MARK YEELES
AI INFRASTRUCTURE
“ By combining innovative engineering with sustainable data centre solutions, the university has developed an enhanced infrastructure platform that will meet its research computing requirements, while supporting its sustainability strategy.”
The chips powering today’ s AI revolution weren’ t designed for AI workloads at all.
GPUs started life making video games look better, but their parallel processing architecture happened to be perfect for the calculations that neural networks love.
Companies like Nvidia, for example, have become the kingmakers of the AI boom, with processors that don’ t just use more power than traditional server chips, but operate in an entirely different league, requiring 30 to 50 kilowatts per rack compared to the 5 to 10 kilowatts that used to be considered normal.
The QMUL project shows how infrastructure design has had to evolve around these new thermal realities.
Traditional data centres were built with the assumption that servers would run intermittently and generate manageable amounts of heat, now AI workloads have thrown that assumption out the window.
What makes the university’ s approach particularly clever is how they’ ve stopped treating computing hardware and building systems as separate problems.
Most data centres are still designed with disjointed communication between compartments, but QMUL has built something more like a modern smart home, where everything communicates.
MARK YEELES
TITLE: VICE PRESIDENT, SECURE POWER DIVISION, SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC UK AND IRELAND
COMPANY: SCHNEIDER ELECTRIC
INDUSTRY: ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT
Mark Yeeles leads Schneider Electric’ s UK / Ireland data centre infrastructure solutions, championing sustainable AI computing through heat recovery systems and digital optimisation technologies that transform energy-hungry processors into community assets.
Schneider Electric turning waste heat into campus comfort Traditional data centre thinking treats heat as enemy number one, but the QMUL project flips this on its head by treating thermal output as a valuable product in its own right.
Schneider Electric achieves this with its EcoStruxure system which monitors how hot the servers are getting as well as actively coordinates computing workloads with the heating demands of campus buildings.
It’ s like having a very sophisticated thermostat that understands both quantum physics calculations and whether the students in the dorms need their radiators turned up.
134 September 2025