Data driven
Out of shape and out of sorts, Hayden Bygott transformed his fitness and his career, joining the AI revolution.
Hayden Bygott barely recognises the man he was two years ago. The figure posing for photographs in technology company Megaport’s Brisbane hub is razor sharp. His casual clothes hang loosely from an athletic frame, his eyes sparkle with an easy confidence.
Charged with ensuring Megaport’s pivot into AI stacks up commercially, Hayden looks every bit like a man with the world at his feet. It is hard to reconcile him with the person who once felt like he was carrying its weight on his shoulders.
Megaport’s Brisbane office looks exactly how you might imagine a technology company should: beanbags, video games, Lego scattered across tables in the lunchroom, graffiti-lined walls and bowls of cookies and lollipops everywhere.
Megaport’s Brisbane office looks exactly how you might imagine a technology company should: beanbags, video games, Lego scattered across tables in the lunchroom, graffiti-lined walls and bowls of cookies and lollipops everywhere.
Hayden fits the energy of the place, but not quite the stereotype. There is little room for screens or sugar hits in his spare time.
He runs. He swims. He rides.
In early 2025, that wasn't the case.
He was working as a commercial analyst, a job he wasn't enjoying. His passion for exercise had slipped. He was out of shape and out of sorts.
“I was in a bit of a rut to be honest,” he says.
He needed a spark – something that scared him. He started running with a hazy idea to complete the Mooloolaba Triathlon but after two weeks he decided to up the ante. His goal: the 226.2km of pure pain known as the Busselton Ironman.
There was just one problem. He could barely swim 50m.
“I guess I’ve always set pretty ridiculous goals,” Hayden says.
“I’ve always enjoyed challenging myself with goals that terrify me a little bit, so I looked for the hardest thing I could possibly do and convinced one of my best mates that we should do an ironman.
“He was reluctant at first, and he made some good points. We couldn’t even ride bikes, I could barely swim 50m at that point and I hadn’t run more than 5km before.
“But I said, let’s just sign up, get a coach and see how far we can go.”
They found experienced triathlon coach Mark Gleeson from EnergyLab Triathlon and committed to nine months of training.
Discipline became the organising principle of Hayden's life. He trained twice a day, every day – between 20 and 25 hours a week. He was in bed by 8.30pm and up at 4.30am for training before work. He would finish work at about 5.30pm and train again.
The plan to start with the 51.5km Olympic-distance Mooloolaba Triathlon was blown away by Cyclone Alfred. Then, three months before the full Ironman, his confidence took a hit.
Racing in the Sunshine Coast half Ironman, Hayden crashed 45km into the bike leg, flying over his handlebars. He picked himself up and finished the race.
The crash had hurt but Busselton was still ahead, and the 3.8km swim, 180km cycle and 42.2km run represented a whole new world of suffering. Before race day, Hayden had never run more than 21km in one go. He had never swum more than 2km. He had covered the 180km bike distance in training but still had no idea whether his body could get him through the whole thing.
“I genuinely had no idea if I could finish it,” he says.
“There was a 50 percent chance.”
Mark kept telling him to trust the process. He had done the training and built the base. Now he had to trust it.
Hayden finished the Busselton Ironman in 11 hours and six seconds, comfortably beating his target of 12 hours. The experience reinforced something he had already begun to understand about himself. He likes doing hard things. His goal each year, he says, is to do something that scares him – something where there should be roughly a 50 percent chance of success.
“You can doubt yourself,” he says, “but you push yourself through the training because of the person you become when you come out the other side.”
That philosophy is proving useful in his career.
Because while Hayden was pushing his body to its limits, his professional life was taking him into one of the world's fastest-moving industries.
Today, the Bond alumnus sits at the commercial centre of Megaport’s push into the infrastructure powering the global artificial intelligence boom.
His job is to make the numbers work. And there are a lot of numbers.
The path to Megaport began at Bond.
Hayden was a Vice Chancellor’s Elite Scholar and studied a Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of Laws. He arrived at Bond after serving as school captain at St Joseph’s Nudgee College, having previously attended Siena Catholic College on the Sunshine Coast. He was an accomplished debater, played rugby and rowed at Nudgee, and was a surf lifesaver with Alexandra Headland Surf Life Saving Club.
At Bond, he threw himself into university life. He became president of the Bond Investment Group after initially joining as events director. The student-led organisation ran its own mock sharemarket, hosted industry events and created opportunities for students to connect with business leaders. Its Titans of Industry forum attracted about 250 people, and one of its keynote speakers was Bevan Slattery.
Bevan stood out immediately.
“He could see five years into the future,” Hayden says.
Bevan Slattery (third from left) at the Titans of Industry forum hosted by Bond students.
Bevan Slattery (third from left) at the Titans of Industry forum hosted by Bond students.
Bevan was chairman of Megaport at the time, and Hayden began following him and the company closely. Then, one day, Megaport appeared in his LinkedIn feed. The connection was there. So was the curiosity.
When an opportunity came up at Megaport, Hayden took it.
It would prove to be the career move he didn't know he was looking for.
What began during lockdowns would eventually take Hayden around the world.
He and fellow student James Frizelle had started their Law and Commerce degrees just before COVID-19 transformed university life.
When international exchange programs resumed, they jumped at the chance to go overseas.
