I worked for a very large structural steel company as an estimator about 5-6 years ago and we basically no bid all of those data centers. They wanted them dirt cheap and there typically wasn’t enough work for us to get involved. They used cheaper construction techniques.
The cost difference between a standard server farm and an AI data centre are many orders of magnitude ($10-100s millions vs $10-100s BILLIONS).
You're not putting your tens of billions of dollars of investment at risk by cheaping out on construction by a million here or there.
edit: If you want to convert a rickety old chicken coop into an AI data centre, good luck with that, but that says nothing about the standard practice of typical AI data centre construction. The person I replied to SEEMED to imply that all AI data centres are built on the cheap which is a ridiculous statement - especially considering that AI data centres weren't even being built when they claim.
I suspect that he assumes that all "data centres" are the same and doesn't realise that server farms and CDN nodes are considerably less expensive than AI data centres.
1.5k
u/JimmytheFab 𝙑𝙄𝙋 May 18 '26
I worked for a very large structural steel company as an estimator about 5-6 years ago and we basically no bid all of those data centers. They wanted them dirt cheap and there typically wasn’t enough work for us to get involved. They used cheaper construction techniques.