Powering hyperscale data centers

In the end, the project’s success came down to client-to-contractor collaboration and well-placed trust.

A confidential client — a developer of next-generation turnkey hyperscale data center campuses — needed speed to market in delivering a data center to a tenant with ambitious, strict plans about when the building would be ready for business. The dilemma: a lack of crucial clarity about the effort’s precise scope and the ultimate funding needs early into the multi-phase project, namely when it came to building the first of two 300-megawatt substations to help power the campus.

Black & Veatch — globally known for its critical infrastructure solutions — had the answers.

In lockstep with the client as the company entrusted to make the substation a reality, Black & Veatch turned to a progressive design-build approach that allowed for early acquisition of long-lead items, as well as incremental design development as the project’s requirements became clearer. As part of Black & Veatch’s expertise toolkit, that innovative alternative project delivery method has advantages — schedule compression and cost containment, among others — that typical design-bid-build practices can’t match, allowing greater flexibility and stakeholder input.

Underscoring its invaluable understanding of the market, Black & Veatch shifted the manner of getting circuit breakers and other key components by mitigating long wait times so common for such components in the supply chain, proactively placing those orders early in the process. Just-in-time delivery was championed, avoiding construction delays — all part of nimble pacing that shaved three months off the anticipated schedule.

That agility won the day. The first of the substations is to be completed by September 2025, meeting the tight deadline. Construction of the second is expected to begin by the end of 2025.

Speed, transparency and scalable power solutions

As hyperscale data centers proliferate across America’s landscape, finding innovative ways to meet their sizable power demands increasingly has required sharper focus. Black & Veatch has answered that call, with more than a century of supplying critical power infrastructure that has included substations as an increasingly go-to option for data centers, delivering reliable electrons for those enterprises to thrive.

After the client broke ground for the substation in 2024, Black & Veatch deployed a version of an “open to closed book” contract approach that facilitated the client’s requirements and schedule while providing a target price for the project.

The accounting then got “true upped” as the construction progressed, and the client was presented with the subcontractor bids and took part in the selection process before the price was locked in. The upside: transparency and greater accuracy of project costs with fewer change orders, propelling speed to market for the site that calls for three eventual campuses powered by the two new substations.

The true game-changer remained the shortened construction schedule through Black & Veatch’s nimble approach to procurement, largely in how it got essentials faster. Case in point: When suppliers warned that high-voltage circuit breakers generally wouldn’t arrive for as long as 85 weeks, Black & Veatch received them in just 48 to 65 weeks by requesting staggered deliveries.