Construction & MEP for data centers in India

A specialist trade

A data center looks like a heavy industrial building and is contracted like one far too often. The civil work is conventional; the mechanical, electrical and plumbing scope is 60 to 70 percent of the cost and demands sequencing, quality control and commissioning discipline that general contractors rarely have. India's pool of contractors with completed data center references at Tier III scale is small and busy, and most schedule failures trace to an award made on price to a firm that had never commissioned a critical facility.

Cost benchmarks help frame the decision. A Tier III facility in an Indian metro runs indicatively INR 45 to 70 crore per MW of IT load from shell to commissioned, depending on density, redundancy, land condition and the share of imported equipment. Fit-out of an existing shell is lower; high-density halls with liquid cooling are higher. Treat the figures as planning ranges and build the estimate bottom-up from the design.

Delivery models

Turnkey EPC transfers design and delivery risk to one party at a premium and suits owners without a technical team, provided the basis of design is fixed before award. Design-build with the owner's own design consultant keeps control of the specification and lets the contractor price a complete package. Package contracting (civil, electrical, mechanical, fire, security as separate contracts under a project manager) produces the lowest price and the highest coordination burden, and it works only with an experienced owner's team.

Prefabricated and modular construction is now a serious fourth route. Factory-built power and cooling modules and prefabricated halls of 1 to 5 MW ship pre-commissioned in roughly 16 to 24 weeks and are installed in 6 to 8 weeks on site, with quality that site construction struggles to match. They suit edge sites, phased campuses and owners who value schedule certainty over the last few percent of cost.

Prequalification and tender

Prequalify before you tender. The criteria that predict success are completed data center references at the target Tier and scale (visited, not just listed), in-house MEP capability or a named specialist partner under contract, documented experience of Level 1 to 5 commissioning with an independent agent, a resource-loaded programme that shows equipment lead times, a safety system with a clean record, and a balance sheet that can carry the project's cash flow. Interview the proposed site team; the bid is written by people who will not be on site.

Issue a complete tender package: drawings, performance specifications, bills of quantities, the commissioning scope, the documentation standard and the contract terms. Normalise bids before comparison, because contractors qualify and exclude differently, and weight the technical evaluation at least as heavily as price. Lump-sum and item-rate structures each have their place; what matters is that the scope is fully defined so the structure does not become a variation machine.

Contract terms that protect the schedule

Tie payment milestones to commissioning levels rather than to percentage completion. Set liquidated damages that bite and a realistic programme that includes procurement lead times, because an impossible programme simply moves the dispute to the end. Define the defects liability period, the spares and documentation deliverables, and the role of the owner's engineer and the independent commissioning agent in the contract so they are not treated as interference later.

Insurance should be placed by the owner or verified line by line: contractors' all-risks, erection all-risks, third-party liability and delay in start-up where financing requires it. Site safety under the Factories Act and the BOCW Act is the contractor's legal duty and the owner's reputational one; data center sites run live electrical systems during fit-out, and the incident record of the last three years is a fair prequalification question.

Schedule reality

A greenfield 10 to 20 MW first phase runs 14 to 20 months from ground-break to Level 5 commissioning when long-lead equipment is ordered at design stage; fit-out of an existing shell runs 8 to 12 months subject to equipment. Schedule compression almost always comes out of commissioning, and a facility commissioned in a hurry announces it in the first year of operations. Protect the commissioning window in the contract and in the owner's own expectations.

How we run contractor selection

We help the owner choose the delivery model, prequalify contractors from our network and the wider market against the criteria above, assemble the tender package with the design team, normalise and evaluate bids, interview site teams and negotiate the contract. We can place an owner's engineer on site and coordinate the independent commissioning agent, so the quality the tender promised is the quality that is delivered.