Converting a Warehouse or Factory to a Data Center vs. Building New

Owners of vacant warehouses, distribution centers and factories are often told their building could become a data center. Sometimes that is true. More often the building is worth less than the land, power and fiber under it, and the best plan is to clear it and build a purpose-designed facility. Bisnow summarized the industry consensus in 2025: demolishing an existing structure and building from scratch is usually faster, cheaper and easier than attempting a retrofit.¹

That calculation is shifting at the margins. Bisnow reported executives expecting demand for smaller “last-mile” inference sites near population centers, measured in dozens of megawatts rather than hundreds, where existing industrial buildings with power and fiber are common.¹ Equipment lead times also play a part: reusing existing critical equipment can avoid waits for items such as generators that can run a year or more.¹ Currie & Brown argues that reuse can cut a data center building’s embodied carbon by up to 78% compared with new construction, citing an estimate from ZGF Architects, because keeping the foundations, structure and envelope avoids most new concrete and steel.⁷

This guide is about the building. Whether a former plant or industrial property is a good data center site at all (grid access, environmental history, zoning) is covered in repurposing industrial and power plant sites and greenfield vs. brownfield sites.

Data center floors carry heavy, concentrated loads that most commercial buildings were never designed for. Data Center Knowledge puts a typical 42U rack with a standard mix of compute, networking and storage at 1,500–2,500 pounds, and AI equipment with multiple GPUs and liquid cooling at more than 4,000 pounds.² Bisnow notes that office, retail and residential buildings typically cannot support the weight of servers, cooling and other critical equipment.¹

Slab-on-grade warehouses start from a better place than multistory buildings, because the slab bears on soil rather than spanning between beams. An analyst quoted by Data Center Knowledge said strengthening raised floors is becoming expensive enough that more data centers are built directly on the slab, and described a multistory data center that was not built for racks of three or four thousand pounds.⁸ The same article says designers must do more structural analysis to confirm an existing floor can take the load, while another expert added that the extra reinforcement need not materially affect construction timelines.⁸

Rack weight is only part of the load. Mechanical equipment on the roof, cable trays, busway, piping full of water and the cooling plant all add dead load. A slab on poor soil can also settle under new concentrated loads, so a geotechnical investigation belongs in the structural review. Rack weights are rising with rack density: Uptime Institute’s 2026 survey put the most common rack density at 11 kW, up from 9 kW in 2025.⁹

Height is the second filter. HKS says floor-to-floor height is a crucial factor in conversions, and that concrete structures typically net about 11 feet of clear space while steel structures net about 14 feet.³ Bisnow adds that many older buildings have ceilings too low for today’s server rack designs.¹ Low headroom limits overhead power and cooling distribution and can even complicate construction: a Manchester warehouse conversion that Currie & Brown advised on needed foundations about 20 meters deep for a new steel frame, and standard piling rigs would not fit under the existing roof.¹⁰

Column spacing, wall openings and roof condition matter next. Tight or irregular column grids waste data hall area and constrain rack rows. Long walls of windows must be closed in. Roofs often have to carry new mechanical equipment, which is why HKS recommends splitting equipment between the rooftop and a ground-level yard while checking the existing structure’s capacity.³ Corgan’s conversion of a 1980s wood-framed building in San Jose reinforced the existing structure and tied it to new rooftop equipment dunnage to raise the structural importance factor to 1.5.¹¹

Hyperscale tenants are the hardest fit. Bisnow notes that their proprietary designs make reuse difficult,¹ so a converted building usually targets enterprise, colocation or edge users, which also changes the tenant pool and the build-or-lease strategy.

Even a large industrial building rarely has the electrical service a data center needs. HKS puts data center power intensity at more than 30 times an office building and 60 times a distribution center per square foot, and recommends early talks with the utility because upgrading substations or lines, building an on-site substation or relocating easements takes time.³ The building’s value often rises or falls with the substation capacity nearby, and with whether the owner can take service at transmission voltage, as discussed in utility-owned vs. customer-owned substations.

The xAI Colossus site in Memphis shows both the appeal and the limit. NPR described the former Electrolux factory as a 785,000-square-foot building with a cooling tower, heavy electrical feeds and full air conditioning.¹² Even so, xAI ran at least 18 portable gas turbines beside it in 2024, which local and federal regulators said lacked air permits,¹² before a regional power authority approved its request for grid power.¹³ By September 2026, NPR reported about 60 turbines on the campus and a resident lawsuit over noise.¹⁴ A shell can be ready long before the power is.

Generators, transformers, chillers and fuel storage usually sit outside the building, so the parcel needs yard space and setbacks that an urban warehouse may lack. HKS notes that fuel storage may need permits that take time and must be renewed, and that generator noise calls for community outreach.³ Corgan’s conceptual design for converting the 190,000-square-foot Skybox Chicago One warehouse paired it with an equipment yard for 30 MW of critical load.⁶

Converting a warehouse to a data center is usually a change of occupancy and a major alteration, which brings the existing building code into play. ICC’s summary of the 2018 International Existing Building Code explains that a change of occupancy requires live, snow, wind and seismic loads to be checked, with IBC-level forces where the new use places the building in a higher risk category.⁴ A Massachusetts interpretation adds that nothing in the change-of-occupancy rules relieves structural requirements triggered by the alteration provisions, and that the more stringent requirement governs.⁵ States adopt different editions and amendments, so confirm with the local building official.

Operators often specify structural performance above code minimums, as in Corgan’s San Jose retrofit.¹¹ Fire protection, egress and hazardous materials rules for batteries and fuel also change with the new use; see building and fire codes for data centers. Zoning is a separate question: a building permitted as a warehouse may not allow a data center by right, and on-site generation can draw challenges from neighbors, as the Memphis noise lawsuit shows.¹⁴

A useful order of checks: confirm the utility can deliver the target load and when; have a structural engineer review the drawings and test the slab; measure clear height, column grid and door sizes; verify yard space and setbacks for equipment; then run a Phase I ESA and code review. An engineer quoted by Bisnow advised developers to build their own criteria for when retrofitting makes sense on a given site,¹ and another expert told Data Center Knowledge that height and other constraints, not only weight, rule out many buildings people would like to convert.⁸ Compare the retrofit schedule against a realistic new construction timeline. BlackForge screens sites for power, land and buildability; you can get a site reviewed.