SharonAI Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: SHAZ) is expanding its executive leadership team as the Australian AI infrastructure company prepares to manage a growing network of AI capacity across multiple sites and countries.
The company has appointed David Burns as Chief Operating Officer, while current COO and co-founder Andrew Leece will transition to Head of Strategic Partnerships and Co-founder. The changes, effective Sept. 7, 2026, are intended to create clearer executive responsibility for infrastructure delivery, operations and key strategic relationships as Sharon AI scales its AI Factory platform.
For Sharon AI, the leadership restructuring comes as increasing customer commitments and infrastructure deployments create a more complex operational challenge: converting contracted capacity and customer orders into functioning AI infrastructure. The company said responsibilities previously incorporated into broader executive positions are being separated into specialist roles.
Burns will oversee the end-to-end delivery and operation of Sharon AI’s multi-site, multi-country infrastructure estate. His responsibilities will include program management, procurement, the consolidated customer order book and services delivered through partners, with a focus on moving projects from customer orders to operational capacity.
“As Sharon AI grows, we are building the specialist leadership capability required to deliver with discipline and at scale,” CEO and co-founder James Manning said. He said the new structure establishes clearer accountability across operational delivery, infrastructure capacity and strategic partnerships.
Burns brings more than 35 years of experience in technology, telecommunications and services businesses across Australia, the United States, Europe and Asia. His career includes senior executive positions at Telstra and IBM covering P&L management, customer delivery, managed services, infrastructure, business transformation and major acquisitions.
Most recently, Burns served as Group Executive, Telstra Enterprise, where he led Telstra’s Australian business-to-business and international portfolio. At Sharon AI, he will be responsible for operational strategy and execution, including customer outcomes and financial performance as the company’s infrastructure footprint expands.
“AI is moving at a pace unlike any technology shift I’ve experienced in my career,” Burns said. He added that his focus will be on building the operational capabilities, partnerships and execution discipline needed to deliver infrastructure for customers at scale.
Leece’s move into a dedicated strategic partnerships position shifts his attention away from day-to-day operational delivery and commercial negotiations. He will instead provide executive sponsorship and continuity across Sharon AI’s priority customer, data center and strategic relationships.
The new role preserves Leece’s involvement at the founder level while giving the company’s incoming COO direct responsibility for operational execution. Leece has played a central role in developing Sharon AI’s operating capabilities and advancing deployments across the AI Factory platform.
“Sharon AI has reached a point where the scale of our customer commitments, infrastructure pipeline and partner ecosystem requires more specialised leadership,” Leece said. He said the new position will allow him to concentrate on relationships supporting the company’s capacity, delivery and longer-term expansion.
The management changes illustrate the operational demands facing AI infrastructure providers as they move beyond securing computing capacity and customer commitments toward deploying and operating that infrastructure across distributed locations. For Sharon AI, the separation of operational execution from strategic relationship management is designed to give each function dedicated senior-level oversight.
Sharon AI operates as an Australian Neocloud focused on sovereign AI infrastructure. Its AI Factory platform works with technology and co-location partners to provide computing infrastructure for workloads ranging from AI model training to inference. The Nasdaq-listed company serves customers globally as it develops its infrastructure platform across multiple markets.