Matt Hawkins

Matt Hawkins is founder and chief executive of CUDO Compute, a London, England-based company that designs, deploys and runs AI computing clusters for enterprise and regulated customers. He started CUDO after selling C4L, the British internet and data center business he founded in 2000.

Building C4L in Bournemouth

C4L, short for Connections4London and based in Bournemouth, England, grew into one of the fastest-growing internet service providers in the UK and won fast-growth awards including the Times Tech Track 100 and Deloitte's EMEA Technology Fast 500. It ran its own data center and one of the largest private networks in the country, carrying roughly 1 percent of UK internet traffic, and its customers ranged from government bodies and FTSE 250 companies to internet providers and small businesses, according to his DatacenterDynamics profile.

Selling C4L to Castle Street

In 2016 Castle Street Investments bought C4L in a cash-and-shares deal, and Hawkins, then founder and chairman, became chief technology officer of the combined business. "The acquisition opens a whole new world for us, it really is all about the people," he said at the time, according to DatacenterDynamics.

Founding CUDO in London

The sale freed him to start CUDO, which he set up to make better use of the world's computing capacity. Today the company focuses on production AI infrastructure: it designs clusters to NVIDIA reference architectures, sources hardware through Dell, Lenovo, Supermicro and HPE, and runs them with round-the-clock monitoring from sites in North America, Europe, the UK and the Middle East and North Africa, according to CUDO's about page. Hawkins leads its strategy, partnerships, fundraising and largest customer relationships, and the company says it expects more than 250 megawatts of capacity under contract by the end of 2026.