The cloud is a surprisingly earthbound place. Before an AI system can answer a question, somebody has to arrange the electricity. Before the electricity comes the fuel, the generating equipment, the permits and the people who put it all together. Chad Zamarin has spent much of his working life among those preliminary arrangements. Now they have become a central part of the technology conversation.
In July 2025, Zamarin became president and chief executive officer of Williams, the Tulsa energy company whose natural gas network reaches across the United States. He arrived at the top after eight years in corporate strategic development. His assignment had expanded; so had the customers’ expectations. A business accustomed to moving gas was increasingly being asked to help solve the whole power problem.
There is a pleasing reversal here. Computing gets sold in the language of speed and weightlessness. Energy infrastructure involves heavy equipment and calendars. Zamarin works where those two descriptions must agree on a delivery date. A very clever machine still needs somebody to finish the less glamorous job outside.
The engineer before the executive
His route began with materials engineering at Purdue University, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in 1998. He later earned an MBA from the University of Houston. That combination gives his career two distinct vocabularies: the behavior of physical materials and the commercial decisions that determine what gets built.
From 1998 through 2004, he worked in product, engineering and project management at GE Energy and Panhandle Energy. Colonial Pipeline followed, with technical services and asset integrity leadership from 2004 to 2009. These were jobs concerned with the working condition of infrastructure, well before his responsibilities extended to a public company’s strategy.
One small detail from that period deserves keeping. A federal pipeline research forum in 2007 listed Zamarin, then at Colonial, as chair of a session on data mining and threat assessment. Today, data is often discussed as the thing consuming power. In that earlier professional setting, it was part of the effort to understand the infrastructure itself.
The detail gives his later career some texture. The executive now discussing new energy demand had already worked in a world where information had to tell operators something useful about physical assets. Twenty years of changing terminology have left the underlying requirement familiar: measurements matter because equipment has to work.
Learning the length of the chain
Between 2009 and 2014, Zamarin held executive roles at NiSource and Columbia Pipeline Group, including chief operating officer responsibilities for midstream and energy ventures businesses. He also served as president of Pennant Midstream. At Cheniere, which he joined in 2014, his leadership responsibilities included pipelines and midstream operations.
Those moves broadened the work from the condition of individual assets to the businesses connecting production and consumption. By the time Williams hired him in June 2017, his new responsibilities included enterprise strategy, business development and customer relationships, with government affairs and project analysis also in the brief. It was a job built around connections.
In January 2023, Williams promoted him to executive vice president of Corporate Strategic Development and added commodity marketing to his responsibilities. The position brought together commercial decisions, new ventures and the company’s public explanation of its business. A proposed project has several audiences. Customers need a service, investors need a return and communities need to understand what is arriving.
Purdue recognized him as an Outstanding Materials Engineer in 2024. The honor came 26 years after his undergraduate degree, by which time his work encompassed much more than a single engineering discipline. His career had acquired considerable breadth without losing its connection to physical infrastructure.
Eight years to the corner office
Williams announced the succession in May 2025. Zamarin would become president, CEO and a director on July 1; Alan Armstrong would move to executive chairman. This was an internal handover to an executive already involved in shaping the company’s direction. The person taking responsibility for the strategy had helped develop it.
On his first quarterly earnings call as CEO, Zamarin described a smooth transition with Armstrong and welcomed Rob Wingo, who had taken over his former strategic development role. That is a quieter opening than the customary corporate promise to reinvent everything by Tuesday. His account emphasized getting the team settled and carrying on with the work.
Continuity, however, does not guarantee a quiet market. In August 2025, he was already describing a national race to provide the energy required by the next generation of technology. Williams had broken ground on Socrates, its Ohio power project intended to serve growing AI demand. The business argument was becoming inseparable from a construction timetable.
When the customer needs more than gas
The crucial word in Zamarin’s current vocabulary is “solutions.” In May 2026, he said, “We want to be recognized as an infrastructure solutions provider.” It is a compact description of an expanding ambition: use the gas network, marketing capabilities, generation and storage together to address a customer’s energy requirements.
Consider the practical question behind that language. A data center developer needs electricity in a particular place, on a particular schedule. Gas delivered somewhere else does not settle the matter. Neither does generating capacity that arrives after the computing facility is ready. The commercial opportunity lies in coordinating the steps closely enough that the customer can proceed.
Behind-the-meter generation places electricity production at or near the customer’s facility. Williams has described combining gas generation with batteries and controls that respond to changing loads. The proposition is partly about timing: serving a large new customer while broader grid upgrades work through their own schedules.
By August 2026, Williams reported that the first phase of Socrates had been completed, with the second phase scheduled for the fourth quarter. That distinction matters. One phase had reached a reported milestone; the rest remained a delivery commitment. For a CEO selling speed, the calendar is an unusually plainspoken scorekeeper.
The old relationships in a new deal
The power business is only part of Zamarin’s remit. In August 2026, Williams also announced an agreement to acquire Momentum Midstream, linking its expansion plans to the Haynesville region and demand from Gulf Coast LNG and power markets. The announcement placed a familiar midstream transaction beside the newer power story.
In his earnings remarks, Zamarin added a personal connection. Williams had worked with the Momentum team more than a decade earlier, he recalled, on assets that became an important part of its Northeast system. He thanked Frank Tsuru, Brant Baird, Bill Pritchard and their colleagues. A transaction announcement briefly became a record of people who had built things together before.
That is a useful glimpse of the business beneath the presentations. Infrastructure takes long enough that a previous partnership can become relevant again years later. New demand may come from a fashionable technology; the relationships needed to serve it can be considerably older. Zamarin’s career has given him time on both sides of that equation.
Who gets to set the clock?
His argument for more infrastructure extends into public policy. Zamarin has advocated changes to permitting and the legal processes affecting energy projects. In 2026, he pointed to water-quality approvals under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act and prolonged litigation as areas where he wanted reform.
This is an interested executive’s position: Williams develops and operates the kinds of assets affected by those decisions. It also shows where he believes the constraint sits. Finding fuel and securing customers are only parts of a project. Permission to build, and confidence about when that permission will hold, belong in the same calculation.
His public roles have included the federal Gas Pipeline Advisory Committee and leadership of the Interstate Natural Gas Association of America’s board. Those responsibilities place him in conversations about the rules governing the industry as well as the industry’s plans. His engineering background and commercial responsibilities meet at precisely that boundary.
The people beside the pipeline
There is another recurring subject in his public remarks: the people doing the work. After attending the Northeast Supply Enhancement groundbreaking, he told investors about looking out at employees and union workers in the crowd. His reflection moved from the project to the livelihoods associated with building it.
That interest also appears in his support for Eagle OPS, an Oklahoma organization connecting veterans with community resources and one another. In 2022, he discussed backing its mission both personally and through Williams’ charitable giving. The connection offers a more local view of an executive usually heard discussing national energy demand.
“It’s something that I’m very passionate about.”Zamarin on supporting Eagle OPS, 2022
By September 2026, he was still taking the energy argument to new audiences, including a conversation with Tortoise Capital about powering the AI era. The topic keeps returning him to the same practical territory his career has covered for years: supply, equipment, customers and the distance between a plan and an operating asset.
Zamarin’s next chapter will be measured in projects delivered as much as speeches given. The appeal of instant computing is easy to understand. Making its electricity arrive on time asks for a different kind of patience, and a great many people willing to build. Somewhere behind the next quick answer is a much longer job.