Christian Belady

Christian Belady is a seasoned veteran in managing Datacenter/Infrastructure Development at global scale. Since retiring from Microsoft, Christian serves as an Advisor and/or a Board member for several companies related to digital infrastructure. At microsoft, he has developed one of the largest data center footprints in the world. He was the Vice President of Cloud Infrastructure Strategy and Architecture for Microsoft’s Cloud Infrastructure Organization. Five years prior to this role, he was 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 drove innovative thinking and quantitative benchmarking in the field. With over 150 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 and served on the board and was 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 and the iMasons "2020 Industry Luminary" Award. Selected for the 2023 Interglobix Magazine's "The Titans List." Recently, he was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering (NAE) and the Northern Virginia Technology Council selected him for the 2024 Data Center Icon" Award. 

Christian was a key player in development of the iMasons' Climate Accord (ICA). This historic even was conceived at Christian home (coined Chez Belady) on 2/22/2022 with 40+ Industry executives. Over 100 companies committed to standardize embedded carbon reporting and was announced in May 2022 in Monaco.

Christian has published dozens of papers, is frequently quoted in the press, and is a featured speaker on data center trends in the industry.