Another data center tops out

A crowd of roughly 200 people gathered at the Vantage Data Centers Lighthouse Campus in Port Washington Thursday to watch the final steel beam be put in place on a 750,000-square-foot building.

Two construction workers helped position the beam as it was lifted by a massive crane, then two journeymen bolted it onto the structure to applause.

The beam, which had been signed by many of the construction workers, was topped by an American flag and an evergreen tree, a symbol that the building has reached its highest height safely and a hope for good luck and prosperity for the future occupants of the building.

“It doesn’t seem that long ago I was taking a picture of the first beam being put up,” one worker said.

That was brought home during a short program held just before the beam was lifted into place.

“This was a farm coming into the new year,” Michael Graham, project lead for Whiting Turner, the contractors on that building, said. “Look at where we are, all the infrastructure that’s been put into place. It’s an incredible feat.”

At its peak, Graham said, there were 85 ironworkers on site working on that one building. Crews put in 40,000-plus hours with no lost time coming out of winter.

More than 5 million cubic yards of earth was moved and there were more than 500 deliveries of steel for the building.

“We’re in awe of what you guys do every day. It’s on your shoulders that we stand every day,” Victoria Tyson-Bloyd, vice president of construction for Vantage, told the workers. “This really is unprecedented.”

The building, which she said is the size of “a couple Walmarts,” is “just the foundation and steel right now.” Crews will work to clad the exterior and install the roof in the coming months, then make the building weathertight.

The work will also include installation of mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems.

She noted that there are about 1,700 workers at the site now, but that number will increase shortly — The Weitz Co. plans to mobilize as many as 1,200 workers for the data center building it’s working on by the end of July — and hit 5,000 going into winter, when interior work begins.

“The real work begins when we bring all the equipment (for the data centers) in,” Tyson-Bloyd said. “It’s a little more labor-intensive.”

During the ceremony, Tyson-Bloyd reminded workers that what they do impacts people living around the site.

She said later that the dust and noise that has angered some of those neighbors should be lessened soon.

“I really think we’re through with the worst of the dust,” she said. “The first six months, I really think were the  worst of the disruptions.”

Crews are hydro-seeding the detention ponds, open areas and berms and paving  the entrance and exit gates, internal roads and parking lots to stabilize the soil and limit dust.

A truck wash intended to remove debris from vehicles before they leave the site will be added, helping reduce the amount of dirt tracked onto the public roads.

“Unfortunately there’s still a lot of trucks to come,” Tyson-Bloyd said. “But they’re more delivery trucks than stone trucks.”

This was the second so-called topping out celebration at the site, held to mark the completion of the structural framework of the building.

It will probably be another two months or so before the next data center building on the site is at this point, Tyson-Bloyd said.

About 40% of the structural steel has been erected on the next building, and steel work has recently started on the fourth data center building.

Overall, Tyson-Bloyd said, the data center project is between 12% and 15% complete.

The $15 billion campus includes the four data center buildings that total about 2.5 million square feet, central utility plants with chillers and mechanical systems in them and support buildings, such as an operations center and a warehouse.

The 672-acre campus will be used by Oracle and OpenAI when it is completed in 2028.