• • • INTERVIEW • • •
From engineer to industry leader: Paul Hood on powering the future of data centres
BY PAUL HOOD,
CHIEF OPERATING OFFICER, AVK
E
lectrical Engineering caught up with Paul Hood, AVK’s Chief Operating Officer, at a recent press event to hear his take on the fast-moving data centre industry. With a career spanning senior roles at Yondr Group, Pure Data Centres, Barclays and JP Morgan, Paul has led major infrastructure operations across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Starting out in engineering, he’s built a deep understanding of building systems that still shapes his approach today. Known for his practical mindset and hands-on leadership style, Paul shared his thoughts on growth, challenges and what’s next for the sector.
You’ve been working in data centres for over 25 years. What originally drew you to the industry? I’m an engineer by trade. I started life out as a Controls Engineer with the post office, so I was at the start of automated letter sorting. AWS uses this now for Amazon, so I was at the forefront of that technology.
26 ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING •MARCH 2026
Then I joined a company called John’s Controls, building control systems for technical buildings in the city of London. During that period of time, I was fortunate to work on a project for JP Morgan who were building their European headquarters in London. I was the Lead Commissioning Engineer on that job, writing software code for controlling their intelligent buildings, they built an on-premise data centre for their trading. So that was really my first real route into the data centre industry. As a result of this, JP Morgan approached me to go and work for them. I was there for thirteen years as their Engineering Manager across Europe, the Middle East and Africa. During this time, we built our three enterprise data centres in the UK, all in the same year.
I then worked for Barclays globally as their Head of Engineering, but then fell out of love with corporate life, so I began Pure as one of the three founders back in 2015 and was with them for five years. So I’ve been in the date centre industry for the last 40 years now.
How has the culmination of your experiences shaped how you approach large scale infrastructure operations at AVK? I think one of the benefits of having been an engineer on the tools and seeing the real problems and the challenges is that i’ve been able to learn
from mistakes. Being a humble engineer I don’t profess to know it all, every day is a school day. Having been on the client side for the past 30 years meant that my decision to leave yonder and come back into a supplier arena with AVK was purely built on my passion for the industry and to come and drive to make a difference at the front end of the industry where the challenges are. And there genuinely are challenges. During my
career, I have helped build in Malaysia, Frankfurt, Toronto, Mumbai, the US, everywhere, and I had the same challenges. Being able to bring the solutions that I’ve learnt as an engineer is really what I want to be doing.
People still see data centres as energy-intensive infrastructure. How important is it for companies like Pure DC and AVK to actively invest in environmental innovation to change that perception?
I live in an area, currently, where there is a group of local residents lobbying against a data centre that’s quite significant. I saw some of the messaging from the pro and against parties and I think people need to understand that we need data centres. They’re not really a luxury item anymore. Everything we do, everything we interact with that runs our lives, runs through a data centre. Your banking, your insurance, your TV,
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