Makurdi, the capital of Benue State in north-central Nigeria, does not appear on the shortlists of global finance hubs. It is, however, where Mary Collins grew up, the third and youngest child of two civil servants who believed, from hard experience, that the most durable investment they could make in their children was not financial. It was foundational. Her late father, an engineer by profession, was the defining influence of her early years. Disciplined, deliberate, and deeply invested in the academic and moral development of his children, he modelled values that would hold Mary steady through the most demanding moments of her career: integrity, perseverance, and the willingness to take full responsibility for your outcomes regardless of what surrounds them. When his health began to fail, a blood pressure diagnosis that progressed to partial paralysis and dependence on continuous medication, she watched a strong man face illness with quiet dignity. That, too, shaped her. There was a season when it looked as though a partially sponsored opportunity to study in the United States might open a different door. Financial constraints closed it before she could walk through. It was a genuine disappointment, and she names it as such without sentiment. What it taught her was something she has carried into every subsequent chapter of her career: that alternative paths are not lesser paths. They simply demand that you build more of the infrastructure yourself. She mentions, “This experience taught me valuable lessons about resilience and finding alternative paths to success.” Building the Knowledge Before Building the Business Mary’s professional formation was deliberate and cross-disciplinary in ways that were not common among her peers. Her Bachelor’s degree in Economics from the Federal University of Technology, Yola, where she graduated as the Best Female Student, gave her the analytical foundation. Her early career on a British government-supported African development project gave her operational fluency in high-value financial transactions. The commendation she received during that period for managing those transactions with integrity and professionalism was the first formal recognition of a professional standard she has since maintained across every role and every market. From there, her path moved through multinational financial advisory, investment, and real estate firms across multiple international markets. Professional certifications in Real Estate Development and Investment and Financial Management, from the University of Cape Town and the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business in Chicago, widened her technical lens. A research co-authorship on labor force participation among married women in Adamawa State, published in the Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences, reflected the social dimension of her thinking. And her Master’s degree in Real Estate Finance from Henley Business School, completed as she was simultaneously building Marie Consulting and Partners, provided the academic architecture for the investment thesis she had already begun developing from lived market experience. She asserts, “My academic background and professional experience combined to give me a framework for understanding how to diversify risk across both asset classes and geographies.” The Pandemic That Built the Business The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed a great deal and built a few things that might not otherwise have been built. Marie Consulting and Partners are one of them. In 2020, Mary was working within a financial advisory firm when global markets collapsed. Stock portfolios that had taken years to build were decimated within weeks. The distress of communicating these developments to investors who were simultaneously managing health anxieties was among the most professionally and personally demanding experiences of her career. At the same time, something was becoming visible that the noise of the crisis made it easy to miss: not all assets were falling. Residential real estate in several key markets was moving in precisely the opposite direction as remote work changed where people needed to live and how much space they needed to live in. The observation that different assets behave differently under the same conditions is not a new insight. But experiencing it in real time, managing real client portfolios through real market chaos, gave that insight a visceral quality that no textbook conveys. Diversification, she concluded, was not a risk management principle. It was the foundational logic around which a genuinely resilient investment practice had to be built. Not just across asset classes but across geographies, so that no single market event, however severe, could devastate a well-constructed portfolio simultaneously across all its components. She highlights, “The pandemic reinforced one of the most valuable lessons in investing: the power of diversification. It became the foundation for a larger vision.” Marie Consulting and Partners were conceptually born in 2020 and formally built over the three years that followed. The firm provides exclusive investment opportunities in private equity, private credit and fixed interest loan notes, and real estate to global private wealth investors through a carefully curated network of reputable partners operating across Accra, Dubai, and the United Kingdom. The markets are not chosen arbitrarily. Each represents a combination of growth trajectory, regulatory maturity, and investment infrastructure that research and data consistently validate. Private Markets and the Gap That Needed Filling The investment advisory landscape has historically been organized around publicly traded assets: stocks, bonds, and the various instruments that derive their value from public market prices. Private markets, where some of the most significant wealth creation and preservation has always occurred, have been accessible primarily to institutional investors and ultra-high-net-worth individuals with the connections and minimum investment thresholds that have functionally excluded most private wealth investors. Mary saw that gap clearly, and the experience of watching public markets collapse while private assets held or appreciated gave it new urgency. Marie Consulting and Partners were built explicitly to close it, offering carefully researched access to private equity, private credit, and real estate opportunities that would not otherwise be available to the investors the firm serves. The firm also carries a social dimension that is not incidental to its identity. A commitment to supporting labour force participation among married women in remote areas of West Africa, grounded in the

