Comment by pjdesno

You've got more experience there than me, and I've only seen the plans for a single center.

I'll point out that some of the key thermal and power stuff in those plans you saw may have come from the hyperscalers themselves - our experience a dozen years or so ago was that we couldn't just put it out to bid, as the typical big construction players knew how to build old data centers, not new ones, and we had to hire a (very small) engineering team to design it ourselves.

Heat removal is well-solved in theory. Heat removal from a large office building is well-solved in practice - lots of people know exactly what equipment is needed, how to size, install, and control it, what building features are needed for it, etc. Take some expert MEs without prior experience at this, toss them a few product catalogs, and ask them to design a solution from first principles using the systems available and it wouldn't be so easy.

There are people for whom data center heat removal is a solved problem in practice, although maybe not in the same way because the goalposts keep moving (e.g. watts per rack). Things may be different now, but a while back very few of those people were employed by companies who would be willing to work on datacenters they didn't own themselves.

Finally I'd add that "9 figures" seems excessive for building+power+cooling, unless you're talking crazy sizes (100MW?). If you're including the contents, then of course they're insanely expensive.