Peter Hannaford
CEO Edge Nebula
Peter has a distinguished track record in the data centre industry. In 1997, he founded Waterfields, one of Europe's pioneering data centre construction firms which delivered major facilities for clients including Global Switch (Paris and Amsterdam), PSiNet (later Telstra) in London, and Czech Telecom in Prague.
He later founded Tecnikon, the company behind the first water-cooled rack for high-density servers. This patented technology was sold to APC in 2003, playing a key role in APC's market leadership through innovations such as In-Row cooling and Containment. Following APC's acquisition by Schneider Electric in 2007, Peter served as Vice President of Data Centres and Alliances.
In 2010, Peter established Datacenter People, the world's first global recruitment firm focused exclusively on the data centre sector. This was followed in 2018 by the creation of Portman Partners, a boutique executive search firm serving senior leadership roles in digital infrastructure.
His latest venture, EdgeNebula is pioneering a new class of distributed, liquid-cooled micro data centres for AI and cloud workloads, underpinning the development of a nationwide edge mesh to support low-latency, high-performance computing.
Day 2 | 4th November
9:30 AM Opening Keynote Talk: AI Value Reality: How to separate hype from durable value to avoid mispriced risk and protect long-term returns
As capital floods into data centres on the promise of AI, the gap between investor expectations and delivery reality is widening fast. Shifting hyperscaler strategies are reducing demand visibility and driving mispriced return assumptions. At the same time, the economics of AI are evolving, with real compute costs increasingly colliding with unclear or uneven monetisation models.
Private equity-backed platforms are under pressure as development risk, power delays and heavy upfront spending clash with optimistic models. Fast-changing technology raises the risk of facilities that no longer match what customers need. Power, not buildings, is becoming the real source of lasting value, reshaping how deals are structured and how portfolios perform.
This talk looks past the growth story to show where risk really sits today, which parts of the market keep their pricing power as AI margins shrink elsewhere, and how to position your capital as the market moves from expansion to discipline, including what the shift from training AI models to running them at scale means for where durable value is built.
Check out the incredible speaker line-up to see who will be joining Peter.
Download The Latest Agenda