Kao Data expands leadership team

Kao Data has appointed Matthew Harris as its Chief Financial Officer (CFO).

Following his position as Managing Director at Goldacre Noé Group, Kao Data’s original founders and investment firm, Matthew joins the company’s c-suite, having overseen the financial evolution of the business from inception. With a Masters’ degree from the University of Cambridge, a fellowship from the Institute of Chartered Accountants and over 15 years’ experience in the financial sector, he brings extensive financial expertise at a pivotal point in the business’ evolution.

During his time with Goldacre, Harris played a crucial role in securing investment into Kao Data from Legal & General Capital in 2019, and overseeing the investment of up to £130m from New Zealand-based investors Infratil Limited last month. Further, his strategic appointment comes at a transformative point in Kao Data’s development as it moves from a single-site campus to a 55MW multi-site operator, having recently acquired two new data centres with a long-term anchor lease from a large financial services business in the UK.

As CFO, Matthew will work directly alongside CEO Lee Myall, CTO Gérard Thibault, COO Paul Finch and Vice President, Spencer Lamb, to help spearhead the next phase of the company’s growth, engaging with new and existing customers within the financial services, life sciences, enterprise, and cloud sectors. Having firmly cemented its position as the UK’s preeminent home for sustainable, high performance computing (HPC) and artificial intelligence (AI), and becoming the host of NVIDIA’s Cambridge-1, Kao Data will also continue to service the industrial-scale requirements of GPU-accelerated computing users from across the UK and Europe.

“Having been firmly engaged with the company’s vision and its growth strategy from inception, I’m delighted to have joined Kao Data formally, as its CFO,” said Matthew Harris. “Kao Data is truly on the cutting-edge of tech, working with some of the industry’s foremost thought leaders and engineers to push the boundaries of design and innovation. Our facilities have been engineered to support the UK government’s National AI Strategy and have created a blueprint for the future of high performance data centres.”

“Further, as our company transitions into a multi-site operator, there has never been a better time to join,” he continued. “And with environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investments on the rise, I’m proud to be able to oversee the next phase of the company’s growth in an economical and environmentally responsible way.”