The megawatts are contracted. What stops them becoming AI compute?
Your situation
A hall designed for air-cooled racks in single-digit kilowatts is being asked to take liquid-cooled racks that draw an order of magnitude more. The grid agreement says how much power the site may import; it does not say how much of that can be delivered to a rack position.
The limit is rarely the one people name. It is usually a component between the transformer and the rack, such as a tap-off unit, a busway run or a UPS block, and the person who knows the rating is not the person asked for the density commitment.
Nobody in the building tends to have the binding constraint in writing, so a commitment to a customer is made on a total-kilowatt figure that says nothing about whether one position can be fed.
The decision this informs
Whether this hall is worth a full densification study, which constraint the study should start with, and what to tell a prospective tenant today.
THE FIRST QUESTIONWhich single component stops the next AI rack in my hall?
What you probably already have
- Contracted capacity, current peak and current IT load, from the grid agreement and the building management system
- Busway ampacity and tap-off rating from the as-built drawings or a walk of the hall
- Plant supply temperature and the target platform from the facilities team and the customer's brief
The constraints most likely to decide your answer
- Rack feed / tap-off rating
It binds at the first rack, not at scale, and is the item an operator is least likely to have checked.
The commonest hard stop in a legacy hall is the last two metres of copper.
- Busway ampacity
Higher-rated tap-offs do nothing if the busway behind them cannot carry the current.
A 400 A busway run cannot feed three 130 kW racks, whatever the hall total says.
- Transformer capacity
It often sets the date for the whole retrofit, because its lead time is the longest on the ladder.
The transformer is rarely the tightest constraint and is usually the one that sets the date.
The route through what can be bought
It starts free and each step credits or informs the next; none is required. Prices are read from the live catalogue.
- Free capacity checkFree, no card
Seven numbers you already know, free, to see which constraint is likely to bind before spending anything.
- Density Screen€4,500
5 working days from a complete intake
The first paid step: one hall, a document naming what binds and the first costed rungs, which you can hand to your own engineers.
- Capacity & Density Envelope Study — deposit€9,000 deposit; opens a scoped engagement priced at €22,000 to €45,000
When the screen shows the hall is worth pursuing: the full ladder, architectures compared and a model pack you keep.
What to ask us before you rely on the answer
- Which inputs in the result were assumed rather than supplied, and which are the most sensitive?
- Which evidence class does each figure carry, and what would it take to raise it?
- Does any date rest on a lead time we assumed instead of one a supplier quoted?
What it is not
- It is not a design, a sign-off or a statement that the hall will carry the racks. It identifies what binds so that your engineers check it.
- A hall that passes the screen has not been shown to be safe to load: protection, commissioning and structural checks are outside it.
Time to Power sells no equipment, holds no inventory and owns no megawatts. A figure is modelled unless its evidence class says otherwise, and a date that rests on an assumed lead time is labelled as one.