An idle shell has walls, a roof and power, but it was built for a different machine. We turn it into a facility that can carry, cool and feed a dense AI cluster.
A powered shell already has the hard part: walls, a roof and a live connection. But the building was poured and wired for its old job. An AI cluster is a different load entirely: dense, hot, heavy, and rejecting most of its heat into liquid rather than air.
This layer is the work of turning an idle shell into AI-ready white space: cooling racks the building was never built to cool, carrying weight the floor was never poured for, and moving the heat back out.
Four kinds of work stand between a powered shell and white space a tenant can move into.
Air handling sized for a warehouse cannot move heat off a 100 kW rack. Dense clusters want liquid brought to the chip: coolant distribution units, primary and secondary loops, direct-to-chip plumbing.
Dense racks plus the liquid feeding them concentrate weight the original slab was never poured for. A structural survey establishes what the floor can take and where it needs reinforcement.
The heat pulled off the chips has to leave the site. Dry coolers, cooling towers or a closed loop reject it outdoors, which means roof and yard space, water access, and permits the old use never needed.
The room is dictated by the reference design: rack pitch, hot-aisle containment, power distribution to the rack and network pathways. Fit-out has to match the specific cluster the site will run.
Rack density, coolant temperatures and floor loading are set by the silicon vendor's reference design. The retrofit is designed backward from a cluster that may not be chosen yet.
Every shell is bespoke. Slab strength, ceiling height, water rights and how power routes through the building only surface under survey.
Cold plates, distribution units, loop chemistry, leak detection, heat rejection and controls all have to work as one system, and stay serviceable while the cluster runs. Integrating them is a large share of the retrofit's engineering.
Cooling, construction and critical-infrastructure delivery are partner work. We scope it, pick the operators and sequence their work.
Vertiv
Schneider Electric
CoolIT Systems
MotivairPower puts the site on the map. Cooling and structure are what let it hold the machine that pays for it.
Tell us the building. We'll come back with an honest first read on the retrofit: cooling, structure and heat rejection.
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