With demand for data centers surging, federal leadership is eager to remove hurdles and provide incentives to accelerate builds. Energy and manufacturing projects related to data centers are also eligible for funds, tax credits, and loans. Reducing red tape? Yes, that’s key to the acceleration effort too.
Swifter Approvals, More Construction
Data center builds are at the center of construction activity across the country, though completing them involves significant challenges related to securing land, energy, equipment and materials. To speed up the action, a White House directive “aims to accelerate federal permitting and unlock financial incentives for large-scale data center builds, along with related energy and manufacturing projects.” Specifically, federal leadership aims to rev up data center construction with measures like:
- Expanded access to federal lands
- Grants, tax credits and loan guarantees for qualifying projects.
- Reduced permitting friction for megaprojects valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Construction Drive reports that the effort to eliminate barriers and accelerate data center builds “coincides with a wave of new data center investment,” and shares these two examples of megaprojects getting underway:
- CoreWeave recently tapped Turner and Wohlsen Construction to deliver a $6 billion data center facility in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
- Tech giant Google also recently pledged more than $25 billion to expand its artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Since all that data we send “to the cloud” actually requires four walls and a 24/7 power source, it’s anticipated that “data center construction will continue to provide substantial business for the construction industry and, in particular, for electricians.” Given the particular requirements of data centers, most demand new construction, and site selection is extremely tricky. Not everyone wants “massive, windowless buildings housing the high-speed computers that make technologies like 5G and artificial intelligence possible” dotting their community, and, not every site can provide the ready access to power required:
A key criterion in site selection is proximity to the clusters of undersea cables that send and receive data from all over the world. In the United States, the cloud’s Grand Central Terminal is Northern Virginia…..Data centers typically are new construction, given the challenges with retrofitting a building to meet requirements, such as raising the floor above the foundation and running powerful cooling systems to keep the hardware from overheating…..The generators and cooling components are built to allow repairs while they continue to operate, and they consume a lot of energy. Because data centers work around the clock, they need ready access to cheap, reliable power.
Good To Know: What Exactly Is A Data Center?
Noting that Virginia leads the nation in data centers construction, with California, Texas and Illinois also becoming home for many, C&C Technology Group, a business whose work includes planning for smart buildings and data centers, provides this three points to define data centers:
- A data center is a building or group of buildings that holds computer systems and equipment. These facilities provide space, power, cooling, and security for servers and network hardware.
- There are different types of data centers. Enterprise data centers are owned and operated by one company for its own needs. Colocation data centers rent space, power, and internet to different businesses. Cloud data centers are run by large companies like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google and provide online services to users.
- Data centers can be small rooms or very large buildings. Reliability, security, and constant operations are essential features.
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