When Santiago Suinaga was seven years old, neighborhood kids would gather at his house to play video games on one of the few home computers in Mexico City. Suinaga had a blast showing his friends a glimpse of the digital technology that would shape their lives – and his.
Today, Suinaga is the first Chief Executive Officer of Infrastructure Masons, a global professional association that unites the builders of the digital age, and he’s committed to helping grow the industry that shapes lives throughout the global digital economy.
In the coming months and years, Suinaga will leverage his decades of experience in business and technology to position iMasons as the global voice for the digital infrastructure industry.
“In today’s world, there is no industry that does not benefit from or require digital infrastructure,” Suinaga said. “The role of iMasons is to enable the responsible and sustainable growth of our industry.”
A business savvy passion for technology
The computer in Suinaga’s childhood home belonged to his father, an investment banker and entrepreneur with a passion for technology. Suinaga inherited his father’s business acumen and passion for technology.
“I’m not an engineer, but I’m passionate about technology and understanding how things work,” he said.
Suinaga earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Iberoamerican University in Mexico City. In the summers during college, he worked with his father to launch a voice over internet protocol company and, upon graduation, accepted an internship with KIO Network Data Centers in Mexico City.
“I was supposed to join for six months to save enough money to go to Spain for my studies abroad,” Suinaga said. “I ended up spending almost 20 years there because I found it a very interesting business and industry.”
During his early years with KIO, Suinaga gained an insider’s view of the data center industry. He also earned a master’s in business administration from IPADE Business School in Mexico City and a diploma in entrepreneurship and IT innovation from the University of California at Berkeley Haas School of Business.
As Suinaga’s business skills sharpened, he assumed leadership roles in sales and marketing at KIO, and then in investor relations where he worked closely with the founder of the company. The founder saw Suinaga’s innate curiosity in how things work and challenged him to run the platform.
“I had a very extended team. They were all more knowledgeable than me, but I was the guy that always asked, ‘How does this work? What’s this for?’” Suinaga said. “My role was to simplify the technical aspects of it for a more general audience.”
His ability to translate the technical aspects of data centers into language that the public can understand caught the attention of KIO’s board, who promoted him to the Data Centers CEO role in 2017.
“Sometimes in the industry, you find that people with purely technical skillsets don’t communicate well with the rest of the stakeholders in the system,” he said. “I played a pivotal role in getting more awareness from investors and clients knowing the technical and operational side of the company.”
Industry insights from the iMasons community
Suinaga joined iMasons in 2017 after reading an article about Dean Nelson, who founded the organization in 2016. He joined the iMasons Advisory Council as KIO’s representative in 2020.
“It helped us gain insights on the industry’s biggest challenges and obstacles and make connections with industry experts,” Suinaga said.
In 2022, Suinaga joined other industry leaders at the Seattle-area home of Christian Belady, an iMasons founding board member, to discuss the industry’s role in addressing the global climate challenge. Over the course of six hours, they laid the groundwork for the iMasons Climate Accord to achieve carbon neutrality across materials, equipment and power.
“It was a game changing moment,” Suinaga said. “You had competitors and different stakeholders in the same room, and iMasons was able to bring them together in a unique forum and do something very big and inspiring.”
The next level for iMasons
iMasons’ Executive Director, Jeff Omelchuck, reached out to Suinaga at the end of 2023 to tell him that iMasons was searching for a CEO to take the association to the next level as the voice for the digital infrastructure industry. At first, Suinaga thought the job would be best suited for someone else. Then, he looked at the job description and saw himself in the role.
“Many companies in our industry have many challenges, and now with AI I don’t think we can continue to grow sustainably if we don’t act differently,” he said. “It was a breakout moment for me to say, ‘I can wait for somebody else to figure it out, or I can contribute by playing a more active role in the industry, which will have a larger impact.’”
Suinaga brings his deep experience navigating the challenges and opportunities common throughout the digital infrastructure industry as well as a unique perspective on building digital infrastructure in Latin America, an emerging market with huge potential for growth that’s attractive to players throughout the industry.
In his new role as CEO of iMasons, Suinaga will polish the association’s value proposition, a task that will require input, perspective and feedback from its diverse members. He starts the conversation with the perspective that iMasons is a neutral forum where industry members and business leaders are encouraged to discuss challenges and opportunities for sustainable growth and increasing the attractiveness and improving the perception of the digital infrastructure industry.
“iMasons is not just a local professional association, it has a global scope. That’s very rich because you can get a global perspective when you are stuck on a problem that you are not able to solve in a certain region,” he said. “You can get insight from the worldwide leaders of this industry across many regions and other experiences and that will enrich the conversation of how we could address global industry constraints.”
A global voice for the industry is more important now than ever as increased scrutiny of generative AI is raising awareness of the digital infrastructure that enables it. This awareness in turns increases public understanding of the role digital infrastructure plays throughout the digital economy.
In short, digital infrastructure is becoming recognized as a critical industry, Suinaga explained. Like other critical industries such as aviation, power, healthcare and financial markets, it is likely to become regulated at some point in time in many countries around the world, especially as AI’s importance to daily life increases.
“iMasons has the opportunity to be an ambassador for the industry, to set a neutral tone with our expertise and agnostic view,” he said. “We are the ones that could best set the table for our industry to thrive.”