Confidential hyperscale client — multiple sites
Up to 5 GW
Feasibility, cost management, utility coordination and design management across a multi-site data center portfolio.
Capitol Construction Management, Inc. — Owner's Representation
The owner's seat
on mission critical work.
Data centers rarely fail on design. They fail on long-lead equipment, on commissioning, and on the distance between the schedule on paper and the one in the field. We represent the owner across all three.
Our role
We do not bid the work we oversee. Independence is the product.
An owner's representative has exactly one client interest to protect. Capitol CM holds no construction contract on the projects we manage, carries no equipment lines, and takes no fee tied to the cost of the work. When the GMP arrives, when the change order lands, when commissioning slips a month — we are reading those documents for you, not defending them.
What we protectCapital. Schedule. Scope. In that order when they conflict, unless you tell us otherwise — and we will tell you when they conflict.
How we engageFixed monthly fee or lump sum by phase. Never a percentage of construction cost, which pays us more when your project costs more.
Where we startThe earlier we are engaged, the lower the delivered cost. Most of the money is committed before a shovel moves — in site selection, utility commitments, and the procurement strategy for long-lead gear.
Scope of service
Owner's rep,
cradle to IST.
We can carry the whole lifecycle or step in at any phase — including mid-project, when a job is already in trouble.
01
Due diligence & site selection
- Utility capacity and interconnection timeline verification
- Fiber routes, carrier diversity, latency constraints
- Water availability and cooling strategy implications
- Entitlements, zoning, noise and generator permitting exposure
- Order-of-magnitude budget and schedule reality check
02
Preconstruction
- Basis of design and redundancy review against business requirements
- Independent estimate validation and GMP interrogation
- Long-lead procurement strategy — generators, switchgear, UPS, chillers, CDUs
- OFCI versus CFCI matrix and owner-furnished equipment logistics
- Baseline schedule, milestone structure, and risk register
03
Delivery oversight
- GC and trade partner selection, scoping and contract negotiation
- Change order review, entitlement analysis, claim avoidance
- Pay application and lien waiver verification
- Schedule oversight, recovery planning, pull planning facilitation
- Field quality and installation conformance on the owner's behalf
04
Commissioning & turnover
- Cx agent scoping and oversight through Levels 1–5
- Script review and integrated systems testing witness
- Failure-mode and load-bank testing verification
- Punch, closeout, as-builts, O&M and warranty administration
- Operations handover and training coordination
Equipment we scope, price and witness
230kV / 115kV utility transformers · 15–35kV MV switchgear · 2–3.5 MW N+1 generation · UPS 500kW–2MW modules · PDUs to 55kW per cabinet · chillers 2,000–4,000 tons · CRAHs and cooling towers · CDUs and direct-to-chip TCS · diesel fuel farms 500K–1M+ gallons · pre-action suppression · BAS / SCADA
Track record
Programs behind
the judgment.
Capitol CM is principal-led. The programs below were delivered by Frank Fernandez at Turner Construction, Skanska, Cumming Group and Pavarini McGovern — on the owner's side and the builder's side. Client names are withheld where confidentiality applies.
Confidential hyperscale campus — Tahoe Reno, NV
650 MW · $6B+
Six buildings on a 2,000-acre campus, 530,000 to 1.3M SF and 55 to 130 MW each. Budget development, MEP and utility power coordination at the substation, and long-lead procurement planning across concurrent buildings. CM-at-Risk.
Terremark NAP West / DC-04 — Santa Clara, CA
2 MW · $35M
Carrier-neutral colocation facility with N+1 electrical infrastructure. Owner-side program management, budget development and GC procurement.
SMUD headquarters & data center — Sacramento, CA
2 MW · $50M
Utility-owned data center delivered alongside a full headquarters renovation across multiple contracts. Also led the SMUD Power Control Center replacement — a hardened, N+1 mission-critical facility.
