Iron Mountain Data Centers (IMDC) is positioning itself to meet the rapidly accelerating demands driven by enterprise workloads, now amplified by AI, through flexible, future‑proof data center designs and a global expansion that emphasizes strategic ‘land-banking’.

Leading this strategy is Gary Aikenhead, EVP and general manager for data centers at IMDC. Aitkenhead joined IMDC in April 2025 after four years as senior vice president of EMEA operations at Equinix. Before coming into the data center industry, he spent over two decades working in telecoms for Motorola, at a time when the sector was “mission critical”.

At IMDC, Aitkenhead is responsible for all the global aspects of the data center business of the wider Iron Mountain company – from customers and commercial design to construction, operations and capital deployment.

During his first few months in the job, he has been busy visiting IMDC’s facilities and meeting customers to get a “360-degree state of the business” to understand the company’s strategic priorities and direction of travel over the next three to five years.

As part of these priorities, he believes that flexibility and agility are the “keywords” to keep up with the ever-evolving, AI-driven demands from clients, with demand from cloud, enterprise and traditional colocation already fueling significant growth.

“If we look out into the future, that growth is set to continue,” Aitkenhead said during a recent DCD>Talks episode. “As AI comes along, that layers even more growth on top of what we're already seeing.”

Standard data center design

Aitkenhead pointed out that a wave of huge, AI‑focused investments from the industry’s biggest players is dramatically reshaping the data center landscape.

He cited recent examples from Meta and its commitment to spend billions of dollars on AI data centers, including a multi-gigawatt AI data center in Ohio, and Oracle’s $30bn per year contract with OpenAI to expand the Project Stargate.

“These investments are predominantly for AI training in the US but what will follow on from that is AI inference use cases closer to the customers, and that's going to create capacity all over the globe,” Aitkenhead added.

Analysts predict that by 2030, 80 percent of the AI workloads will be for inference rather than training, which led Aitkenhead to say that the size of the inference capacity expansion is “just phenomenal”.

Additionally, neo cloud companies such as CoreWeave and G‑Core are now buying up large volumes of hyperscale‑grade capacity to serve AI workloads.

To keep up with this changing landscape, IMDC is ensuring that it has access to large amounts of carbon-free power and that it has the flexible cooling infrastructure that can adapt to customers’ requirements as they change over time.

The company is adopting a standard data center design that can accommodate both air‑based and water‑based cooling, giving customers the freedom to choose any mix of the two. The design is deliberately oversized (Aitkenhead said it can provide well over 100 percent of the cooling capacity initially needed) so it can handle rising rack densities.

Built‑in taps to chilled‑water loops let operators add liquid‑cooling circuits or stick with traditional air cooling as demand evolves. Because heat loads are soaring, Aitkenhead said that this flexible approach ensures IMDC’s facilities can be upgraded quickly to meet future high‑density workloads.

“We are building this robust, redundant power infrastructure so customers can run these high-density workloads 24/7, all of it backed up by renewable energy and with a path towards carbon-free power,” he added.

Global expansion

IMDC already has a strong global presence and operates more than 30 data centers across 21 markets. The company’s expansion is focused on new geographies and growing within existing Tier 1 and Tier 2 regions.

At the beginning of the year, IMDC acquired a company in India, providing it a foothold in six cities within the country, where it controls over 150MW of land and plans major capacity growth to serve India’s booming digital economy.

“With more than a billion people, a highly educated workforce and a growing economy, much of it founded on digital and technology, we think India is going to be a substantially growing market for data center demand as we look out into the future,” Aitkenhead said.

IMDC is also expanding in existing traditional markets where it has a very strong presence, including Virginia, Phoenix, Richmond, Amsterdam and Madrid. Its broader strategy is to “land‑bank” locations where customers are likely to need capacity in the future, securing both land and power assets – including on‑site solutions such as fuel cells, battery storage and gas turbines – to overcome utility constraints and ensure sustainable growth.

Future plans

Over the next three to five years, Aitkenhead said that IMDC has been growing in revenue by more than 20 percent over the past few years. It expects to grow more than 25 percent in 2026 and projects that growth into the future.

To date, the company is operating about 450MW of operational capacity and has a 1.3GW pipeline of land and development slated for future projects.

This expansion is financed entirely from Iron Mountain’s strong, cash‑generating businesses, which gives the data center arm the capital to invest aggressively while improving cost predictability and operational agility.

With a revamped design construction process and a solid expansion strategy, IMDC is positioning itself to capture the surging demand for AI‑driven, high‑density workloads, ensuring it can meet the market’s steep upward curve and remain “exciting” and competitive in the years ahead.

Aitkenhead concluded: “It's all about positioning ourselves to meet the market demand curve, especially as we see this demand through the roof for AI cloud and high-density workloads. I think the times ahead are going to be exciting, that's for sure.”

Watch the full DCD>Talks episode with Gary Aitkenhead of Iron Mountain Data Centers here.