Data Centres & Digital Infrastructure

Data centres — warehouses of power and cooling, built like fortresses.

A data centre is mission-critical construction: the shell is familiar — long-span steel, high-load slabs, a secure envelope — and those shared methods are linked below. But the building is only ever the wrapper. The job is power, cooling, white space and proving it all works under load before handover.

The electrical infrastructure is sized in megawatts and built in layers of redundancy — substations and grid connections, switchgear, UPS and generators — because the facility is sold on never going dark. The cooling plant runs as hard as the servers it serves. And the fit-out turns the shell into certified white space: raised floors, containment, racks and cabling, all of it commissioned under simulated load at integrated systems testing, where the facility rehearses every failure mode before a single customer server arrives.

The five guides in this sector cover the mission-critical layer — shell and structure, power, cooling, white-space fit-out, and commissioning and IST. The everyday civils upstream are the shared methods, linked through to their canonical guides.

What does Data Centres & Digital Infrastructure cover?

• Hyperscale data centres
• Colocation facilities
• Edge & enterprise facilities
• Substations & grid connections

Process guides in Data Centres & Digital Infrastructure

• Data Hall Shell & Structure — Long-span steel, high-load slabs and a secure, weather-tight envelope — the warehouse-scale structure engineered for rack loads, not roof lights, where weather-tightness is a hold point the whole fit-out depends on.
• Power Infrastructure — From utility intake to the rack PDU — substations, HV/LV switchgear, UPS and batteries, standby generators and busway distribution, engineered to a redundancy philosophy that tolerates failure without dropping a single server.
• Cooling Systems — Getting the heat out — chillers and chilled-water loops, CRAH units and aisle containment, free cooling, and the direct liquid cooling that high-density AI racks now demand, all measured by one number: PUE.
• White-Space Fit-Out — Turning the shell into sellable white space — racks and containment aligned to the millimetre, kilometres of structured cabling overhead, VESDA and gas suppression below, and the security layers and DCIM that make the hall a product.
• Commissioning & Integrated Systems Testing — The five-level commissioning framework that ends with pulling the plug on a live load — factory witness tests, load banks, integrated systems testing and failure drills that prove the facility behaves exactly as the redundancy philosophy promised.

Shared methods used in Data Centres & Digital Infrastructure

• Site Access & Enabling Works
• Earthworks & Excavation
• Piling & Deep Foundations
• Concrete Frame Construction
• Steel Frame Construction
• Floor Slabs & Screeds
• Roofing
• Façade & Cladding
• MEP First Fix
• Testing, Handover & Snagging

Part of the Utilities & Energy group.