A project like no other

It takes a tremendous amount of coordination and continuous planning — not to mention thousands of people and hundreds of pieces of heavy equipment more typically seen in mining operations — to convert roughly 675 acres of farmland into a data center that will become home to sophisticated computers used to create artificial intelligence systems by the end of 2028.

Greg Winn, Vantage Data Centers’ vice president of construction, and Edwin van Velzen, the company’s senior vice president for development delivery, said last week that it involves bringing in workers from throughout the region, four general contractors and a plethora of subcontractors, planning different entrances and exits for them to use and start and stop times.

It takes building four to five food tents able to house as many as 1,200 workers each, and bringing in food trucks to feed them.

It takes moving hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of soil and stone on and off a construction site using a fleet of dump trucks.

It takes constructing building pads large enough to accommodate two buildings that are each about 719,000 square feet — the equivalent of 12-1/2 football fields each — and two others about 560,000 square feet — or nearly 10 football fields each.

It takes creating parking lots near each building pad for the construction workers who will build them, warming tents and medical facilities.

The Vantage Data Centers Lighthouse Campus under construction on Port Washington’s north side is a construction project like no other.

Right now, about 300 workers are on site, operating about 200 pieces of equipment — everything from utility terrain vehicles to trucks so large they are used on mining sites.

Some of those vehicles are so massive  they had to be trucked to the data center site and assembled there. Last Thursday, crews worked to build a Caterpillar 6015, a powerful, 100-ton hydraulic mining excavator designed for high-volume earth moving.

The body weighs 100,000 pounds, and when completed can handle three times the load of a typical truck, Ramon Perez, Vantage’s environment, safety and health manager, said.

“It’s standard equipment for very large projects,” Winn said.

Putting all this machinery to use are a corps of workers from throughout the region.

“We have a commitment to a union workforce,” Winn said. “And a strong focus on local contractors.”

Vantage has four general contractors on site — Whiting-Turner Contracting Co. and The Weitz Co., which will each construct one data center building, and Turner Construction Co. and McCarthy Building Companies, which together will construct the remaining two buildings.

Among the subcontractors are Michels and Veit.

Planning for the data center campus began in March.

“There’s lots of investment up front to make sure we have a safe and effective workplace,” Winn said. “The plan continues to evolve and grow. You have many pieces, and you have to make sure those small pieces interlock.”

For example, a lot of work went into planning employee movements not just on the site but in and out of it, he said.

Workers arrive from different directions at different times to avoid congestion, and they use different entrances and exits.

“A lot of energy and planning was spent on the flow of people and materials and keeping it as safe as possible,” van Velzen said.

Meetings are held daily to coordinate work at the site, and watching the trucks conduct the earthwork is like seeing a finely choreographed dance.

Until April, Vantage will focus on that earthwork to achieve a level site. Drilling for the foundations of the first two buildings is expected to start by late January, and work on the foundation slabs will follow.

The first of many deliveries of steel to the site will be in the next 45 days, Winn said. Steel construction and erection of the superstructures on the foundations is expected to start at the end of February, followed by modular concrete wall installation and construction of the external building envelope.