Cushman & Wakefield has strengthened its APAC & EMEA Data Centre Group (DCG) leadership with three senior appointments, as the firm continues to scale its platform to meet accelerating client demand for integrated cross-regional advice.
Tom Glover joins as Head of Data Centre Group, EMEA. He was previously at JLL where he was Executive Director and EMEA Head of Data Centre Transactions. Glover brings 15 years dedicated to the data centre sector and has overseen transactions worth more than US$20 billion. He has served as a non-executive director on the board of data centre and colocation provider Asanti and led international business development at Interxion, prior to its acquisition by Digital Realty.
Based in London, Glover will lead the continued EMEA build-out of Cushman & Wakefield’s DCG, which provides an integrated, end-to-end offering across research, advisory, transactions, capital markets and technical services. DCG clients in APAC and EMEA include occupiers, hyperscalers, neo-clouds, developers, operators, landowners and institutional investors, supported by more than 350 dedicated professionals working on live projects and facilities.
Andrew Fray takes on the newly created role of Head of Origination & Major Transactions, APAC & EMEA. In this cross-regional remit, Fray will originate and deliver the group’s most complex mandates for clients operating across both regions. His recent track record includes major powered land transactions and AI colocation leases in the UK, Spain, Italy, France and Ireland, among other markets. The role responds to how the sector’s largest clients now operate, with hyperscalers running global site selection in parallel across regions, neo-clouds building multi-region AI campuses in a single decision cycle, and institutional investors deploying capital into APAC and EMEA platforms from the same investment committees. Fray’s remit gives these clients a single senior point of accountability for their most complex mandates.
James Polkinghorne joins Cushman & Wakefield as Head of Operations, Data Centre Group, APAC & EMEA. Based in Singapore, Polkinghorne will optimise the platform across APAC & EMEA, strengthening delivery across regions, service lines and accounts. He joins from AirTrunk, the Blackstone-owned hyperscale data centre platform. Prior to this he spent five years at Macquarie Group, working across the origination and development of large-scale renewable energy projects.
Tom Gibson, President – Data Centre Group, APAC & EMEA at Cushman & Wakefield, said: “These three appointments reflect both the scale of our ambition in EMEA and the way our clients’ needs have evolved. Tom Glover’s appointment is a key milestone in extending to EMEA the momentum we have built in Asia Pacific. He is highly respected in the data centre industry, while his 30-year technology career began in software, which, combined with his data centre expertise, gives him a rare end-to-end understanding of the technology stack.
“Andrew Fray’s new cross-regional remit recognises how our largest clients operate today. The most complex powered land, AI colocation and platform mandates no longer sit neatly within a single region, and our clients increasingly expect a single senior point of accountability. Andrew’s track record on precisely these mandates makes him the right person to lead this.
“James is a critical Data Centre Group appointment to ensure we bring the very best of Cushman & Wakefield to our clients. His combination of operator-side experience, institutional capital exposure and project development will be invaluable as we build out our EMEA platform and continue to scale in APAC.”
