Stellanor Names Gary Watson as New Managing Director
Big changes at Stellanor: Gary Watson steps up as MD to lead growth and operational excellence in the data center sector.
Eleven facilities in nine months. That's not a typo — that's the pace at which Stellanor Datacenters has been building its UK footprint since launching last year. Now, the DWS-backed operator is installing the leadership it needs to turn that acquisition sprint into a coherent, scalable business.
Gary Watson has been appointed managing director of Stellanor, stepping up from the COO role he took on in February 2026. The move signals that the company is shifting gears — from land-grab mode into the harder, less glamorous work of operational integration and platform maturity.
From Two Sites to Eleven: Understanding What Stellanor Is Building
Stellanor isn't a startup in the traditional sense. It was seeded with real assets from day one — two London data centers acquired from Colt Technology Services, sites that carry legacy DNA from CenturyLink and Level 3 via Lumen's EMEA operations. That's infrastructure with history, existing customer relationships, and established interconnection value.
The bigger move came with the acquisition of Redcentric's data center portfolio: eight facilities totaling 41MW across London (Shoreditch and Hounslow), Woking, Gatwick, Byfleet, Reading, Cambridge, and Elland in West Yorkshire. That deal recently closed. The company is also in the process of acquiring a facility outside London from semiconductor firm Imagination Technologies.
Forty-one megawatts across eight sites isn't a single campus — it's a distributed enterprise colocation network, and managing it requires an entirely different operational playbook than running a hyperscale facility.
The geography here is deliberate. These aren't trophy assets in the M25 corridor alone — they're regional anchors covering enterprise markets that hyperscalers routinely ignore. Byfleet. Elland. Gatwick. For businesses that need low-latency connectivity to specific locations or have compliance reasons to keep data in particular jurisdictions, this kind of distributed footprint has genuine strategic value.
Gary Watson: The Right CV for This Moment
Watson's background reads like a tour through two decades of European data center evolution. He spent a decade at Keppel Data Centres as country manager for Ireland — Keppel being one of the more operationally disciplined players in the APAC-originated colocation space. Before that: Sungard AS, Hosting 365, Telecity, and Cable & Wireless.
That last pair matters more than people might initially assume. Telecity was one of Europe's most significant colocation operators before its merger with Interxion — a company built on the same distributed, enterprise-focused model that Stellanor is now pursuing. Watson has seen what that kind of network looks like when it works and what it takes to hold it together operationally.
Bringing in someone who's been country manager for a major operator, rather than a pure financial or commercial executive, suggests Stellanor's board understands that the next phase of risk is operational, not transactional.
His remit covers a lot of ground: operational delivery, platform integration, commercial performance, customer engagement, and footprint expansion. That's a broad mandate, and it's worth reading between the lines. "Platform integration" isn't just an IT term — in the context of an operator that has assembled eleven facilities through multiple acquisitions, it means harmonizing systems, processes, SLAs, staffing models, and customer experiences across a portfolio that was never designed as a unified whole.
The DWS Infrastructure Play
Stellanor's backer deserves some context here. DWS — formerly Deutsche Asset Management, founded in 1956 and listed on the Frankfurt Stock Exchange since 2018, with Deutsche Bank retaining a majority stake — is not a data center specialist. It's a global asset manager with infrastructure funds that have identified European data centers as a high-conviction allocation.
DWS is running a parallel play with Mediterra, a data center operator focused on southern Europe that also launched last year. It recently sold European operator NorthC to Antin Infrastructure Partners. The pattern is consistent: build or seed platform companies, scale through acquisition, and position for either continued growth or exit at a premium valuation.
For Stellanor specifically, the growth trajectory has been rapid enough that the appointment of strong operational leadership isn't just a nice-to-have — it's a risk management decision. Integrating Redcentric's eight-site portfolio alone involves inherited contracts, staff transfers under TUPE regulations, existing customer SLAs, and aging infrastructure that will need capital investment to meet the "AI-ready" positioning that chairman Michael Tobin CBE is publicly committed to.
Tobin's comment that Stellanor is "firmly positioned to support growing demand for enterprise colocation and AI-ready infrastructure" is aspirational language that Watson now has to make concrete. AI-ready means different things to different people, but at minimum, it implies higher power density capability, reliable cooling infrastructure, and connectivity to the networks that AI workloads actually depend on.
What Comes Next — And What's Actually Hard
Watson's own statement focused on integration before growth: "Our focus now is on integration, ensuring the highest standards across the platform and continuing to deliver operational excellence for our customers. At the same time, we are investing in the platform and building the next phase of growth."
That sequencing is honest and, frankly, encouraging. Operators that try to keep acquiring before they've digested previous purchases tend to create customer experience problems that take years to unwind.
The pending acquisition from Imagination Technologies adds another variable. Imagination is a chip designer, not a data center operator — which means the facility being acquired is likely optimized for internal use rather than colocation. Converting that to a customer-facing asset involves more than flipping a sign on the door.
The real test for Watson won't be the next acquisition announcement — it will be whether Stellanor can deliver consistent operational standards across eleven facilities that were built, acquired, and operated by at least four different previous owners.
For customers, this appointment is a meaningful signal. Enterprise colocation buyers — particularly those evaluating regional UK providers as alternatives to the hyperscale giants — want to see stable, experienced leadership before committing long-term contracts. Watson's appointment gives Stellanor a credible face for those conversations.
The UK enterprise colocation market has plenty of demand. Data sovereignty concerns, latency requirements for distributed workloads, and the sheer cost of hyperscale alternatives are all pushing mid-market companies toward operators exactly like Stellanor. The infrastructure opportunity is real. Whether Stellanor can execute on it at pace — while maintaining the operational standards that justify enterprise trust — is the question Watson has just signed up to answer.
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