Ask anyone who has put a rack of accelerators into a building that was not built for one how long it took, and the answer clusters around nine months. Not because any single step takes nine months, but because there are a dozen steps, each with a wait, each done fresh, and each capable of sending the design back to the beginning. Today a site takes about nine months of consultants, cooling plant and re-qualification. We take a scan. This note explains where the time goes, what replaces it, and what has to be true for the replacement to hold.
Where the months go
Consultants, in sequence. A conventional build runs through an MEP consultant for a thermal study, an electrical consultant for the single-line diagram and the panel, a structural engineer to confirm floor loading, a fire consultant for the NOC implications, and then a tender and a contractor. Each hands the next a document. Each waits for the one before. A revision at step four returns the file to step two. No one is slow; the sequence is.
Cooling plant, when density demands it. Once a room is asked to hold more heat than air can carry, the build acquires a coolant loop, a distribution unit, a heat-rejection path to a roof or a chilled-water riser, leak detection, and a plumbing contractor. The permissions multiply with the trades. So does the calendar.
Re-qualification, every time. Because each build is bespoke, nothing is inherited. The panel is tested again. The detection and suppression are designed again. The Electrical Inspector sees a new installation, not a known type. The building's insurer asks its questions again. The learning from the last room does not shorten this one.
Nine months is what that costs. We have written separately about why we removed liquid from the design. This note is about the other two.
The calendar everything else runs on
It is worth putting the nine months next to the alternatives, because the comparison is not really between our clock and a consultant's. It is between adding a machine to a room that is already energised and adding a kilowatt to the grid.
| Route | Weeks |
|---|---|
| An Azita mill into a room already energised | 14 to 18 |
| Medium-voltage switchgear | 44 |
| Large power transformer | 128 |
| New substation | more than 160 |
| New grid interconnection, United States median | 265 |
Money shortens none of the last four. That is the whole reason the room is the unit: the permission and the copper are already there, and what is left is a machine and a scan.
The four steps
RackQuilt is the software that turns a walked room into a certification-ready pod design. It runs in four steps.
| Step | What it is | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| 01 SCAN | The room as it is | Drawings, airflow, feeder rating, riser, fibre. |
| 02 TWIN | The engine renders it | A 3D twin of the space, its heat and its air. |
| 03 SWEEP | Every option, priced | Seconds of compute, and the binding limit named. |
| 04 SHIP | A rack built for it | Arrives built and burned in. Plugs into what is there. |
The step that does the work is the sweep. The engine evaluates 340,200 configurations for every single room, in seconds, and returns not just a design but the reason the design stops where it does: the feeder, the airflow, the riser, the floor. A design firm draws four by hand and defends the one it likes. The engine prices all of them and names the constraint.
The second thing the sweep buys is a choice most designers never get to make: the engine can choose the silicon as well as the layout, rather than being handed a part number and asked to fit it in. What that does to the delivered cost per token is part of our cost model and is not yet measured, and it only matters at fleet scale, because choosing silicon per room is only rational when there are many rooms to amortise the choice across.
RackQuilt is running today, assisted, and instrumented at every installation. It has never been licensed to anyone. The engine and the room graph it builds are the two things we do not sell.
The clock, and what it assumes
The mill's own clock is 14 to 18 weeks from order to first token. A target without its assumptions is a slogan, so here are the assumptions.
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Silicon is ordered against the pipeline, not against one room. Hardware lead time is 14 to 18 weeks from purchase order, and that is the clock. It only reads as 14 to 18 weeks from the owner's point of view if the order is placed against a graded pipeline rather than after a signature. That is a supply-chain workstream we run, not a problem we have solved.
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The room passes on the first scan. The scan, including the after-hours cooling screen, finds a room with the electrical headroom, the thermal margin and the panel way it needs. A room that fails costs a second scan and a second room. This is why rooms are graded before any of them is sold anything, and we publish no count of rooms graded.
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The design composes rather than being drawn. The sweep returns a configuration built from modules that have been engineered once. A room the engine can compose gets a design in the time the sweep takes. A room that needs a new module does not, and some rooms will.
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The electrical work is a tie-in, not a project. A 415 V three-phase circuit at twenty amps a phase, off the board that already feeds the floor, a cable run, an earth and a socket; no new connection. A licensed contractor does it in days.
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The filing goes in before energisation and comes back clean. Under the CEA Safety Regulations 2023 the installation is carried out by a licensed electrical contractor, inspected by a Chartered Electrical Safety Engineer, and its test report is filed with the Electrical Inspector before the mill is energised. Where no trigger requires the Inspector's own approval, the filing is the step. Where one does, the clock stretches.
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The owner signs after the render. The owner sees a photoreal render of the mill in their own room and signs the hosting terms. A good design can still stall here, which is why the render is part of the product and not a marketing asset.
Any one of these failing adds weeks. All six holding is what the clock means.
What we instrument
We do not publish a curve we have not measured. What we do publish is what the machine records, because that is what makes the next room cheaper than this one.
Every mill meters what it delivers, room by room and configuration by configuration. That record is the input to the next sweep. More rooms mean more mills, more mills mean more measured telemetry, more telemetry means a sharper silicon specification, and more output per kilowatt in the same room makes every room worth more than it was. The loop is the product; the engine is only how it turns.
Two honest statements belong next to that. Telemetry is an instrument before it is a dataset, and a curve needs many rooms behind it before it says anything. And what the loop is worth in cost per token is a modelled input, not a measurement of it, so we print no figure for it.
The signature
Nothing above replaces the licensed engineer. The CEA regulations require that a licensed electrical contractor carries out the installation, that a Chartered Electrical Safety Engineer inspects it, and that the test report is filed before energisation. Those are people, with licences, who sign. RackQuilt shortens the work that comes before the signature: it finds the room, models the heat, composes the design from parts that have been engineered once, and shows the owner what they are agreeing to. The engineer then checks a known type in a modelled room, rather than an unknown installation in an unmeasured one. That is where the months go, and it is where they come back.