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Executive Board

Leadership.

Three operators run the Netser doctrine across capital, technology, and the physical asset base. Extended biographies follow.

Alexander Vane is Netser's chief executive officer and the architect of the holding's modern doctrine. Since assuming the role in 2010, he has overseen the firm's repositioning from a single-line telecommunications operator into a diversified, multi-jurisdictional infrastructure investor with controlling interests in cloud compute, defensive infrastructure, and long-horizon research.

Before Netser, Mr. Vane spent fifteen years at Pacific Bell, most recently as Vice President of Operations, where he led the regulatory negotiation behind one of the largest cross-state backbone consolidations of the era. Earlier in his career, he served as a senior strategy associate at McKinsey & Company's New York office, working primarily with public-sector communications mandates.

He sits on the boards of two of Netser's operating subsidiaries and chairs the Holdings Investment Committee. He is a recurring contributor to the Atlantic Council's Infrastructure Resilience Working Group and has testified before the U.S. Senate Commerce Subcommittee on critical-infrastructure governance.

Education
MBA, Wharton School — BSc, Cornell University
Languages
English, French (working)
Domicile
Wilmington, Delaware
Direct Office
[email protected]
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Dr. Elena Sorel is Netser's chief technology officer, with operating responsibility for the firm's compute architecture, cryptographic posture, and the Horizon Labs research mandate. She joined as Head of Architecture in 2014 and was appointed CTO in 2016.

Dr. Sorel completed her doctorate in Quantum Information Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and conducted post-doctoral work at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen on entanglement-distribution protocols. Before joining Netser, she spent six years at a sovereign-grade cryptographic research consortium in Geneva, where she led the working group on post-quantum key-establishment standards now under consideration by NIST.

She holds eleven granted patents in distributed-systems integrity and photonic-edge processing. Her work on neural-lattice fabric — Netser's proprietary substrate for resilient AI workloads — is the foundation of the Holdings' position in regulated AI engagement. She is a Fellow of the IEEE and an editorial-board member of the Journal of Cryptographic Engineering.

Education
Ph.D. Quantum Information, MIT — MSc Theoretical Physics, ETH Zürich
Languages
English, French, German, Russian
Domicile
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Direct Office
[email protected]
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James Chen is Netser's chief operations officer, accountable for the physical integrity of the Holdings' global asset base — data-center campuses, cross-border backbone, regional operations centers, and the supply chain that sustains them. His remit covers operational continuity, sustainability targets, and the protocol for jurisdictional transitions of physical assets.

Mr. Chen joined Netser in 2017 from one of the world's largest container-shipping groups, where he served as Group Head of Network Operations across the Asia-Europe and Asia-Americas trade lanes. The logistics discipline he brought from that environment — predictive routing, redundancy without inventory bloat, and a hard distinction between cost-of-disruption and cost-of-resilience — is the operating doctrine that now governs Netser's physical layer.

He led the consolidation of the firm's data-center estate into the current four-region operating footprint and chairs the Holdings Sustainability Committee, which set the 2028 carbon-neutrality target. He is a board member of the Global Resilience Council and contributes to the World Economic Forum's working group on critical-infrastructure interdependence.

Education
MSc Industrial Engineering, National University of Singapore — BEng, Tsinghua University
Languages
English, Mandarin, Cantonese
Domicile
Hong Kong
Direct Office
[email protected]
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