I pulled conduit in a windowless building with one tenant
Spent about five months on a jobsite last year that I didn't understand until near the end. Single story, enormous, no windows, concrete everywhere. I was on the electrical crew running conduit, and the thing that got me was the ratio. On a normal commercial building the electrical room is a room. On this one, the electrical and mechanical spaces felt like most of the building, and the part where the computers were going was almost an afterthought by square footage.
Generators outside, each one about the size of a shipping container, in a row. Fuel tanks. Two of everything, and then a spare of some things. To get into the data hall side you go through a set of two doors where the first has to close before the second opens, which the badge guy called a mantrap and I called annoying at 6am.
The site super was decent to me and I asked him one day who was moving in. He said the whole building was leased before the slab got poured, and the customer had signed for a certain number of megawatts, not a certain number of square feet. Then he said the reason the second phase hadn't started wasn't money or drawings. It was the utility. They were waiting on power.
I've been swinging tools for eleven years and I'd never thought of a building as a place to put electricity. Now I can't stop seeing it that way, and I'm trying to work out whether there's any way for somebody like me to own a piece of that rather than just wire it.