Matthew VanderZanden

Chief Executive Officer, STACK Americas STACK Infrastructure

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Matthew VanderZanden is Chief Executive Officer of STACK Americas, the Americas region of the Denver-headquartered data centre developer STACK Infrastructure. He was appointed in December 2025, ten months after being made President, and has been with the company since 2019 in a sequence of roles — Chief Strategy Officer, then Chief Operating Officer — that put him closer to the physical business than most chief executives arrive. His specialism is the part of the industry that decides everything downstream and gets discussed least: where the building goes. Before STACK he built and ran Facebook’s global data centre site selection programme, which is the discipline of matching power, water, fibre, land, tax treatment and a local community’s tolerance against a hyperscaler’s capacity plan.

Career Highlights

• Chief Executive Officer, STACK Americas, announced 12 December 2025.
• Named President of STACK Americas in February 2025, with commercial, financial, development, design and construction, facility management and legal operations reporting to him.
• Joined STACK in 2019 as Chief Strategy Officer, leading development and location strategy for the data centre portfolio alongside product development and strategic partnerships; subsequently Chief Operating Officer, running day-to-day strategy.
• At Facebook, Director of Data Center Site Selection, where he built and managed the global data centre location strategy programme and team and helped expand the company’s global footprint.
• Leads the Americas region of a business with 13GW of current and pipeline capacity across 24 global markets.

Professional Journey

VanderZanden’s career sits in the least visible and most consequential layer of the cloud. A hyperscale data centre is a negotiation with physics and with a county: enough power, enough water, a fibre route, buildable land, a grid interconnection queue that does not run past the customer’s deadline, and a community that will have it. Getting that wrong is not recoverable by engineering later.

He learned it inside the demand side. At Facebook he was Director of Data Center Site Selection, building and managing the company’s global data centre location strategy programme and the team that ran it, during the period in which Facebook expanded its footprint worldwide. That gave him what STACK would later describe as the perspective of a former hyperscale data centre executive — someone who has been the customer his company now sells to.

He joined STACK Infrastructure in 2019 as Chief Strategy Officer, leading development and location strategy for the portfolio and working on product development and strategic partnerships. He then became Chief Operating Officer, responsible for day-to-day strategy, and in February 2025 STACK promoted him to President of STACK Americas — a newly framed role covering commercial, financial, development, design and construction, facility management and legal operations. Brian Cox, then CEO of STACK Americas, described the promotion as a reflection of the company’s expansion and scale.

Ten months later, on 12 December 2025, STACK named him Chief Executive Officer, STACK Americas. Cox moved to become Interim CEO of STACK EMEA while remaining on the STACK Americas board, and Preet Gona leads STACK APAC, under a unified operating model that the company says is intended to keep delivery consistent across the three regions. Phil Koen, chairman of the board, framed the appointment around the business having demonstrated its ability to operate at the highest level.

VanderZanden’s own framing of the job is narrower and more operational than the usual chief-executive statement. STACK, he said, is built on a culture of partnership and execution, and as demand accelerates the responsibility is to deliver capacity where clients need it most, with precision. The scale that responsibility covers has grown quickly: STACK reported more than 10GW of capacity across 23 markets in early 2025 and 13GW of current and pipeline capacity across 24 markets by the end of that year.

In March 2026 he was still in the role, quoted in STACK’s announcement of a further round of Americas appointments — Mike Casey promoted to Chief Operating Officer, Kevin Hughes to a newly created Chief External Affairs Officer post, and Addam Friedl to Chief Technology Officer. The creation of an external affairs role is itself a signal about where the constraint now lies in this industry: not in building data centres but in being permitted to.

Education

No education record could be established. Neither STACK’s own press releases and team page nor the trade coverage of his appointments names an institution or a degree, and no other primary source was found. The field is left empty rather than filled from an aggregator.