In March, DPR Construction’s team at Vantage Data Center’s CA2 Campus reached the major milestone of topping out a new, four-story data center in Santa Clara, CA.

The 200,000-sq-ft. mission-critical facility, which goes by the moniker of CA23, was erected in a swift six weeks. Once completed in April 2022, the new facility will bring an additional 32 megawatts of critical IT processing power to Vantage’s multi-tenant campus.

The CA2 campus has been a multi-year, phased site re-development for Vantage, in which DPR has built 600,000-sq.-ft. of mission-critical facilities, with CA23 being the third and final building on the site. Designed by Sheehan Nagle Hartray Architects and Peoples Associated Structural Engineers, DPR broke ground on the first phase of work, the demolition of existing buildings and construction of CA21, in April 2018. Once fully completed and operational, Vantage’s nine-acre campus will provide 541,000-sq.-ft. of data center space and 77 megawatts of computing power to its tenants.

The site’s tight footprint has presented the team with several logistical challenges. As work progressed from building to building, structural steel beams were set in close proximity to customers’ leased space. In addition to new structures going up next to operating facilities, interior fit-outs have taken place concurrently in those occupied buildings.

“Pressures we face are all about the timeline,” said Sam Huckaby, Vice President of Construction in North America for Vantage Data Centers. “How fast can we get to market? That’s the biggest pressure.”

To address those pressures, DPR used prefabricated wall panels from its strategic partner Digital Building Components. This enabled a significant schedule enhancement by allowing production work to take place offsite concurrently, while prep work for the delivery and installation of those components occurs onsite. Prefabrication can mean a safer site, as well: to date, Digital Building Components has achieved more than 600,000 labor production hours with zero recordable incidents from their operations.

“Our project used a digitally prefabricated and pre-finished exterior panel system and, even though we started our exterior skin field activities after similar projects in the local area, we had our building enclosed well before all of the others,” said DPR’s Kevin Chen, who helps lead the CA2 Campus project.

In addition to prefab, DPR self-performed large scopes of concrete and interior work, which enabled DPR to control the flow of work to support a fast-paced, yet safe and healthy jobsite. Also contributing to the team’s ability to remain on schedule was DPR’s strong relationship with the City of Santa Clara, which helped expedite the permitting and tenant occupancy processes.

Vantage Data Centers was founded in 2010 and their partnership with DPR began shortly thereafter in 2012 at Vantage’s flagship Santa Clara campus, less than two miles away from CA2.