William Meaney

William Meaney became president and CEO of Iron Mountain in 2013, inheriting a company known for storing physical records — boxes of documents, backup tapes, and archival materials — in a network of underground vaults and warehouses. Over the past decade, he has executed a radical transformation: while maintaining the legacy physical storage business (which generates stable, recurring cash flow from over 225,000 customers), Meaney has built Iron Mountain into a rapidly growing data center operator with over 40 data center facilities worldwide. The pivot to data centers has been transformative for Iron Mountain's growth profile. The AI boom has created unprecedented demand for data center capacity, and Iron Mountain's existing relationships with enterprise customers (who already trust the company to manage their most sensitive physical and digital records) provide a natural customer pipeline for data center services. The company now has over 500 megawatts of data center capacity with a substantial development pipeline targeting over 1 gigawatt. Meaney's capital allocation between data center expansion, physical storage optimization, and shareholder distributions (Iron Mountain is structured as a REIT), along with his ability to fund the capital-intensive data center growth while maintaining the dividend, are the primary drivers of the stock. The AI-driven data center demand cycle has elevated Iron Mountain's growth profile well beyond what investors had priced for a legacy storage company.