Bringing fifteen years of experience in mission-critical environments and six years of managing high-performance data center environments, he will lead centralized teams at Leaseweb headquarters, including those responsible for company-wide policies, procedures, security, and project management.

In his new role, Wessel will also work closely with operations directors across the Leaseweb entities to support service quality across all the company’s locations. He will focus on driving standardization and ensuring a consistent experience across all services, regardless of location.

Wessel began his career as an Engineering Officer in the Royal Netherlands Navy, where he developed a strong operational mindset and a focus on the high availability of critical infrastructure.

From there, he moved to Global Switch, where he was responsible for the technical maintenance and incident management of the company’s Amsterdam campus. This early experience in one of the Netherlands’ most established colocation data centers laid the foundation for a career defined by expertise in high availability, critical infrastructure, and a deep understanding of mitigating customer risk.

He also went on to hold regional leadership roles at EdgeConneX, managing operations across large campuses in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Barcelona. Serving demanding hyperscale clients, he gained valuable expertise in working across cultures and geographies to deliver complex, large-scale services. Wessel then joined nLighten, leading teams in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Switzerland, before moving to Leaseweb.

“Leaseweb’s reputation was already well known to me through former colleagues and industry partners,” said Alex Wessel, COO of Leaseweb. “What drew me to the company was its strong culture, the scale and diversity of its operations, and the opportunity to contribute to an organization that so many customers rely on to run their core business. The data center world is incredibly dynamic, and I’m excited to see how developments like AI and IoT will shape customer needs. I also believe we’ll see a growing shift towards local service providers as data sovereignty becomes more important.”

“Alex brings a very strong combination of operational discipline, technical depth, and customer focus, all of which are essential to Leaseweb’s continued growth,” said Svenja de Vos, co-CEO at Leaseweb. “His experience in managing global infrastructure, from high-density facilities to customer-centric operations, along with his structured approach to critical infrastructure, makes him a great fit for this role. We’re delighted to welcome him to the team and look forward to the impact he’ll make across our global operations.”

With its European Cloud Campus project, Leaseweb is actively building the foundation for a sovereign European cloud – designed to protect sensitive data, comply with EU regulations, and ensure that Europe’s digital infrastructure is no longer dependent on US providers.

In the last nine months, Leaseweb has made an industry-leading contribution to the IPCEI-CIS initiative, including developing powerful and flexible cloud infrastructure.

This includes creating a scalable compute platform with enhanced automation capabilities, including an open API to streamline automation initially for virtual machines, with plans to integrate physical servers and storage in 2025-26.

The company has also developed data integration tools for interaction with public cloud compute services, with ongoing enhancements for greater efficiency and scalability.

Additionally, Leaseweb has created a flexible, multi-tenant system for running applications, enabling independent operations within shared clusters.

This incorporates backend services and a scalable container platform, currently in beta, with full integration expected in 2025. These activities form the foundation for new, sovereign cloud services in Europe.

As the platform expands, Leaseweb continues to enhance management tools, ensuring an intuitive and adaptable cloud environment, further expanding compute and storage capabilities with increased automation and flexibility.

Strengthening the integration between compute and container platforms will be a key priority, allowing for more efficient operations.

In addition, Leaseweb is committed to enhancing monitoring and self-healing features, ensuring the cloud infrastructure remains resilient, scalable, and future-proof.

“Leaseweb has been vocal about the risks of outsourcing European data storage and cloud services to non-EU technology firms, with particular concerns over data sovereignty, compliance with EU regulations and over-dependence on US service providers,” said Robert van der Meulen, director, Product Strategy at Leaseweb. “We recognize and support the strategic urgency of reducing dependency on foreign infrastructure for critical workloads and sensitive data and will continue to play a leading role in driving the success of this initiative.”