Data centre practice
From first parcel to steady state
A campus passes through five sets of hands. The person who makes a decision is almost never the person who lives with it, and that gap is where money and goodwill are lost.
What we carry at each stage
We do not self-perform construction and we do not replace your engineer of record. We carry the decisions, the sequence and the evidence — the work that falls between your specialists and usually onto nobody.
- Develop Multi-site screening against grid capacity, groundwater and flood exposure, ground conditions and incentive zone. Entitlement route, power and water strategy, incentive election with written rulings, phasing that avoids negative leverage, and the funding structure that goes with it.
- Build Owner's representative. Long-lead procurement discipline for transformers and switchgear, contractor and vendor governance, change control priced against the original basis, and consents tracked as schedule items with named owners rather than as a compliance list.
- Commission Level 1 to 5 test regime and witness plan, integrated systems test under load, as-built and O&M evidence pack, and the operations team in the room months before handover instead of on the day.
- Operate Operating model and staffing per megawatt, escalation ladder a two-year technician can follow at 3am, maintenance tied to design intent, energy and tariff strategy, spares and vendor contracts, incident and root-cause discipline.
- Sustain Expansion triggers and phase releases, air-to-liquid retrofit planning, regulatory change tracking, technology refresh, and readiness for a sale or recapitalisation when the time comes.
The four inputs that decide a campus
Every failed site we have looked at failed on one of these, and it failed early — usually before anyone had run the model.
Grid
Twelve to twenty-four months where high-voltage infrastructure does not already exist. This, not land price, is the binding constraint.
Water
Cooling water permits are now the harder consent in most metros. Over-exploited groundwater blocks approval outright, whatever you are willing to pay.
Land
Ground that can carry liquid-cooled point loads and sits above a defensible flood line, at a scale that leaves room for the phase you have not committed to yet.
Fibre
Two physically independent paths, or a wholesale tenant will not sign. If both routes share a conduit, no amount of on-site redundancy fixes it.
Gates, not mitigations
We write walk-aways as walk-aways. On a recent 30 MW programme, the fibre gate was a hard fail: if two diverse paths could not be contracted, the site was abandoned. Most advisers would have logged that as a risk with a mitigation. It is not. It is a stop.
The cheapest project you will ever run is the one you stop in month three.
Three gates before capital is committed
- Two physically diverse contracted fibre paths, tested by a formal capacity enquiry to every carrier in the corridor
- Written eligible-asset ruling and zone confirmation from the department that will actually disburse
- Transmission spare-capacity confirmation in MVA, and a water allocation in principle with the rate fixed in writing
Where the security practice comes in
A campus is a security problem wearing a building, and the cheapest time to deal with that is while the drawings are still open.
Design stage
Network segmentation for building management and power systems, remote-access rules for vendors, and physical access control specified against the tenant contract that will audit it.
Commissioning
Security testing folded into the integrated systems test, so the failover you prove is the one an attacker would try to trip.
Operations
Monitoring that covers the control layer as well as the IT layer, and one evidence trail serving tenants, insurers and regulators.
Tell us the district you are already looking at
We will tell you what is likely to stop it, and whether the work is worth doing at all.