He didn't find his direction until almost 50. Then he built a data center empire, sold a company, co-founded a fiber startup, and came back to run the whole thing as CEO.
Derek Garnier | CEO, Evocative
The sock, according to Derek Garnier, has a habit of sliding off. "I walk around like everything's fine," he once explained in an interview, "but deep down, inside my shoe, my sock is sliding off." It's an oddly specific image for a CEO of a company handling enterprise data centers across four continents - but that specificity is precisely the point. Garnier is not a man who speaks in investor-deck language. He is an operator who has been inside the machine long enough to know exactly what makes it tick, and exactly where the friction hides.
Today, Garnier runs Evocative as Chief Executive Officer from Los Angeles, leading a company that has grown from a two-location regional colocation shop into a global digital infrastructure provider with more than twenty locations worldwide. Evocative's portfolio spans colocation, bare metal servers, private cloud, and carrier-neutral network connectivity - the foundational plumbing of an AI-hungry internet. Garnier took the top seat in February 2023, succeeding founder Arman Khalili, who moved to the board of directors. The appointment was not a surprise to anyone who had been watching. He'd helped build the company once already.
His guiding principle, stated plainly: "To lead responsibly, empower those around you, and strive for the best outcome for all involved." In practice, this means he thinks of the CEO role as something closer to an orchestra conductor than a general. "The CEO sets the pace and tone for the entire organization," he told Authority Magazine. "The CEO should be approachable, not feared." Coming from someone who started his career as a network engineer soldering patch cables, this isn't a corporate slogan. It's the accumulated scar tissue of three and a half decades in an industry where one wrong call can take a Fortune 500 company's data offline.
Garnier's path to that conductor's podium was anything but direct. He began as an engineer at ISI, a network and data center company later renamed Global Crossing - building physical infrastructure during the internet's first wild decade. From there, he moved through MFS Datanet and Cabletron Systems before joining Sitesmith as an early employee. Sitesmith, a global managed services provider, was eventually acquired by AboveNet Communications, which gave Garnier his first taste of what it means to operate through an acquisition rather than just watch one happen. Later, he landed at QTS Datacenters, one of the largest publicly traded data center REITs, where he gained enterprise-scale operational experience.
The pivot that defined him came when he became CEO of Layer42 Networks - a national network services and colocation provider that was, when he arrived, operating under the shadow of bankruptcy. Garnier restructured the company, returned it to profitability, and sold it in 2015 to Wave Broadband, which was expanding aggressively into Silicon Valley. He stayed on post-acquisition as SVP of Datacenter Services. The sale was a clean exit and a clean lesson: a business is not a fixed object. It is a story in progress, and the question is always whether you are adding to it or subtracting from it.
By 2017, Garnier had joined Evocative as President and COO under founder Arman Khalili. During his first stint, he helped the company grow from a single data center location to eight locations across five markets, incorporating five acquisitions and completing a capital raise. Then, at the end of 2019, he left. What followed was one of his most unexpected chapters.
Alongside co-founder Dan Davis - whom he'd known from consulting work at Zenzu, a firm advising private equity investors on telecom assets - Garnier launched Arcadian Infracom. The company was built to solve a specific, unglamorous problem: the US Southwest had almost no diverse long-haul fiber routes. The existing routes were old, indirect, and vulnerable. Arcadian built new ones, deliberately routing its fiber through rural and tribal communities in New Mexico, Arizona, and beyond - simultaneously providing diverse, lower-latency infrastructure for data center customers and broadband connectivity for communities that had little or none. It was infrastructure with a mission, and it was very much Garnier's fingerprints on it.
When Evocative came calling again in March 2022 - this time with the top job on the table - Garnier returned. Eleven months later, he was named CEO.
The data center industry, in 2025, is being rewritten by AI workloads. The power demands alone are rewriting the engineering playbook. Where a standard enterprise colocation rack used to draw 5-8 kilowatts, AI inference clusters can require 100 kilowatts per rack or more. Cooling systems, power distribution, fiber density, floor loading - everything is under pressure. Garnier has been thinking about this in public, at conferences, in press interviews, and in the announcements that have come out of Evocative with increasing frequency.
In December 2025, Evocative announced it had closed a significant debt financing round from a large global investment firm, with continued equity support from Crestline Investors, Inc. Guggenheim Securities served as sole structuring advisor and placement agent - not a small-time deal. The capital is earmarked for targeted infrastructure investments: capacity upgrades, strategic metropolitan expansions, and enhancements across Evocative's data center, network, bare metal, and cloud platforms.
Garnier's statement on the financing was precise: "This financing marks a significant milestone in Evocative's continued journey to expand capacity and deliver on our long-term vision of high density colocation and a robust global network to support next generation AI applications." And in a later comment: "We remain committed to building with discipline, scale, and customer focus. Our aim is to continue delivering the space, power, and connectivity required for AI development, hybrid cloud environments, and infrastructure diversification."
