Data Centers
Our integrated design approach to Data Centers emphasizes early involvement and a fluid, dynamic process. This gives us the agility to pivot and adapt to issues, challenges, and opportunities associated with key project drivers like site, integration of MEP systems, sustainability, and constructability.
Because the structural system impacts all aspects of a data center, we ideally begin our process during site selection and conceptual design phases. We can then inform and shape the design, considering and looking ahead to such critical factors as flexibility, resiliency, performance, operations, maintenance, and sustainability.
Data Center developers, architects, and MEP engineers turn to DeSimone for trusted expertise in the design of data centers and other mission critical facilities. Our roster of clients includes Digital Realty Trust, Microsoft, Amazon, QTS, DataBank, L.L. Bean, RagingWire/NTT, Aligned Energy, Bloomberg, Fidelity Investments, and more.
For decades, we’ve offered integration structural design, detailing, and project delivery services for tilt-up concrete, precast, and high-efficiency steel structures—positioning us as a proven leader in the evolving data center market.
Our ability to offer input and adapt the structural design for a data center from the project’s outset can be critical to identifying—and leveraging—opportunities for efficiencies, customization, and incorporating features that can support future expansion and adaption for evolving use and technologies.
We validate the schematic design against its capacity to support power, facilitate communications and prevent damaging water entry. Our experience has shown us the unique differences between the design of hyperscale data center campuses with large co-location providers and smaller facilities, including the competitive build-to-suit developers, but also the integration challenges they share.
We understand the changes and conditions impacting the data center market today, from economic drivers and soaring demand for AI-ready facilities to construction logistics and the sustainability and resiliency concerns driven by climate change.
Our engineers understand the design processes and demands unique to complex data center projects that require dependable and accurate integration with MEP systems and robust, reliable performance at high power density.
We’ve designed data centers from 200,000 SF (18,600 SM) to over 800,000 SF (74,300 SM) in size, capable of providing 26 MW to 96 MW of IT power. These include Building P for Digital Realty Trust, a 2-story, 790,000-SF (73,400 SM) data center that is part of a 2M-SF data center campus. Supporting 74MW of IT load we designed a steel-framed structure with load-bearing exterior tilt-up wall panels. For RagingWire, we completed the 16MW, 250,000-SF (23,200 SM) Data Center Building VA3, the company’s first greenfield data center in Northern Virginia. We designed a combined precast superstructure with conventional steel framing.
We work with the structural considerations that impact the effective design of data centers and anticipate the need for specific features and interventions. For example, we space footings and columns to account for load capacity should rooftop dunnage be added down the line. Similarly, we design the foundation to accommodate underground penetration for new conduit for other mechanical systems. For Project Centurion for Aligned Energy, our team designed a steel-framed floor and roof, with partial electrical mezzanines around the perimeter of each floor level, and exterior walls primarily constructed of load-bearing tilt-up concrete wall panels cast on site.
Through our long-standing relationships with other companies that specialize in critical infrastructure, we have gained great insight into the various cooling, electrical, and telecom requirements that are unique to data centers.
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About us
In an industry in which consolidation has become the norm, DeSimone stands apart from large engineering practices. The diversification of our services enables us to support a global clientele experiencing complex challenges. We remain independent so that we are able to provide bespoke and personal solutions, wherever your vision takes you.
Structural engineering is where we began, and it is still the core of our practice. But through the years, we have expanded the services we offer our clients, from façade and building envelope to vertical transportation to steel detailing and fabrication-ready modeling to advisory services.
