Can You Run GPU Servers in an Office?

Engineers ask this question for good reasons. Local hardware can be convenient for experiments, attractive when cloud capacity is hard to get, and necessary when data cannot leave the premises. A handful of GPU workstations under desks, or a server or two in a properly cooled network room, is an ordinary requirement that many office buildings can meet.

The trouble starts when the plan grows from a few machines to a rack, and from a rack to a row. An office building is designed to keep people comfortable during the working day. It was not designed to feed and cool dense computing equipment at all hours. Whether your plan works depends on the specific building, the specific suite and the specific lease, which is why the useful answer is a set of questions and not a number.

Four physical constraints decide how far you can go.

• Power. Each suite has a finite amount of electrical capacity available to it, set by the building's service, its risers and the panels on your floor. GPU equipment draws far more than the desks and laptops the system was sized for. Adding capacity may mean new panels, new feeders through other tenants' floors or an upgrade to the building's service, all of which need the landlord's approval and may not be feasible.
• Heat. Nearly all the electricity a server draws leaves it as heat. Standard office cooling is sized for people and light equipment, and in many buildings it shuts down or sets back at night and on weekends. Equipment that runs continuously needs cooling that does too, which usually means a dedicated supplemental unit and somewhere for that unit to reject its heat.
• Noise. Server fans are loud. In an open office, or behind a thin partition, they make calls and focused work difficult. A separate, enclosed and sound-treated room is the usual answer, and it uses floor area.
• Weight. Loaded racks and the cooling and battery equipment that support them are heavy and concentrate their weight in a small area. A structural engineer, not a broker or an IT lead, should confirm what the floor can carry.

We are deliberately not giving capacity figures here. They vary widely between buildings and even between floors, and a rule of thumb that is right for one property can be badly wrong for the next. Get the actual information for the actual building and have a qualified engineer interpret it.

Even where the building can physically support the equipment, the lease may restrict it. Read these provisions, or have your attorney read them, before you assume anything.

• Use clause. Leases state what the premises may be used for, often general office use. A room full of servers running production workloads may or may not fit, depending on the wording.
• Electrical limits. Many leases cap the electrical load a tenant may connect or state that consumption beyond normal office use will be metered and charged separately.
• Alterations. New circuits, supplemental cooling, penetrations through floors or walls and work in the risers all require the landlord's consent, and often the landlord's contractors.
• After-hours services. If you rely on the building's cooling outside its normal schedule, the lease sets the charge for it.
• Roof and shaft rights. Supplemental cooling often needs equipment outside your suite. You have no right to that space unless the lease grants it.
• Restoration. Specialty installations frequently have to be removed at your cost when the lease ends, unless the landlord agrees otherwise in writing at the time it approves them.
• Rules on nuisance. Noise and vibration that disturb other tenants can put you in breach.

Insurance deserves its own conversation. Tell your insurance broker what equipment you plan to install, what it is worth and how it is powered and cooled. Coverage for equipment breakdown, business interruption and damage to the building or neighboring tenants, for example from a cooling leak, may need adjusting. The landlord's own insurer may have requirements too.

These questions go to the landlord's property manager and building engineer. Have your own IT lead and, for anything substantial, your own electrical and mechanical engineer review the answers.

• ✓How much electrical capacity is available to this suite today, and what would it take to add more?
• ✓Is our electricity included in rent, submetered or billed by formula, and does the lease cap our usage?
• ✓What hours does building cooling run, and what does it cost outside those hours?
• ✓Can we install a supplemental cooling unit, and where would it reject heat?
• ✓Does the building offer condenser water or another source we can connect to, and on what terms?
• ✓Is there roof, shaft or riser space available to us, and is there a charge for it?
• ✓Has a structural engineer reviewed the floor for the equipment we plan to install?
• ✓Does the permitted use in the lease cover this equipment?
• ✓What will we be required to remove at the end of the lease?
• ✓Have other tenants in the building installed similar equipment, and how did it go?

There is a point at which fitting compute into an office stops being a convenience and becomes a construction project in someone else's building. These are the signs that you have reached it.

• The plan requires new electrical service to the building or major riser work.
• The cooling design needs equipment on the roof or in shafts that the landlord is reluctant to grant.
• The workload cannot tolerate an outage, and the building offers no backup power you can rely on.
• The structural review calls for reinforcement.
• The cost of the installation is large relative to your remaining lease term, and you would have to leave it behind or pay to remove it.
• The equipment is growing faster than the team, so the office is being chosen for machines and not for people.

At that stage the usual alternatives are the cloud, a colocation facility, or for hardware and robotics teams, flex or light industrial space that is designed for heavier power and equipment. An office remains the right place for the people and their workstations.

Our role is on the real estate side. We help technology companies identify buildings that can support the equipment they intend to keep in the office, and we negotiate the lease rights needed to install and run it. When the requirement belongs in a data center, we say so, and that procurement is handled by specialists in that field.