The Story
Calculating forces, then the grand jete
Walk into a Meta data center in Prineville, Oregon, or Los Lunas, New Mexico - and somewhere in the load-bearing walls, the seismic base isolators, the carefully modularized electrical rooms - there is the invisible math of Azlan Ezaddin. He has been solving structural problems since 1990, the same year the first web browser was invented and, not coincidentally, the year he joined Peoples Associates Structural Engineers in San Jose.
Thirty-five years later, he runs the firm. As President and CEO of PASE, Ezaddin oversees a practice that spans San Jose, San Ramon, Sacramento, and - since 2019 - Zagreb, Croatia. The firm has completed data center projects across five American states and Sweden. It earned ENR Magazine's "Best of the Best" for the first Facebook data center ever built, in Prineville, Oregon, 2012. Ezaddin was the structural brain behind it.
"I have been dreaming of this day for quite a long time, to reunite key founding engineers of PASE."- Azlan Ezaddin, on the 2023 acquisition of Finn Design Group
His credential portfolio reads like a jurisdictional map of ambition: Professional Engineer (P.E.) in 28 U.S. states, Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) in four Canadian provinces - Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, and Ontario - and Structural Engineer (S.E.) licenses in Arizona, California, Georgia, Illinois, Utah, and Washington. That is 38 engineering jurisdictions. Each one required examination, documentation, and a demonstrated track record.
His subspecialty - mission-critical data center structural engineering - is not a field where you improvise. The facilities Ezaddin works on cannot go offline. A structural miscalculation is not a bug to be patched. He serves as owner's representative for data center clients, providing third-party structural oversight on both design-bid-build and design-build projects. He is a member of 7x24 Exchange, the global community dedicated to continuous availability of critical systems. The work requires the rare ability to operate at the intersection of extreme precision and enormous scale.
His academic roots are fitting for someone who would end up in earthquake country. His B.S. in Civil Engineering (Structural Design emphasis) came from California State University, Chico. Then Stanford - an M.S. in Structural Engineering with an emphasis in Seismic Analysis, completed in 1985. He joined PASE five years later. He has not left.
In 2021, when founder Don Peoples passed leadership to a new generation, Ezaddin was among the five associates who took the reins. The transition was internal, deliberate, and quiet - the way structural handoffs should be. Two years later, he engineered a reunion: PASE acquired Finn Design Group, a Pleasanton firm with deep roots in healthcare facilities, schools, bridges, and industrial buildings. Jeff Finn, the firm's founder, is described as a key founding engineer of PASE. Ezaddin had, apparently, been waiting for that moment for years.