Update: On February 8, 2024, Belady was appointed a senior advisor to DigitalBridge.

Original story continues: Data center veteran Christian Belady has left Microsoft after more than 16 years.

Belady ran the data center advanced development team at Microsoft, and is credited with creating the metric PUE (power usage effectiveness) while at server maker Hewlett Packard.

He held numerous roles at Microsoft, including leading data center development worldwide, managing the company's terrestrial/subsea network, and energy portfolio.

In his most recent position as VP and distinguished engineer of advanced development, he worked on creating breakthrough technologies in cooling, energy storage/generation, free space optics, and cryogenics.

Outside of Microsoft, he is a founding member of ASHRAE's TC9.9, and co-published the Water Utilization Effectiveness (WUE) and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) metrics with the Green Grid.

For Belady's last day at Microsoft, Sean James, senior director of data center research at Microsoft, said that he was given a piece of a data center to take with him.

"While my departure from Microsoft is hard, I am super excited about the ambiguity of the future, the surprises it will bring, and the new things I will learn," Belady said in a LinkedIn post.

"My plan is to take some time off to figure out my next chapter… I do know it will be in my beloved infrastructure industry."