A data centre campus through seven phases of construction, and what the site’s own technology can record between the visits, where a project runs it.
A data centre is not a large building. It is a large amount of equipment that needs a building around it. The plant inside is worth more than the structure that houses it, and much of it arrives months before it is installed, after lead times measured in years.
They are built at a pace few projects of this value attempt. Demand sets the programme, and the programme is compressed from the first day on site. The projects keep going after handover, too. The first hall runs live while the next is still being built, so one campus is an operating facility and a construction site at once, with a boundary between them that moves.
Construction at this value, at this scale, and at this speed has never been seen before. Values this large strain the cover available for them, and the faster the programme, the more each day is worth. Delayed practical completion is a risk to every party, whether or not a risk transfer mechanism exists for it. Where physical damage causes the delay, the cost of that delay can dwarf the cost of the damage. Everyone with a stake in the project is watching the same three things: what is on site, how it is protected, and whether it is on programme.
On one side are the people delivering the project: the owner, the contractors and their supply chain. On the other are the people financing it and carrying its risk: lenders, insurers and reinsurers. Both need to know the same things about the site, for different reasons.
The finance side sees the site through risk engineering. The engineer looks for the conditions that turn into losses before they do: fire protection falling behind the fit-out, plant stored where water can reach it, hot work without the right controls. A loss prevented is a delay that never happens, which is how risk engineering helps a project finish on time and on budget.
An engineer’s attention is finite, and on a programme this fast the site changes most between visits: deliveries at the gate, plant in storage, energisation in sequence, a boundary that shifts week by week. Between visits, the engineer can only react to what is reported. A record of those days lets them get ahead of it.
The faster a site moves and the more value passes through it, the more happens between visits. Not every project runs reality capture, but more do each year, and data centres are increasingly among them. Where it is in place, it runs for the project’s own purposes:
The delivery team runs the project from this record. If the people building the site work from it every day, the people financing and insuring it have every reason to see the same record, and risk engineering is where that happens. Pikt puts it, time-stamped and attributable, in front of the engineer.
The scene below follows a campus through seven phases. Each marker sits on a part of the site that has been named in print this year as a driver of loss or a gap in cover. Open one to see what is happening there, what a risk engineer wants to know, and what the site’s technology can record where it is in place. Scroll to move through the phases, or use the phase list. Nothing in the scene is a real project, and the sources are listed below it.
See every site, every day. Survey the ones that need it.
Custody, progress and what the site looked like, from the technology a project runs: fixed cameras, 360° walk-throughs, environmental sensors, drone capture, progress tracking, and the design models where the project issues them. Each entry keeps its source and its time.
No new hardware, and nothing added to the site team’s day.
Pikt does not assess condition, cause or value. It does not score, rank, predict or advise. It records what the site’s own technology observed, with its time and provenance, and shows it to the people who carry the risk.
Pikt is not an insurer, broker or MGA, and gives no insurance advice.
Put your own project’s figures against this. Reality Capture Value computes exposure and offset for a data centre programme.
Open Reality Capture ValueIf you oversee a data centre programme and want to see what its own technology already records, we would like to talk.
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