The Two New Executives Steering KKR’s $10 Billion AI Infrastructure Bet

KKR’s new $10 billion AI venture, Helix Digital Infrastructure, has made its first two senior hires under CEO Adam Selipsky, the former Amazon Web Services chief, a person with knowledge of the moves said.

The venture, which counts Nvidia among its backers, has tapped Jonathan Lin, former chief business officer at data center operator Equinix, to run data center strategy and execution. Kleber Costa, previously chief commercial officer of the clean energy business at power company AES, will lead Helix’s power and energy operations, the person said.

The moves come as data center developers, tech firms and investors are all competing for executives who know how to build and run large-scale computing and power infrastructure. The two new hires started in their roles this week as executive vice presidents reporting directly to Selipsky, who ran AWS until mid-2024, the person said.

Launched by KKR earlier this year, Helix is aiming to invest in and develop infrastructure for large AI cloud customers. Besides Nvidia, the firm’s other big backers include power producer Vistra Energy and the Kuwait Investment Authority.

Helix has pitched itself as a single point of contact for big cloud providers that might otherwise have to navigate a fragmented market of smaller developers to secure compute and power in one package. Rather than developing big data center and power projects from scratch, Helix leaders have said they want to move quickly in part by acquiring existing developers that have stalled due to lack of financing or power connections.

Helix is looking to acquire data center assets that require more capital than their current investors can provide, or whose backers want to return cash to limited partners. The firm as of late June had already drawn up a short list of acquisition targets, The Information previously reported.

The two new hires will help Helix put that capital to work. At Equinix, Lin helped deploy over $30 billion into data center development and worked on more than $10 billion worth of mergers and acquisitions transactions, the person familiar with the move said. Lin was among the five senior executives whose pay Equinix disclosed in its latest proxy, receiving nearly $7 million in total compensation for 2025.

Both AES and Equinix have the deep connections with big cloud providers that Helix will need to grow its business.

Equinix, one of the world’s largest data center operators, is structured as a real estate investment trust and publicly traded on the Nasdaq. It operates more than 280 data centers located in 77 markets, renting space where customers can run their computing operations. Customers including enterprises and cloud companies often take advantage of the fact that they can operate space within the same data center, speeding up connections.

AES, for its part, has signed multiple gigawatts of power agreements with major tech companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google, including a 20-year power purchase agreement with Google announced in February tied to a new data center in Texas.

The company is set to go private—in March, a group of investors, including BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT, announced it would buy AES for $10.7 billion. That deal is expected to close later this year or early in 2027.

In a Sept. 1 LinkedIn post announcing his departure from AES, Costa said he helped the firm’s U.S. and clean power business scale fivefold to over 20 GW of “renewables, energy storage and natural gas under operations or construction.”