Christian Belady is a seasoned veteran in managing Datacenter/Infrastructure Development at global scale. He has developed one of the largest data center footprints in the world. He is currently the general manager of Cloud Infrastructure Strategy and Architecture for Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure Organization. In recent years he has been responsible for driving the strategy and delivery of server and facility development worldwide, including research, engineering, construction, and operations for Microsoft’s data center portfolio.
In 2010, SearchData named Christian as one of “5 People who changed the data center” industry and helped drive innovative thinking and quantitative benchmarking in the field. With over 132 US patents and many international patents, Christian is an ASME and IMAPS Fellow and a founding member of ASHRAE’s TC9.9, which drive industry guidelines. He was one of the early architects of the Green Grid where he has served on the board and as treasurer. He is an originator of the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data center which is now broadly used by the industry. In 2011, he co-authored Water Utilization Effectiveness (WUE) and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE) with the Green Grid. He has also worked closely with government agencies such as the Department of Energy and European Commission to define efficiency metrics for data centers and servers. As a result of his efforts, Christian has received several industry awards including the 2013 DatacenterDynamics “Outstanding Contribution to the Industry” Award, the 2017 DataCloud “Data Center Thought Leadership” Award and the 2015 Semi-Therm “Thermi” Award.
Christian has published dozens of papers, is frequently quoted in the press, and is a featured speaker on data center trends in the industry. Since the late 1990s, his publications have focused on data centers and the industry’s need for engineering efficient computing environments.