The digital infrastructure industry requires its leaders to master three essential components, which include power strategy, capital cycles, and regulatory timelines. Sandy Xiao developed her leadership abilities through multiple fields, which she studied in her professional development. She began her career in finance when she worked as Chief Financial Officer at Shanghai Wangsu during which she developed expertise in capital governance and long-term investment strategy. She used her financial expertise to establish commercial operations, which expanded further into managing enterprise-wide infrastructure. She was also President at Chindata Group, where she oversaw all aspects of land acquisition and power strategy, government relations, and large-scale program delivery throughout China and Southeast Asia. As President of Bridge Data Centres (BDC), she currently oversees the company’s expansion throughout Asia Pacific (APAC) and beyond. Her method combines operational efficiency with a focus on building partnerships to create durable artificial intelligence infrastructure systems, which develop trustworthiness and sustainable development throughout their operational lifespan. From Finance to Full-Stack Leadership Sandy’s journey into digital infrastructure began not in an engineering lab, but in the boardroom. She spent eight years as Chief Financial Officer at Shanghai Wangsu (2011– 2019), where she developed a rigorous command of capital planning, multi-year capex governance, and investor-grade accountability. Working at the intersection of technology roadmaps and balance sheets, she learned early that strategy only matters when it translates into real capacity on the ground. “In finance, decisions are often clear on paper. In infrastructure, they rarely are. Power availability changes, land timelines shift, regulations evolve, and communities rightly ask difficult questions. Those realities taught me the importance of clarity, adaptability, and early stakeholder engagement rather than relying solely on perfect plans,” she reflects. That grounding in financial discipline prepared her for a much bigger stage. In 2019, Sandy Xiao stepped into the role of President at Chindata Group, expanding her remit from capital allocation to end-to-end infrastructure leadership across China and Southeast Asia. She oversaw land and power strategy, supply chain development, government relations, program controls, and enterprise client onboarding, stitching together an operating system that could scale rapidly without losing its integrity. Her five years at Chindata sharpened the core capabilities she carries to this day: sequencing capital spend to protect schedule and optionality, aligning regulatory and utility approvals in parallel rather than sequentially, running weekly cross-functional forums to surface risks early, and embedding ESG targets as non-negotiables rather than afterthoughts. She also cultivated what she calls a “partnership mindset” treating vendors, government agencies, and customers as co-authors of solutions, not checkpoints to be cleared. In 2024, she joined Bridge Data Centres as President, bringing her strong expertise to BDC’s accelerating growth across APAC and beyond. The transition marked a new chapter, but the approach remained consistent: build systems that others can win in. A Leader Who Builds Operating Systems, Not Just Data Centres When walking into any project Sandy Xiao oversees, you encounter a distinctive cadence. She calls it the “control room,” a weekly cross-functional forum that keeps engineering, procurement, compliance, and partner teams in tight alignment. Approvals move in parallel, risks surface early, and critical path decisions stay protected from the churn that typically derails complex infrastructure builds. At BDC’s flagship Malaysia projects, MY06 Phase 3 and MY07, this approach produced measurable results. Sandy Xiaoinstitutionalized multi-story steel structures and modular construction packages, where they reduced schedule risk, expedited project execution, and accelerated development through modularization strategies. “For corporate functions to act as business accelerators, they must be embedded into decision-making from the outset, not positioned as checkpoints at the end of a process,” she says. Legal, supply chain, human resources, and IT teams at BDC participate in early planning discussions, surfacing risks before they become constraints and keeping timelines realistic. Navigating the Transformation Shifts Reshaping APAC Sandy Xiao leads BDC at a time when the digital infrastructure landscape is undergoing rapid structural change. From her vantage point, the most significant shifts sweeping across APAC are the underlying systems to support sustained, large-scale digital growth. “One clear shift is the move from standalone facilities to interconnected infrastructure ecosystems,” she observes. Data centres no longer compete on physical footprint alone; they earn differentiation by integrating seamlessly with power grids, network connectivity, water planning, sustainability frameworks, and surrounding digital platforms. In a region as diverse as APAC, the ability to coordinate across these dimensions across markets with different regulations, utility structures, and community expectations have become a competitive moat. The rise of AI and edge computing adds another layer of urgency. Enterprise customers now evaluate infrastructure not just on capacity, but on readiness, the ability to activate quickly, predictably, and adapt to evolving workloads. This demand rewrites the calculus of infrastructure development. Deep upfront planning, long-horizon utility partnerships, and execution discipline matter far more than simply building fast. She responds to this environment by positioning BDC as a platform of choice for leading AI, cloud and internet companies across the region. She secured a 400 MW greenenergy commitment for the MY07 project and structured BDC’s international operations as the group’s growth engine backed by a unified APAC portfolio and an empowered land-power- permits-client negotiation team with weekly board visibility. Her operating philosophy on digital transformation reflects the same practicality. “In the data centre world, digital transformation is not about chasing new technology for its own sake. It is about strengthening the fundamentals that allow infrastructure to perform reliably at scale while adapting to evolving workloads,” she says. At BDC, transformation means applying analytics to understand system behavior in real time, automating routine decisions for enhanced precision, and designing processes that allow teams to respond quickly when conditions change without disrupting the power stability and cooling efficiency that mission- critical customer’s demand. Sustainability as a Performance Principle If there is one area where Sandy has worked hardest to shift institutional thinking, it is sustainability. She is direct on the point: environmental stewardship is not a branding exercise. At BDC, it is a performance principle embedded in capital gating, leadership KPIs, and engineering decisions