AT&T enterprise data center — Loganville, GA
10 MW · $150M
175,000 SF carrier-grade facility. Redundant N+1 power and cooling, MV switchgear, emergency generation and structured cabling to telecommunications delivery standards.
Renown Health medical campus — Reno, NV
$1B
Full lifecycle owner-side accountability — schedule, budget, safety, design coordination, GC performance and commercial negotiation — in an active clinical environment that never closed.
Outcomes15% budget reduction while expanding scope. 25% increase in unit profitability. Change orders resolved within 30 days. On the $650M Miami International Airport CONRAC — preconstruction through delivery as Project Director with 100+ staff — on time, under budget, money returned to the owner, zero recordable injuries.
Where we work
Mission critical
Hyperscale
Colocation
AI & HPC high-density
Enterprise & edge
Central utility plants
Generator & switchgear yards
Liquid cooling conversions
Healthcare critical systems
Rack densities moved faster than the buildings did. Air-cooled halls are being retrofitted for direct-to-chip, utility queues now set schedules that used to be set by steel, and equipment lead times price the job before design is finished. Those are owner problems before they are contractor problems.
Before the pro forma hardens
Conceptual cost
benchmark
Early budgets usually inherit a dollar-per-megawatt figure from the wrong market, the wrong rack density and the wrong year — then anchor a pro forma for eighteen months. Define the program and we will come back with an AACE Class 4 range, a development cost per IT megawatt, and the decisions actually moving it. No charge.
Market research
US Data Center
Atlas
We maintain a register of 242 major US data center campuses — planned capacity, build status, market concentration, and which sites are facing moratoriums, referendum petitions or permit litigation. It is the same reference we use when an owner asks whether a site is deliverable.
Who does the work
Leadership
Frank Fernandez
PresidentThirty years across both sides of the table. Chief Estimator and Director of Preconstruction at Turner Construction and Skanska. Project Director with full P&L and 100+ staff on the $650M Miami International Airport CONRAC. Six years as Regional Managing Director and Owner's Representative at Cumming Group, where he opened the Sacramento practice and grew it from 3 people to 55 across three offices, running front-end development on 50+ concurrent programs a year.
Data center portfolio of $6.2B+ and 664+ MW across five programs — anchored by preconstruction and GMP development on the six-building, 650 MW Tahoe Reno hyperscale campus, and by owner's representative work on data center projects totaling up to 5 GW for a confidential hyperscale client.
That combination is the point. He has written the GMPs he now reviews, run the schedules he now audits, and negotiated the change orders he now contests. He also built the preconstruction frameworks still in use at Turner — Progressive Design-Build, Design to Cost, Site Logistics Planning, Schedule Optimization and Buyout Strategy.
University of Florida, B.S. Building Construction · California Class B General Contractor · U.S. Army veteran
Extended team
Assigned by projectCapitol CM staffs each engagement to its scope rather than carrying overhead between projects. Depending on the assignment, that includes cost and estimating support, scheduling, commissioning oversight, and environmental, health and safety specialists — brought on under Capitol CM's direction and accountable to the owner, not to the builder.
For procurement & supplier onboarding
Capability
statement
Capitol CM holds small, disabled-veteran and minority business enterprise certifications — qualifying for owner and hyperscaler supplier diversity programs as well as public agency participation goals. The contractor's license is held as a qualification and for the technical standing it requires; we do not bid construction work on programs we represent.
Registrations & codes
Verified- CA General Contractor
- Lic. #996176
- Small Business (SBE)
- #1766319
- DBE
- #41773
- MBE
- Certified
- SB / DVBE
- Certified
- CAGE Code
- 079273042
- NAICS
- 541611 · 541618 · 541610
541330 · 236210 · 236220 - SIC
- 1541 · 1542 · 8741
Start a conversation
Bring us in
before the GMP.
Phone
510.882.8477Office
Capitol Construction Management, Inc.Fort Lauderdale, FL