Provident Data Centers, a national data center developer and division of Provident, a Dallas, TX-based firm with a $5.9 billion diverse real estate and investment portfolio, announces the appointment of Jack Backes as Principal Strategist.

Backes brings deep experience in both the U.S. realty and data center infrastructure sectors and will be a key asset as the company scales to meet demand for next-generation digital infrastructure.

“Jack brings a strong background in data center system engineering and a forward-thinking approach that will be invaluable as we enter our next phase of nationwide growth,” said Provident Founder and CEO Leon Backes.

In his role as Principal Strategist, Jack Backes leads sales and partnership activities and brings a track record of success in real estate, data centers, and software engineering along with a visionary approach to development. 

“Provident has always been about seeing possibilities where others don’t,” said Jack Backes, Principal Strategist. “With the rapid growth of AI and high-density computing, we’re aligning decades of real estate expertise with advanced data center infrastructure — focusing on site selection, power connectivity, and scalability to support the next generation of digital workloads.”

A seasoned technology leader and recognized real estate industry innovator, Backes served in several high-level positions at major technology firms prior to his return to Provident. At LinkedIn, he was a senior leader within the company’s data center infrastructure operations, helping oversee strategy and execution across a global fleet of 350,000 servers in five state-of-the-art hyperscale facilities. He served as execution lead for LinkedIn’s groundbreaking “Blueshift” migration onto Microsoft Azure — the largest and most complex cloud migration attempted up to that time — and led AI compute orchestration, configuration, and automation supporting more than two million AI workloads daily.

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