The strategic thesis is clear. Garnier believes hybrid cloud - combining on-premises or colocation infrastructure with public cloud deployments - will become the dominant model as enterprises discover the real costs of cloud lock-in. He has said as much publicly: "Unpredictable costs and limitations in managing large-scale workloads, such as those required for AI, have emerged as challenges for many companies." Evocative's positioning as a carrier-neutral provider that speaks both colocation and cloud - offering bare metal servers alongside its Evocative Metal enterprise solution and network on-ramps to major public cloud providers - is a bet that enterprises will need a trusted, flexible partner rather than a single-vendor stack.
He spoke at Datacloud USA 2025 in Austin on a panel titled "Designing for Uncertainty in the Era of AI" alongside executives from Nvidia, STACK Infrastructure, Black & Veatch, and Susanna Kass from Stanford University. The conversation centered on how AI's explosive growth is forcing data center operators to rethink power architecture at the rack level - not just the building level. At the ONE Houlihan Lokey Global Conference in New York in May 2025, he joined a panel on how data centers are adapting to support AI demand through colocation, edge computing, and hybrid deployments.
"Evocative is in a unique spot. We are very flexible and look more for partnerships than merely viewing our industry as a competitive landscape. Data continues to grow. Whether it lives in a public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid environment, we can count on the internet growing and evolving."
From a candid interview with Authority Magazine on becoming a first-time CEO.
Garnier spotted the shift toward hybrid cloud early - recognizing that enterprises would need both on-premises control and cloud flexibility. Being early to that call shaped Evocative's product strategy for years.
He draws a sharp line between customer service (what happens after the sale) and customer experience (the entire journey). "We're all privileged to have direct involvement in engaging with customers," he says.
The CEO's job is not to carry the company - it's to hire people good enough that you don't have to. Trust enables delegation, and delegation is what makes scale possible.
Incremental wins matter. Teams need to know when they've hit a checkpoint on the way to a larger objective - recognition fuels the next sprint.
For Garnier, the CEO chair is a megaphone for inclusion. At Evocative, with employees across dozens of countries sharing cultural experiences and religious observances, he actively amplifies voices that would otherwise go unheard.
Garnier is candid about something most executives would bury: he didn't figure out his career direction until he was nearly 50. In an industry full of people who knew they wanted to build networks at age 22, this admission carries a kind of deliberate honesty.
His wife - whom he met on a random flight - became CEO of LisaHealth, a women's health company. He credits her with pushing him to live up to his potential and then to use that position to help others. The two-CEO household is not incidental to how he thinks about leadership. She modeled something for him about what ambition looks like when it's pointed outward.
He describes the digital infrastructure world as having two degrees of separation at most. "Everyone in this industry knows everyone else," he's noted. After 35 years, he is the connective tissue of that network - an engineer turned operator turned CEO who has seen the industry from every angle, at almost every company worth naming.
He admires Orson Welles for "fearless adventure" and the ability to move people through storytelling. For a CEO of a colocation company, it's an unusual hero. But Garnier has always been slightly to the left of the obvious choice.
Took a company operating in bankruptcy and restructured it to profitability, culminating in a successful sale to Wave Broadband in 2015. Stayed post-acquisition as SVP of Datacenter Services.
Co-founded a long-haul dark fiber company purposefully routing new routes through rural and tribal communities in the US Southwest - simultaneously solving infrastructure diversity and rural broadband access.
As President and COO, helped grow Evocative from a single data center to eight locations across five markets, completing five acquisitions and a capital raise - before he'd even become CEO.
Named CEO of Evocative in February 2023, taking the chair from founder Arman Khalili. Board-level recognition of a track record that spanned two separate tenures at the same company.
Led Evocative's debt financing round from a large global investment firm backed by Crestline Investors, with Guggenheim Securities as sole placement agent - to fund AI-driven infrastructure expansion.
Regular speaker at Datacloud USA, ONE Houlihan Lokey Global Conference, and PTC - on panels covering AI infrastructure design, colocation strategy, and data center workforce development.
"The CEO sets the pace and tone for the entire organization - like an orchestra conductor who directs the band members, establishes rhythm, and should be approachable, not feared."
"Being CEO is a place of privilege because of the impact it has on an organization. My goal is to use my position within the company to amplify others' voices."
"Evocative is in a unique spot. We are very flexible and look more for partnerships than merely viewing our industry as a competitive landscape."
"This financing marks a significant milestone in Evocative's continued journey to expand capacity and deliver on our long-term vision of high density colocation and a robust global network."
"My ultimate goal is to help as many people as possible become the best version of themselves."
"To lead responsibly, empower those around you, and strive for the best outcome for all involved."