Data Center Insights: Chrissy Olsen, MPI Energy
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 Q3 2026 insights from Chrissy Olsen, Vice President of Critical Power Solutions, MPI Energy.
Chrissy Olsen is a veteran sales and technology leader with over 30 years of experience shaping the global data center and critical power landscape. As Vice President of Critical Power Solutions at MPI Energy, she leads global marketing strategy and new business development for advanced LFP lithium, VRLA, and energy storage systems supporting hyperscale, colocation, enterprise, and AI/HPC environments.
In her role, Chrissy positions MPI Energy’s solutions within rapidly evolving power architectures, drives industry education on safe and scalable lithium deployment, builds strategic OEM and channel partnerships, and aligns product innovation with real world operator requirements. Her work bridges engineering and economics—translating technical performance, UL/NFPA compliance, and lifecycle modeling into clear executive level value propositions that elevate total cost of ownership, resiliency strategy, and long term infrastructure planning.
Before joining MPI Energy, Chrissy built a distinguished career leading global sales and mission critical infrastructure initiatives. She has delivered multi million dollar data center construction projects, launched global business units, and expanded technical expertise across organizations including Wesco International. Her earlier entrepreneurial success includes founding and scaling a technology design firm through merger.
A dynamic speaker known for her Italian wit and hands on storytelling, Chrissy is a recognized advocate for advancing women in the industry and serves on multiple boards supporting that mission. Her honors include the Infrastructure Masons IM100 Award (2022), the Belden Outstanding Growth Award (2021), and multiple Anixter achievements—reflecting her ongoing impact across the mission critical ecosystem.
With a passion for customer engagement, a love for the microphone, and a commitment to building high performance teams, Chrissy continues to influence the future of data center power infrastructure—ensuring MPI Energy is not just a battery manufacturer, but a strategic partner in the evolution of modern energy systems.
Data Center Frontier: What is AI infrastructure exposing that the data center industry could get away with overlooking at lower densities — and which traditional design or redundancy assumptions now need to be reconsidered?
Chrissy Olsen, MPI Narada: AI is showing us where we have relied too heavily on extra capacity and traditional ways of thinking.
At lower densities, individual systems could be designed and managed somewhat separately. That does not work as well at AI scale, where power, cooling and backup systems are much more dependent on one another.
We also have to look beyond simply adding more redundancy. Having backup equipment is important, but real resilience comes from knowing that all of those systems will work together when something goes wrong.
The question is no longer just, “Do we have enough backup?” It is, “Can we respond, recover and keep the most critical workloads operating?”
Data Center Frontier: As data centers become larger, denser and more power-constrained, where is the definition of “critical infrastructure” expanding — and are the interfaces between power, storage, cooling, controls and other systems becoming the real reliability risk?
Chrissy Olsen, MPI Energy: Critical infrastructure now includes much more than generators and UPS systems. Energy storage, cooling, controls and monitoring all play a role in keeping an AI data center operating.
I believe the bigger risk is often where those systems connect. Each piece of equipment may work properly on its own, but problems can occur when the systems do not communicate or respond together as expected.
As facilities become larger and more complex, someone must be looking at the entire operation, not just an individual product or system. Clear ownership, better coordination between suppliers and testing everything together will be increasingly important.
Data Center Frontier: With time-to-power compressing development schedules, where can operators safely accelerate deployment — and where do commissioning, testing and operational visibility need to become more rigorous rather than less?
Chrissy Olsen, MPI Energy: There are many ways to build faster, including standardized designs, modular equipment and completing more work before systems arrive at the site. Those are smart ways to improve time-to-power.
What we cannot afford to rush is testing and commissioning. Turning the power on does not mean a facility is ready. Operators need to know what will happen during a power interruption, a cooling issue or another unexpected event.
They also need clear, useful information about how the facility is performing. We can, and must, find ways to build faster, but speed should come from better planning and coordination, not from skipping the steps that prove the data center will perform when it matters most.
About the Author
Matt VincentMatt Vincent
Matt Vincent is Editor in Chief of Data Center Frontier, where he leads editorial strategy and coverage focused on the infrastructure powering cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and the digital economy. A veteran B2B technology journalist with more than two decades of experience, Vincent specializes in the intersection of data centers, power, cooling, and emerging AI-era infrastructure. Since assuming the EIC role in 2023, he has helped guide Data Center Frontier’s coverage of the industry’s transition into the gigawatt-scale AI era, with a focus on hyperscale development, behind-the-meter power strategies, liquid cooling architectures, and the evolving energy demands of high-density compute, while working closely with the Digital Infrastructure Group at Endeavor Business Media to expand the brand’s analytical and multimedia footprint. Vincent also hosts The Data Center Frontier Show podcast, where he interviews industry leaders across hyperscale, colocation, utilities, and the data center supply chain to examine the technologies and business models reshaping digital infrastructure. Since its inception he serves as Head of Content for the Data Center Frontier Trends Summit. Before becoming Editor in Chief, he served in multiple senior editorial roles across Endeavor Business Media’s digital infrastructure portfolio, with coverage spanning data centers and hyperscale infrastructure, structured cabling and networking, telecom and datacom, IP physical security, and wireless and Pro AV markets. He began his career in 2005 within PennWell’s Advanced Technology Division and later held senior editorial positions supporting brands such as Cabling Installation & Maintenance, Lightwave Online, Broadband Technology Report, and Smart Buildings Technology. Vincent is a frequent moderator, interviewer, and keynote speaker at industry events including the HPC Forum, where he delivers forward-looking analysis on how AI and high-performance computing are reshaping digital infrastructure. He graduated with honors from Indiana University Bloomington with a B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing and lives in southern New Hampshire with his family, remaining an active musician in his spare time.
Voices of the Industry
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