ABOUT

About Tucker Preston.

I’m Head of Connectivity at Gcore and Managing Partner at Digital Midstream. I’ve spent my adult career making the Internet faster, more connected, and more resilient.

My Georgia connections

I attended Valdosta State University in Georgia. Today, I volunteer with Kitty City Cat Rescue in Macon and lead Digital Midstream LP, an Atlanta-registered business.

Connectivity, performance & AI

At Gcore, I lead global connectivity, peering, interconnection, and traffic engineering for CDN, cloud, and AI services. My work combines network design, infrastructure procurement, and operational delivery.

I focus on how traffic reaches users and compute: choosing paths, balancing capacity, and keeping services dependable through congestion or failure. In recent years, that work has extended to distributed AI, including NVIDIA Dynamo-powered inference and Global Inference Routing.

Gcore’s global private backbone

I designed the backbone and procured its connectivity, leading the initiative end to end. It connects regions across Asia-Pacific, Europe, and North America with dedicated 100G and 400G wavelengths. Read my article about the project →

Digital Midstream

As Managing Partner at Digital Midstream LP, I help identify and develop highly interconnected sites for edge AI inference. We evaluate former telecom facilities, existing data centers, and new locations, bringing a network operator’s perspective to site selection.

An early start in infrastructure

• I began hosting game servers around age 12 or 13, then worked for—and later owned—dedicated server hosting businesses.
• I co-founded OPSkins in 2015, working on marketplace infrastructure, trade delivery, fraud prevention, and payments. I sold my stake in 2018.
• Internet infrastructure has remained the through-line, from individual servers to global networks and distributed AI.

Internet measurement & cybersecurity

I’m passionate about understanding how the Internet behaves at scale. My research contributions include two IEEE GLOBECOM studies of IoT botnets and early warnings about DDoS amplification.

In May 2019, I identified WS-Discovery amplification attacks in the wild and reported them to ZDNet. I also shared early CoAP and WS-Discovery findings with the FBI and security press, and provided commentary on carpet-bombing attacks.

Explore my research contributions and sources or published articles, interviews, and technical commentary.

Elsewhere

LinkedIn ↗ · Gcore interview ↗