Businesses and consumers seem to have an inexhaustible appetite for the services and economic benefits data centres can deliver. But these facilities also have their own apparently inexhaustible appetite for power and other resources.
Ben Pritchard is CEO of AVK-SEG, a London-based company founded by his father. Having started out supplying backup power systems for corporate data centres, the firm now works on some of the biggest hyperscale installations across Europe.
Pritchard originally joined the company as a summer job as a service engineer, after an injury ended his professional rugby career with London Irish. He ended up staying with the company just as the data centre boom took off, working his way through service, projects and sales before taking the CEO role in 2023 to re-focus the firm on renewables and microgrid technology.
In this interview, edited for length and clarity, Pritchard discusses whether hype is matching reality, the future of the internal combustion engine – and why the tech world could do with a few more family businesses.
Governments in the UK and Europe have been talking about the need to build out data centre capacity and achieve AI and data sovereignty. How have things really changed over the last six months?
In the European market, there’s been a lot of discussion about things that are going to happen. We’re yet to see the fruits of that as an industry. There’s a lot of excitement, but not necessarily a lot of doing at the moment in terms of building. AVK only really gets into gear when something’s being built.
You look at other areas in the world, like the US and Asia, they’re romping away with AI. Europe is quite a complex beast because it’s regionalised. Every country’s got their own opinion on data sovereignty and wants to own its own [capacity]. So, it’s a bit harder to unpick. We’re seeing, probably, over the last two months, things start to unblock a little bit.
I think every country is struggling with AI. But what is exciting in the UK is that there are a number of large schemes that are in the pipeline. More than we’ve ever seen.
Are enterprises facing the same problems as they build up their own data centre capacity?
Absolutely. Everyone’s trying to build in the same areas at the moment, and that does bring about grid constraints for anyone, whether you’re a hyperscaler or enterprise. Everyone lives in the same world. You know, no one gets treated differently.
However, the challenges extend far beyond location competition. Enterprise data centres are hitting serious power availability walls. The power equipment supply chain is severely strained, with lead times for critical infrastructure, such as transformers, backup generators, and power distribution units, reaching nearly two years in some cases.
This is where distributed energy and hybrid microgrids become real game-changers for enterprises. With renewable assets such as solar or wind and technologies like battery storage, HVO-powered generators, and advanced controls, companies can secure reliable and predictable power. This delivers cost stability and greater energy independence, so they can deploy new capacity faster while maintaining resilience and flexibility.
So, what do enterprises need to understand about data centres and power?
We’re at this inflection point with power, where the data centre industry can actually drive and assist the energy transition. We’re talking about how data centres themselves can stop being these energy-hungry beasts and actually start to contribute, support and underpin the global energy effort.
The tried and tested technologies are the generators that you’ve seen typically for stand-by, for backup. The combustion engine remains quite a useful piece of technology in this respect because you can put most things in it that will ignite, and it will run. So, it gives great flexibility for future fuels. That’s where I think the big wins are, where you start to look at those renewable biofuels, like HVO [hydrogenated vegetable oil.] That’s the first stepping stone. We see stuff like ethanol starting to play a bit of a part and getting some good traction. So that’s really the big area for those sorts of combustion engines.
On the microgrid side, we’re looking at larger engines that are running on gas. We see potential for hydrogen, too, although there are some question marks with transportation. The production of hydrogen is not yet solved, either. But then you see things like bio-methane, green gas.
Your father, Chris, founded AVK, and it remains a family-owned and run firm. What makes a family-run tech firm different? And should the tech world have more of them?
As far as AVK is concerned, when we have an idea and think it works, we go out and deliver it. It’s calculated for sure, and we go through our own risk assessment process, but we also get on with the job. We’ve hired a lot of very good people from multi-billion-pound corporations who, in the end, have joined us because of that enthusiasm we have for effecting change, no matter where you’re working inside the business. I think it’s quite difficult for an employee to do that in large organisations.
It’s also significantly easier to effect change in a privately-owned family business than in a public one. I also think that family firms tend to be a bit more entrepreneurial, too. That’s something the industry could use more of, but it also needs more investment in R&D and product. And that kind of change, in the end, can only come from larger investors, larger corporations.
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