With a career on both sides of the data centre operator/client divide, Mark Acton is well qualified to talk about how the industry can provide sustainable digital infrastructure to meet the huge demand coming down the pipe.
Ahead of his appearance at Datacloud ESG in March, he talks about his accidental data centre career, the hurdles facing nuclear power provision, and how we can help end users play their role in making digital infra more sustainable.
How did you get into the data centre world - was it an intentional choice?
No, it wasn’t intentional. When I left university, data centres were mainframe systems in basements. I started as an IT manager for a small department, managing an asynchronous network in the late 80s. In the mid-90s, someone offered me a job looking after this thing called a data centre. I had no idea what it was, but I ended up overseeing buildings, which was a steep learning curve. I worked through the dot-com boom and bust, managing data centres globally in places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, and the US. Over time, I moved into consulting, working with Dell, Uptime Institute, CBRE, and later, as an independent consultant from 2019.
Starting on the IT side gave me good visibility of what IT clients want in a data centre. That's always helped me in my career - sitting in that middle ground between what we are providing as data centre operators and what the customers actually want from us, even to the point of acting as a translator on occasion!
As Lord Sainsbury once said, I did have a career path, but it was made of crazy paving! I’ve had a career of chance rather than a career of choice.
That’s quite a common theme with people in data centres…
Absolutely. I think that’s one of the problems we have in the sector.
People talk about a talent shortage. There is lots of talent out there, we just make it hard to gain access to it. Most of us currently in the sector stumbled in through the back door. Now, HR departments may ask for PhD and 10 years' experience in data centres – but these people either don’t exist or they are already in our sector.
We’re not prepared to let people learn on the job effectively. We want fully formed individuals – but the reality is we’re going to have to create those individuals ourselves by giving them the opportunity to learn. It’s not about a lack of talent – there is plenty of talent but we are not taking advantage of it.
What’s the solution?
We need fewer rigid specifications and more focus on cultural fit, adaptability, and willingness to learn. The technology’s moving so quickly – there’s no way kids coming out of school or university can be up to speed with the tech we’re currently using. So why don’t we just employ the right people rather than insisting on all the hoops they’ve got to jump through?
Are there good examples out there of how to recruit talent?
There are increasing numbers of companies who are making a big deal about apprenticeships. I think there’s a recognition that more vocational training is becoming more popular and important. I’ve seen it happening on the data centre operator side and on the supplier side, but not on a sufficiently large scale. We should be hiring people on their aptitude and cultural abilities instead of the piece of paper they hold.
Let’s shift to what you’ll speak about at the event - nuclear power. Do you think modular reactors are too far in the future?
The problem is not with the technology. Small modular reactors have been used in submarines and aircraft carriers for decades, although they can take a long time to build and test. The real challenge is licensing and security – for example, do we need armed guards protecting nuclear installations? A lot of countries, including the UK, wouldn’t be keen on that.
Should we be talking about them now? Absolutely, firstly because it is starting to happen now with some hyperscalers already investing in nuclear technology, secondly because the intermittency of alternative renewable sources is a real problem. How big do our batteries need to be? Are we just going to be running on standby generators overnight anyway?
If you look at the energy alternatives, nuclear is probably most sensible option. What we’ve got to do is work out how we regulate it, how we operate it, and how we make it secure.
Do you see collaboration happening between data centres, power companies, and governments to shift public perception of nuclear power and data centres in general?
It has to happen, frankly. Any country in the world must focus on its digital economy.
I’ve been very impressed with how the UK government has made data centres a part of critical national infrastructure, as well as investing $14bn in what is effectively sovereign AI in the UK. Growth in the digital economy cannot be achieved without government policy supporting the digital sector, whether it’s data centres or networks or whatever. These projects are so big that there must be government support - and part of that is making the power available through the utility companies, and government policy to enable that to happen. There is big public debate on this currently, and I think we as a sector need to be much clearer with the public about data centres and how they really work.
Do you think the public has a responsibility to limit their use of technologies such as generative AI?
What drives IT and data centre demand? We do as a society by our choices of digital service consumption – communicating through TikTok, Facebook and Snapchat, posting pictures of cats, and so on. We as an industry do not create that demand, we merely service it, and this irony needs to be explained to the public.
The first thing that we’ve got to do is give people the level of understanding to enable them to make those choices. We put calorie counts on food packaging and menus – some people look at it, some people ignore it, but it gives you an idea of the energy content of the food you’re consuming.
There’s no reason why we couldn’t put something similar on various digital services – a wattage count would effectively be the same as a calorie count – to help people see there is an overhead in using certain services or streaming videos or whatever it may be. At the moment, people don’t realise that a ChatGPT query consumes five or ten times the power of a Google search.
People do their own thing unless they understand the consequences of their actions, and the only way of doing that from data centre perspective is make them understand the energy overhead of the digital services they're consuming.
You’re speaking at the Datacloud ESG event in March, which will focus heavily on the interaction between the power and data centre worlds. Which topics do you expect will dominate the conversation?
Power and AI. Once you start talking about power and AI, inevitably you’re drawn into the sustainability discussion, because one is a consequence of the other. AI has become a buzzword, and it’s slightly irritating that lots of people are talking about it without really understanding it. But there is no question that it’s going to increasingly feature in our lives and that it will increasingly consume more power – but I don’t think anybody’s really got any idea quite how much and where it will go.