The New Economics Of Data Center Delay

Francesco Iorio is co-founder and CEO of Augmenta, a company automating building design for the construction industry.

Data center owners and developers are under enormous pressure to bring capacity online quickly. Every month a 60 MW facility sits idle costs its owner an estimated $14.2 million in lost revenue, financing costs and contractual penalties, according to STL Partners’ research.​

Experienced project teams already spend enormous effort identifying schedule exposure and squeezing time from procurement, sequencing, inspections, field execution and other familiar levers. Yet, some of the forces affecting energization remain difficult or impossible to control.​​​

Other forces are within an owner or developer’s control. Late design changes are a good example: Owners may deliberately change requirements to accommodate newer technology such as higher-performance GPUs with different rack, power or cooling requirements, because the economic benefits justify the disruption.​​

The challenge is therefore not always just preventing change, but building a delivery process capable of absorbing disruption.​​

That requires looking beyond the traditional places teams go to recover time. Some parts of the project workflow have historically been treated as relatively fixed because there was little practical ability to accelerate them or make them more responsive.

As technology reaches deeper into design, modeling and coordination, that assumption is beginning to change.​ Rather than replace proven schedule controls, the opportunity is to expand the field of view and to identify where technology has made previously difficult-to-influence parts of the workflow newly actionable.​​​​​​​

Reconsider where schedule margin can come from.​​

Design, building information modeling (BIM) and coordination are examples of areas where technology is beginning to change what is possible.