Jay Adelson

Jay Adelson is a serial entrepreneur and technology with a deep understanding of early internet architecture. Prior to founding Equinix, he gained crucial experience working in the facilities and network operations division at Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), where he witnessed firsthand the physical bottlenecks threatening the early growth of the internet.

Jay Adelson is a highly prominent American technology entrepreneur and the co-founder of Equinix, the massive global data center and internet infrastructure giant. While working as a facilities manager at the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in the late 1990s, Adelson and his colleague Al Avery recognized a massive structural flaw in the early internet: competing telecom networks lacked a neutral physical space to exchange traffic. In 1998, the duo departed DEC to launch Equinix, establishing highly secure, vendor-neutral data centers that completely revolutionized internet routing globally. Following his massive foundational success at Equinix, Adelson famously went on to co-found the incredibly popular social news website Digg alongside Kevin Rose, cementing his status as a legendary Silicon Valley operator.