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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.

3 replies

The mantrap at 6am is real and every trade who's worked one of these complains about it. On owning a piece, the practical route for most people is public shares in the companies that own these facilities, which is a stock decision more than a real estate decision. Buying a building like the one you wired takes hundreds of millions and a power team.

Mostly confused by everything on this forum, but the megawatts instead of square feet thing actually made sense to me the first time. It's like renting a tank of water instead of renting the tank.

solder, your side of this might be worth more than the ownership side. If the constraint on new supply is power and skilled electrical labor, the people who can commission that gear get to name their price for a long while. I'd be asking who trains the controls techs.