SERVICES
Engineering services for AI data center buildouts
The brief in motion
Vulcan AI: Four Engagements, One Side of the Table
Four engagements, one side of the table
Vulcan AI does not sell hardware and does not build. Every engagement puts an owner-side engineer against your project: someone whose only incentive is that the facility works at design load, at the density you actually need, on a timeline the grid can support. The four services below can be engaged independently or in sequence, and most projects run through several of them in order.
AI Data-Center Readiness Assessment, from $4,900
A two-week engineering audit of an existing or planned facility against AI-density requirements: rack density and thermal envelope, power availability and quality, cooling architecture, floor loading, network topology, and deployment timeline. It is deliberately the first step, because it is the cheapest point in the project to discover a hard limit.
Liquid-Cooling Design Review, from $9,500
An independent engineering review of a direct-to-chip or immersion cooling design before capital is committed: loop architecture, CDU sizing against real thermal loads, redundancy and failure modes, and a commissioning plan your integrator has to sign against. It fits naturally after the readiness assessment and before contracts are signed.
Retrofit Site Acquisition Advisory, from $15,000
Sourcing and qualifying industrial sites, malls, factories, and retired power plants in the 250MW-1GW class that carry live interconnection agreements from a former life. The advisory verifies the power is real, scopes the retrofit, and builds a phased conversion plan targeting first load in 12-18 months instead of a greenfield's 36.
Deployment Oversight, from $8,500 per month
An owner-representative engineer for the duration of the build: vendor and integrator accountability, milestone verification, and presence at the thermal and power commissioning tests that actually decide whether the facility works. It pairs naturally with the design review, since the engineer who validated the design is the one who should witness it get built.
Why liquid changes the arithmetic
Air-cooled facilities commonly run a PUE of 1.4 to 1.6 or higher once cooling and air movement are counted. A well-engineered liquid plant pushes that toward 1.1 to 1.2. On a large campus, that gap is tens of megawatts of interconnection recovered from your own cooling bill rather than spent on it, which is why every engagement above treats cooling as a capital decision, not a facilities line item.
How an engagement actually runs
Most projects move through the same sequence regardless of where they start: establish what the site or building can support, design and validate the cooling path, and put an accountable engineer on site through commissioning. Retrofit projects add site acquisition and power-rights diligence at the front of that sequence.
- 01Assess2 weeks: density ceiling, power, cooling architecture, go/no-go
- 02Designdesign review scoped to the project's cooling package
- 03Builddeployment oversight through construction and commissioning
- 04First loadenergized, revenue-generating capacity
Next step
Not sure where to start
Most engagements begin with the readiness assessment. If you already know which service you need, go directly to its page, or send the project details and Jon will scope it from there.