Research · October 30, 2026

AIB's New COO — Hiring the Operator for Nebius's 50 MW Build

AIB Data Centers hired Jason Burnett as chief operating officer to execute its next phase: delivering the 50 MW Nebius-anchored CLT1 campus and a contracted power portfolio that grew from 65 MW to about 120 MW.

On October 28, 2026, AIB Data Centers announced the appointment of Jason Burnett as chief operating officer, effective October 26. Burnett reports directly to chief executive officer Jerry Tang and will oversee construction execution, procurement, and data center operations, with responsibility for standardized processes covering simultaneous project delivery, cost control, schedule performance, and operational efficiency as the portfolio scales. AIB, listed on NYSE American under the ticker AIB, describes itself as a developer of right-sized, 40–90 MW data centers for artificial intelligence and high-performance computing customers.

The appointment is framed, in Tang's own words, as a change of phase. “We have secured the power and signed our anchor customer. The next priority is executing on schedule and on budget,” Tang said. That sentence is the whole story of this hire: AIB says the land-and-power part of its strategy is done, and the risk now sits in building on time. Burnett's mandate matches that framing — processes, controls, and operating standards for delivering projects “efficiently and consistently as the portfolio grows,” in his words.

Why Burnett fits the job description. He brings more than 20 years of experience in data center, cloud, and managed infrastructure operations. Most recently he served as chief operating officer of Hivelocity, a provider of bare metal, colocation, and private cloud infrastructure with approximately 50 data centers globally. There he held profit-and-loss responsibility across operations, infrastructure, product, engineering, and service delivery, and he oversaw platform integration following four acquisitions — the exact combination of operating scale and post-deal integration that a small developer growing a multi-site portfolio needs. Before that he was vice president of customer operations at DataBank, and held operations leadership roles at Contegix, Hosting.com, and NeoSpire, where he was the company's third employee and helped launch its first data center. He began his career in the United States Marine Corps, in the Information Systems Management Office of the 8th Engineer Support Battalion at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.

What he is being hired to deliver. Two milestones in the announcement define the workload. First, AIB's total contracted power capacity expanded from 65 MW to approximately 120 MW, an increase the company's October 7 shareholder letter attributes to a strategic acquisition in Texas. Second, AIB holds a binding 12-year agreement with Nebius (Nasdaq: NBIS) for 50 MW of critical IT capacity at its CLT1 data center campus, with two potential five-year renewal periods, according to that same letter. The October 28 release describes the Nebius deal as the anchor-customer signing that, together with the contracted power, justifies strengthening the operating bench “to support the next phase of construction and project delivery.”

For BlitzLab readers, the Nebius connection is the point of this story. Nebius carries a published BlitzLab score of 59/100 (C), and its capacity growth depends on landlords like AIB actually delivering the halls it has contracted. AIB's stated funding plan for CLT1 — customer prepayments plus project-level financing, which the company says it currently expects to mean no corporate-level common equity is needed to fund CLT1's development — is a company expectation, not a completed financing, and this article treats it as such. The announcement names no construction schedule, no contract value for the Nebius agreement, no delivery dates, and no CLT1 site location beyond the campus name, so this article claims none of those.

What this is — and what it is not. This is an operating hire, not a new customer, not a new financing, and not a capacity expansion. The 120 MW figure is contracted power capacity, not operating IT capacity, and the 50 MW figure is contracted critical IT capacity at one campus, not AIB's total portfolio. The announcement discloses no compensation terms, no project-level financing terms, and no prepayment amounts, and this article claims none. AIB has no published BlitzLab score, and this article is not a rescore: Nebius's 59/C score is unchanged, and no score, subscore, or threshold in this article is altered.

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