Rogelio García – Grupo Salinas

Rogelio Garcia was seven when he first took apart the family radio. He didn’t do it to break anything. He did it because he needed to know what was happening inside the box that made his mother’s favorite station play every morning. By the time he had it back together — mostly working, save for one stubborn knob — he had already discovered the instinct that would define the next four decades of his life: before trusting a system, understand how it’s built.

Rogelio García | Grupo Salinas | Chief Data Center Officer

That instinct now guides one of the most consequential infrastructure buildouts in Grupo Salinas‘ history. As chief data center officer, Garcia recently led the integration of a new Tier 4 facility in Querétaro, a project that expands the company’s footprint beyond its long-standing hub in Mexico City and reshapes how the organization thinks about resilience, redundancy, and the future of high-density computing. It is also, in many ways, the culmination of everything that curiosity taught him: that the strongest systems are the ones whose builders understand every layer beneath the surface.

A foundation built on curiosity

Garcia’s path to the top of Grupo Salinas’ data center operations was never a straight line from classroom to boardroom. It was built on decades of hands-on curiosity, first with mechanical objects, later with the information systems and business processes that now define his career. An engineering degree from the Instituto Tecnológico de Tlalnepantla, paired with graduate studies at Tecnológico de Monterrey and the University of La Rioja in Spain, gave that curiosity a formal structure, but the underlying drive never changed.

“Before solving a problem, I need to understand how it’s built,” Garcia says.

That philosophy has shaped not only his technical decisions but his approach to leading people. Rather than building teams that simply follow instructions, Garcia has spent his career helping engineers develop their own judgment, walking them through the reasoning behind every decision so they can eventually make sound calls on their own. Watching those specialists rise into leadership roles, he says, has been among the most rewarding parts of his tenure.

Over the years, Garcia helped assemble and develop a multidisciplinary team of electromechanical engineers, software developers, environmental specialists, security professionals, robotics experts, and data scientists. More importantly, he encouraged them to think beyond their individual disciplines, fostering a culture where continuous learning, shared responsibility, and collaborative problem-solving became as important as technical expertise itself.

Grupo Salinas is a diversified Mexican conglomerate with operations spanning media, telecommunications, retail, and financial services, and its data center network underpins the always-on digital transactions that millions of customers rely on daily. Keeping that infrastructure running without interruption has become Garcia’s defining professional mandate, one that now extends across two major metropolitan hubs, each governed by the same standards of security, availability, and operational discipline.

Space as software

The Querétaro facility adds a 2,000-square-meter clean space spread across three rooms, purpose-built to support the migration of critical systems from the company’s Esmeralda site. But the real transformation, Garcia explains, is not measured in square meters. It’s measured by how the company now thinks about physical infrastructure as a whole.

Cabinets across the new facility have been reengineered as intelligent units, layered with electronic smart locks, environmental sensors, and continuous telemetry that mirror the governance typically applied to software. That shift has collapsed deployment timelines that once stretched for months into a process that unfolds almost instantly, without sacrificing security or requiring a full operational redesign.

“We transformed our cabinets into intelligent units that are managed almost like software,” Garcia says.

The design also anticipates the demands of artificial intelligence workloads, which require far greater power density than traditional computing. To meet that need, Garcia’s team built a three-layer architecture spanning physical access, environmental monitoring, and digital intelligence, incorporating precision robotics to measure airflow and cabinets capable of controlling power down to the individual outlet. Underpinning it all is the company’s in-house monitoring system, which processes more than a billion messages each month from over 5,000 IoT sensors, feeding a data lake that allows artificial intelligence models to flag anomalies long before they become failures. Combined with robotic airflow measurements, the system lets engineers fine-tune cooling to match exact thermal demand, replacing guesswork with precision at every stage of operation.

When software meets the physical world

Long before Querétaro, Garcia led the implementation of Grupo Salinas’ first digital surveillance and access control center, a project he describes as a turning point in how he understood security itself. At the time, most systems were analog and served their purpose well. Digitizing them, he found, exposed a much bigger truth about where technology and physical safety intersect.

“I discovered that a decision made in software could have real-world physical consequences,” Garcia says.

That realization has stayed with him ever since, reinforcing the idea that physical security and cybersecurity are not separate disciplines but two sides of the same strategy. He has also come to see that no system is ever truly finished; every new feature or integration creates an opportunity to strengthen security, but it can just as easily introduce a new vulnerability if the change isn’t managed carefully.

That mindset shaped the operational backbone of the Querétaro facility, where the team eliminated reliance on physical keys entirely in favor of digital identity access that is fully auditable. Electromechanical specialists, environmental analysts, platform engineers, and security leads collaborated to build and document that framework, supported by agile methodologies including SCRUM and JIRA, while the broader team doubled its capacity with master’s and PhD-level talent in artificial intelligence and robotics.

The transformation required more than new technology. Garcia says it demanded a cultural shift in how teams collaborated. Security specialists, infrastructure engineers, software developers, automation experts, and operations personnel moved beyond traditionally isolated responsibilities to work as a unified multidisciplinary team. By integrating human expertise with robotic inspection, IoT telemetry, digital twins, and AI-driven analytics, the organization created a fully connected operational environment where data, technology, and people work together to improve reliability, efficiency, and decision-making. For Garcia, the greatest challenge was not implementing the technology itself, but helping people adapt, learn, and grow alongside it.

Proving the model, looking ahead

Grupo Salinas’ approach, which Garcia refers to internally as Collaboration 2.0, envisions human specialists, autonomous robotic systems, IoT devices, and advanced analytics operating together as one interconnected system. Rather than replacing engineers, the model extends their reach, arming them with thermal vision, real-time 360-degree cameras, and predictive telemetry that support faster, better-informed decisions. Certifications from institutions including MIT, Harvard, AWS, and Boston Dynamics have further deepened the team’s technical independence, enabling the company to build proprietary tools rather than rely on third-party platforms.

That approach earned external recognition when Grupo Salinas received the 2023, 2024 and 2026 Datacenter Award, a milestone Garcia views as validation of a broader philosophy.

“True innovation isn’t about buying off-the-shelf technology, but about how we bring together proprietary development, technology, and human talent,” Garcia says.

The result has been a 15-year streak of uninterrupted availability across the company’s critical infrastructure, a record Garcia and his team intend to extend as computing demands continue to climb. With artificial intelligence workloads driving unprecedented power requirements, the next phase of growth will lean heavily on the predictive systems and governance framework already built into Querétaro.

“Our focus remains on adapting our infrastructure to support the rising power densities demanded by Artificial Intelligence,” Garcia says.

For Garcia, that focus traces back to the same instinct that drove him to open up a radio as a child: a refusal to accept that something simply works without knowing why.

Decades later, that instinct has scaled from a family living room to a national infrastructure network. Today, it shapes the way Garcia approaches both technology and leadership, guiding teams through increasingly complex challenges while fostering a culture of curiosity, accountability, and continuous learning. Throughout his career, he has focused not only on building resilient systems but also on helping people develop judgment and confidence to lead them. For Garcia, lasting innovation comes from creating environments where talented individuals can grow, collaborate, and challenge conventional thinking. Looking back on his career, the systems, facilities, and technologies represent important milestones, but the achievement he values most is helping others develop the confidence and judgment to lead. In his view, the strongest organizations are ultimately built not by infrastructure alone, but by the people who continuously reimagine what is possible.