Data centers
A data center spends more on power and cooling than on walls.
Raised floors, backup generators, UPS systems, precision cooling, and miles of cabling all exist to keep the equipment running. The IRS default writes the whole building off over 39 years. A study finds the parts that should not wait that long.
The baseline
39 years for the shell. A lot less for what fills it.
A data center is nonresidential real property, so the shell depreciates over 39 years by default. But the building is really a shell built around power and cooling infrastructure sized to a computing load. That infrastructure looks and behaves more like the equipment-heavy systems in a research or manufacturing building than like a plain office, and much of it can qualify for shorter lives.
What reclassifies
Where the short-life systems hide in a data center.
Raised floor systems
A raised access floor exists to route power and cooling to the racks above it. It is built and removable in a way a normal floor is not.
Backup power
UPS units, battery strings, and standby generators exist to keep the equipment running through an outage, not to serve the building generally.
Precision cooling
The cooling built to hold a server room at a set temperature is sized to the equipment load, not to the building's general comfort needs.
Cabling and security systems
Structured cabling, access control, and monitoring built for the equipment floor are analyzed as their own systems, tied to what they serve.
A crypto-mining facility runs on the same profile: rows of equipment that need a lot of power delivered and a lot of heat removed. We study those sites the same way we study any other data center.
The honest part
No standard chart line for a data center. We say so.
Our baseline data does not have a row labeled "data center." Rather than force your building into a type it does not match, we map it to the closest type we do have data for, an equipment-heavy building like a research or manufacturing facility, and adjust for your actual power and cooling load. We do not invent a percentage that is not backed by data.
The classification question underneath is the same one that has shown up in equipment-serving cases for decades: does this system exist to serve specific equipment, or does it serve the building generally? Power and cooling built and sized for a server floor point toward the equipment side of that line.See what makes a study audit-defensible.
- What a data center study documents:
- The closest matching baseline named, when no exact match exists
- Power and cooling sized to the actual equipment load
- Raised floor and cabling tied to the systems they serve
- No invented percentages, ever
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