Pillsbury’s experience with data centers dates to the dot-com era. Since then, we’ve counseled the industry as proprietary centers were supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, by physical and cloud-based systems of larger dedicated enterprises. The data center landscape is now international in scope and diverse in speciation, with edge, modular, enterprise and hyperscale facilities each playing important yet distinctive roles, and just as there is no single locus of data center expertise in legal practice, there is no single locus of capabilities and users in the business environment. Pillsbury’s Data Centers team accordingly deploys a one-stop, hub-and-spoke model that reflects the complex ecosystem in which these localized points of computation sit. In an effort to gather these nodes of knowledge and experience into a distinctive publication, the Pillsbury Guide to Data Centers brings together a curated selection of articles which reflects the experience of our firm’s interdisciplinary team in advising clients on the development, acquisition, financing, construction and operation of data centers across the U.S. and internationally. These articles are intended to be enduring reference pieces that lawyers and clients of all levels of sophistication may wish to keep handy as they encounter questions and challenges in this field.
Construction “gigaprojects” are initiatives with expenses of well over $1 billion and which involve time periods of well over five years. They are engagements whose extraordinary size, duration and complexity might induce even the most seasoned of project professionals to rethink how they “do contracts.” The prospect of a gigaproject does not so much raise new questions as call for the careful reconsideration of otherwise established answers. What alternative forms of contracting might one use, how might they allocate economic and project risks, and what compensation might drive the parties’ behavior?
