Power, Cooling and Connectivity: What AI Teams Should Ask a Landlord

Most office buildings are designed around laptops, monitors and a small network closet. An AI team can look very different: engineers running GPU workstations under their desks, a rack of on-prem servers for development or sensitive data, and a heavy dependence on fast, reliable internet to reach cloud compute. None of that is exotic, but each item puts load on systems the landlord controls.

The time to find out whether the building can support you is before the lease is signed, while you still have leverage and alternatives. After signing, adding circuits, cooling or a second fiber provider becomes a request the landlord can price, delay or refuse. A good lease turns the answers into written rights and assigns the cost of each upgrade before anyone starts construction.

This guide is framed as questions, not rules of thumb. Actual power and cooling requirements depend on your specific equipment, so bring your own IT lead or an engineer into the conversation and get the building’s answers from its engineering staff, not just the leasing agent.

Start with an honest inventory of what you plan to run in the space over the next few years: workstations, test benches, servers, networking gear and anything that runs around the clock. Your engineer can translate that list into a load estimate. Then ask the building whether it can deliver that load to your floor.

• ✓How much electrical capacity is allocated to our premises today, and how is that stated in the lease?
• ✓Is there spare capacity at the floor or building level if we need more later, and at what cost?
• ✓Can we add dedicated circuits for server racks and high-draw workstations as part of the build-out?
• ✓Is our electricity submetered, directly metered or included in rent or operating expenses?
• ✓Who pays for electrical upgrades: the tenant improvement allowance, the landlord or us directly?
• ✓Will the landlord’s engineer review our load estimate before we commit to a floor plan?

How electricity is billed matters as much as how much you can get. If power is included in rent or spread through operating expenses, a landlord may push back on a tenant with unusually heavy use, or add a separate charge. Submetering is usually cleaner for a power-hungry tenant because you pay for what you use and the lease has less to argue about.

Base building HVAC typically runs during stated building hours. Equipment that runs overnight and on weekends needs cooling that runs overnight and on weekends too, which usually means a supplemental system dedicated to your server room or equipment area.

Tenant-side lease guidance commonly recommends securing an affirmative right to install supplemental HVAC, including the connections outside your premises that it needs, and spelling out the cost of any building condenser or chilled water it relies on. It also recommends putting the overtime HVAC rate in the lease and tying increases to an objective standard rather than leaving it to the landlord’s discretion.

• ✓What are the building’s standard HVAC hours, and what is the written rate for after-hours service?
• ✓How will that rate change over the term, and what is it tied to?
• ✓Do we have the right to install supplemental 24/7 cooling for a server room or equipment area?
• ✓Does the building supply condenser or chilled water for supplemental units, how much, and at what cost?
• ✓Who maintains the supplemental unit, and do we have to remove it at the end of the lease?
• ✓Are after-hours HVAC costs already in operating expenses, so we are not charged twice?

That last question is worth asking directly. If overtime HVAC is recovered through operating expenses and billed to you separately, you can end up paying for the same service twice.

For many AI teams, the office network is the path to cloud compute. A single fiber entrance or a single carrier is a single point of failure. The number of carrier logos on a building flyer tells you less than whether those carriers reach your floor over physically separate routes.

• ✓Which carriers are already lit in the building, and which can serve our floor?
• ✓How many fiber entry points does the building have, and do they come from different directions?
• ✓How many telecom risers reach our floor, and is there spare riser capacity?
• ✓Who controls riser access, and are there fees for running our own cabling or conduit?
• ✓Can we choose our own telecom and cabling vendors?
• ✓Do we have roof rights for a fixed wireless backup or satellite antenna, and on what terms?

Rooftop equipment clauses typically require landlord approval, put installation and removal costs on the tenant, and prohibit interference with other occupants’ equipment. If a wireless backup link is part of your plan, get the roof right, the path from the roof to your space and the approval standard in the lease rather than in an email.

If a power outage would interrupt training jobs, corrupt data or take down a demo, ask what backup the building already has and what you are allowed to add. Some buildings have a generator with capacity available to tenants; others have none and limited space to place one.

• ✓Does the building have a generator, and can we connect to it or reserve capacity?
• ✓Can we install our own UPS systems or batteries, and are there fire code or floor-loading limits?
• ✓If we need our own generator, is there a location for it and a fuel path?
• ✓Can we install our own card access, cameras and a locked server room on the building’s systems?
• ✓What access do building staff and other contractors have to our space and our telecom closets?

Physical security is a common requirement for teams handling proprietary models or customer data. Card access, a separately secured server room and clear rules on after-hours building access are usually straightforward to negotiate as part of the build-out, and much harder to add later.

Ask the landlord to confirm power, cooling and telecom capacity in writing before you sign the letter of intent, then carry those commitments into the lease and the work letter.

Answers from a tour are helpful; answers in the lease are enforceable. We work with the tenant’s attorney, architect and IT lead to turn infrastructure needs into specific lease language, and to use competing proposals from other buildings to get the landlord to fund more of the work.

1. Build an equipment and uptime list with your IT lead before touring.
2. Send the infrastructure questions to each shortlisted building with the request for proposal.
3. Have an engineer review each building’s answers and flag gaps.
4. Price the upgrades and negotiate who pays through the tenant improvement allowance or landlord work.
5. Write capacity, installation rights, costs and removal obligations into the lease and work letter, and have your attorney review them.

Tenant Advisory Group represents technology, software and data companies as tenant-side advisors, and infrastructure questions like these are part of how we compare buildings and negotiate office, flex and industrial leases for AI and technology companies.