hyperscale
(8)
Digital Realty
The company you have probably never heard of owns the buildings your favorite apps actually live in. Here is how a REIT born from bankruptcy auctions became the landlord of the AI boom.
Steve Tuck
Steve Tuck is the co-founder and CEO of Oxide Computer Company, a hardware-software startup building a rack-scale 'cloud computer' that brings hyperscaler-style elastic infrastructure to on-premises data centers. After nine years at Dell and roughly a decade at cloud provider Joyent, Tuck teamed with Bryan Cantrill and Jessie Frazelle in 2019 to co-design servers, networking, and software from the ground up. Under his leadership Oxide has shipped its first commercial racks and raised more than half a billion dollars, including a $200M Series C, to expand its take on enterprise cloud ownership.
Ingenium LA
Ingenium is an independent engineering, consulting and operations firm specializing in mission-critical data centers across Latin America. Founded in Costa Rica in 2008, it acts as a vendor-agnostic trusted advisor that plans, designs, builds, certifies and operates high-availability digital infrastructure. The firm has worked on more than 150 data center projects in over 20 countries and holds one of the region's largest rosters of engineers accredited by the Uptime Institute, BICSI, LEED, PMI and ISO - including work on Latin America's first Tier IV design certification.
Proficium, Inc.
Proficium is a Union City, California optical connectivity company that designs, manufactures, and tests the cables and transceivers that move data inside hyperscale and AI data centers. Founded in 2003 by Dan Miranda, it supplies OEM-compatible optical transceivers (400G, 800G, and 1.6Tb/s), DAC/ACC/AOC copper and optical cables, fiber assemblies, and InfiniBand interconnects validated against gear from Arista, Cisco, NVIDIA, and Juniper. An early mover in AI/ML cluster networking since 2019, the company was acquired by private equity firm Mill Point Capital in 2024 to scale with surging data center demand.
TeraHop
TeraHop is an optical solutions provider building high-speed optical transceivers and modules for AI clusters and data centers. Operating from Singapore, San Jose, Thailand and a new Texas plant, it ships 400G, 800G, 1.6T and emerging 12.8T-class optics. As the international-facing arm of Zhongji InnoLight - the world's largest optical-transceiver maker - TeraHop pairs high-volume manufacturing with R&D partnerships across NVIDIA, Marvell and Corning, and in 2025-2026 raised roughly US$517M with backing from Abu Dhabi's ADIA and Singapore's Temasek.
Dave Welch
Dave Welch is the founder and CEO of AttoTude, a Menlo Park deep-tech startup building the world's first terahertz interconnect that runs over wire instead of fiber or photonics, aimed at unclogging the data-movement bottleneck inside AI and hyperscale data centers. A co-founder of Infinera, where he pioneered large-scale photonic integrated circuits, and former CTO at SDL, Welch holds more than 200 patents, has authored roughly 300 publications, and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering. In April 2025 AttoTude raised a $50M Series B, pushing total funding past $90M.
Starcloud
Starcloud is a US deep-tech company building data centers in orbit. By placing GPU clusters in space, it taps near-continuous solar power and passive radiative cooling to run AI training and inference without the land, water, grid-permitting, and energy constraints that bottleneck data centers on Earth. In November 2025 its Starcloud-1 satellite became the first spacecraft to train a large language model in orbit using an Nvidia H100 GPU; its $170M Series A in March 2026 made it the fastest unicorn in Y Combinator history.
Todd Swanson
Todd Swanson is the Chief Executive Officer of Proficium, a Union City, California-based company specializing in high-performance optical transceivers, fiber optic cables, and connectivity solutions for hyperscale data centers and AI/ML clusters. With over 30 years in optical networking, he brings deep expertise from Finisar (where he rose to Co-CEO and COO) and Intel (where he led Silicon Photonics as VP/GM). Appointed in August 2024 following Proficium's acquisition by Mill Point Capital, Swanson is steering the company through the AI-driven data center connectivity boom.