Bridge Data Centres (BDC) has named Drew Chen as Co-Chief Executive Officer, effective 1 November 2026, pairing him with incumbent Eric Fan at the top of one of Asia Pacific's three largest next-generation data centre platforms by live capacity.

The move lands as BDC crosses a threshold of its own: one gigawatt of capacity surpassed in 2026, according to Fan's statement announcing the appointment. The company, headquartered in Singapore, operates across Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore and India.

Who is Drew Chen?

Chen arrives with more than 20 years of private equity experience, concentrated in telecommunications, media, technology and business services. He was a Senior Partner at Bain Capital (the US private investment firm) and a founding member of its Asia Pacific private equity team. Before that, he worked at Bain & Company, the consulting firm. His academic credentials run through Harvard twice: a bachelor's degree in economics and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Crucially, Chen is not new to this particular asset. Jonathan Zhu, Partner and Chair of China at Bain Capital, said Chen "played a pivotal role in the buildout of BDC and its sister company ChinData," giving him what Zhu called "an intimate knowledge of BDC's business."

That history matters. A co-CEO who already knows the asset, the sponsor and the sector removes the usual onboarding lag. Zhu framed the appointment in exactly those terms: "Together, he and Eric are well positioned to lead BDC through its next chapter of growth."

What does the appointment signal strategically?

The headline logic is scale. Fan said the appointment "strengthens our leadership team at an important point in BDC's growth, as we surpass one gigawatt of capacity in 2026," and that Chen's experience will "support our strategy as we scale BDC into a multi-gigawatt digital infrastructure platform in the coming years."

Read that carefully. One gigawatt today. Multiple gigawatts targeted. That trajectory requires capital discipline, construction management and client relationships held simultaneously — the profile of a private equity operator rather than a pure infrastructure executive. Chen's mandate, in effect, is to run BDC like a sponsored growth asset at a scale where most operators consolidate.

The demand side, in Chen's own telling, is not in question. "The Asia Pacific data centre sector is at inflection point for growth, fuelled by surging cloud adoption and the rapid expansion of AI workloads," he said.

His list of what BDC brings to that inflection point is short and specific:

• a "world class engineering and design team";
• "longstanding partnerships with global clients";
• "a decade of experience developing and operating next-generation digital infrastructure."

Chen added that he is "excited to partner with Eric and the leadership team to scale BDC's footprint across Asia Pacific and support our customers' ambitious growth plans."

Why a co-CEO structure?

Dual leadership is uncommon but not exotic in capital-intensive platforms, where the operating workload splits naturally between engineering-led execution and investment-led expansion. Fan and Chen's combined resumes map onto that split: Fan carries the operator's voice on capacity milestones; Chen brings the sponsor-side fluency in telecom, media and tech assets that Bain Capital has cultivated across the region.

The structure also keeps continuity at a company mid-transformation. BDC is not rebuilding — it is compounding, moving from one gigawatt of live capacity toward a multi-gigawatt platform across four Asian markets, with stated ambitions to grow "across Asia Pacific and beyond."

What to watch next

Three markers will tell investors and clients whether the arrangement works: the pace of new capacity announcements beyond the one-gigawatt mark, deeper penetration into BDC's four existing markets, and any entry into new geographies implied by that word "beyond."

For now, the signal is straightforward. BDC's owner has installed a proven deal-builder who helped construct the platform in the first place, and it has done so at the exact moment the region's AI and cloud demand curve is steepening. The board's bet is that familiar hands move fastest.