Hayden and James, along with fellow Bond student Efa Mullin, travelled to Western University in Canada on the Cowin Scholarship Program.
The scholarship was made possible through the generosity of Western alumnus and former Chancellor Jack Cowin and created opportunities for Bond and Western students to experience each other’s universities and build an international network.
For Hayden, the semester at Western’s Ivey Business School was transformative.
He found himself surrounded by high achievers, but what struck him most was their entrepreneurialism and ability to build relationships.
“It was a super-motivating environment to be in.”
The friendships he made there have endured.
Three of his closest friends from Ivey have since found themselves at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence.
One is a software engineer at Anthropic, working on AI models.
Another works at Decagon, which is developing AI voice agents.
A third is planning to start his own AI company.
Hayden has taken a different route into the same revolution.
“I’ve fallen by accident into this industry,” he says.
“I’m not going to be the one who’s creating the new models, but if we can be the ones who do the underlying infrastructure, that’s the area I want to go into.”
What began during lockdowns would eventually take Hayden around the world.
He and fellow student James Frizelle had started their Law and Commerce degrees just before COVID-19 transformed university life.
When international exchange programs resumed, they jumped at the chance to go overseas. Hayden and James, along with fellow Bond student Efa Mullin, travelled to Western University in Canada on the Cowin Scholarship Program.
The scholarship was made possible through the generosity of Western alumnus and former Chancellor Jack Cowin and created opportunities for Bond and Western students to experience each other’s universities and build an international network.
For Hayden, the semester at Western’s Ivey Business School was transformative. He found himself surrounded by high achievers, but what struck him most was their entrepreneurialism and ability to build relationships.
“It was a super-motivating environment to be in.”
The friendships he made there have endured. Three of his closest friends from Ivey have since found themselves at the cutting edge of artificial intelligence. One is a software engineer at Anthropic, working on AI models. Another works at Decagon, which is developing AI voice agents. A third is planning to start his own AI company.
Hayden has taken a different route into the same revolution.
“I’ve fallen by accident into this industry,” he says.
“I’m not going to be the one who’s creating the new models, but if we can be the ones who do the underlying infrastructure, that’s the area I want to go into.”
Megaport began by connecting businesses, cloud providers and data centres through its global networking platform.
Hayden’s initial role was commercial, structuring deals and working across sales, finance and legal to make sure the numbers worked.
But the company has evolved. The acquisition of Latitude.sh has pushed Megaport further into the physical infrastructure behind the digital economy, adding high-performance computing and, critically, GPUs. It is an important distinction.
The companies building AI models need enormous amounts of computing power to train and run them. That means GPUs – powerful computer chips capable of processing huge amounts of data – housed inside data centres. Megaport already had the network connecting digital infrastructure. Latitude brought the compute.
Now Hayden is helping work out how to put the pieces together.
“A lot of these deals aren’t overly complicated,” he says.
“It’s more of just an organisation piece. Finding the right data centres, finding the power, finding the GPUs and coming up with the price.”
His preferred description of the job is telling: “financial engineering.” The bet is not on which AI model will win. It is on what every AI model will need to run: GPUs, power, data centres, storage and the networks connecting them.
The AI boom has so far been dominated by the race to build bigger and better models. But training those models is only the beginning.
Once they are deployed, they need enormous amounts of computing power to respond to users and run AI applications – a process known as inference.
Megaport is banking on the infrastructure behind AI becoming as important – and as lucrative – as the technology itself.
“There’s a mad demand,” Hayden says.
“People are scrambling for it.”
The scale of the bet is enormous. In June 2026, Megaport raised A$827.3 million to fund its strategic pivot into artificial intelligence, giving the company the firepower to acquire and deploy the computing infrastructure its customers are demanding.
As the man responsible for making the commercial equation work, Hayden is beginning to understand the scale of the industry.
“The AI boom … it’s just, it’s not stopping,” he says. “It’s continuing to grow, grow, grow.”
There are a lot of moving parts. And a lot of zeroes.
Hayden’s role is about to become even bigger.
He will move to Europe at the start of 2027, beginning in London and taking on a regional role while remaining heavily involved with Megaport and working more closely with the Latitude business.
It will mean longer hours, more responsibility and another steep learning curve.
But again, that is part of the attraction.
“The skill is being organised, but being able to multitask super-well and being able to manage your time effectively,” he says.
“You have to learn quickly, adapt quickly. Ask the right questions. Talk to the right people.”
It sounds a lot like the advice his Ironman coach gave him. Trust the process. Do the work. Keep going when you aren't sure you can finish.
Hayden still trains, although the Ironman days have taken their toll. Injuries have forced him to give up the full-distance events for now.
In 2026 he completed the Gold Coast Marathon.
Next on the list is a Last Man Standing backyard ultra – another challenge designed to test how far he can push himself. He is aiming for 100km.
The setting may be different, but the philosophy remains the same.
“I think you should do things that scare you,” he says.
That mindset has taken him from a Bond Investment Group meeting to a conversation with Bevan Slattery, from a Canadian exchange to the cutting edge of AI, and from a commercial analyst questioning his career to the centre of Megaport’s AI infrastructure push.
Now he is heading to Europe to help build what comes next.
The challenge is different. The stakes are bigger.
And this time, there are a lot more zeroes.
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