James Leach

Founder and President of REACH Advisory & Development, LLC 

Mr. Leach has had a distinguished 30-year career in high-tech sales, marketing, and product development. He is recognized as one of the business leaders that helped to make Northern Virginia the #1 data center market in the world, and over his career was actively involved in developing 148 data centers in nine countries totaling 6.5 million square feet of space and 600 megawatts of power. In addition, he has been a senior executive with global responsibilities at the following industry leading information and communications technology companies: NTT, L3Harris Technologies, Neustar, Internap, CenturyLink, and IBM.

Most recently, Mr. Leach was hired by RagingWire (now NTT) to build and develop their data center presence in Ashburn, Virginia and throughout the United States. In Ashburn, he was responsible for bringing to market over 1 million square feet of data center space and 108 megawatts of power on three campuses. During his tenure, he also created and lead the go-to-market strategies for RagingWire’s data center developments in Dallas, Texas; Sacramento and Silicon Valley, California; Chicago, Illinois; and Hillsboro, Oregon totaling 1.6 million square feet and 163 megawatts of power. He was part of the senior leadership team for NTT’s global data center portfolio of 160 data centers in 20 countries, making it the third largest data center company in the world.

During his career, Mr. Leach has been an integral part of the leadership teams that have built successful businesses delivering innovative internet infrastructure solutions for enterprise and government clients. These solutions include: data center colocation, cloud computing, virtual private networks (VPNs) and route optimization, IT outsourcing, application hosting, content delivery networks (CDNs), Domain Name System (DNS) services, and web performance monitoring and testing. He was actively involved in nine strategic mergers and acquisitions with a total value of $4 billion.

Mr. Leach is proud to serve on the Board of Directors of the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC), as well as the Chairperson of the Leadership Board for the NVTC Data Center and Cloud Committee. He was elected by the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors to be the Chair of the Executive Committee of the Loudoun Economic Development Advisory Commission (EDAC), and currently serves in that role. Previously, he served on the Board of Directors of the Loudoun County Chamber of Commerce and on the Board of the NOVA Parks Foundation.