid-to-chip or immersion cooling, are utilized. 

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