# Site utilities, water & fiber entrance

Part ID: 9.08 · Layer 9 (Building shell, site & construction)

The utility connections a data center needs beyond electrical power — water supply and wastewater handling, on-site water storage and reuse, and the fiber and carrier entrances that connect it to the network.

This layer covers the non-electrical utility hookups that gate occupancy alongside the power interconnection covered in Layers 7 and 8: municipal or well water supply and wastewater discharge, on-site storage tanks and water reuse systems that reduce draw on local supply, and the physical fiber entrance and carrier connections that link the building to the network backbone the servers in Layer 4 depend on.
Liquid cooling and evaporative cooling systems (Layer 6) can significantly increase a facility's water demand relative to older air-cooled designs, which has pushed water rights and local utility capacity into the same category of siting constraint that power interconnection already occupies — some operators respond by investing in on-site reuse and storage specifically to reduce dependence on local water utilities. Fiber entrance is a separate but parallel siting constraint: a site needs diverse, redundant carrier paths before it can be considered qualified for hyperscale tenancy, and that dark-fiber availability varies as much by geography as power does.

**AI delta:** Liquid and evaporative cooling used in AI facilities increases water demand relative to older air-cooled designs, pushing water rights into the same siting-constraint category as power.

## Companies

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Confidence tags: disclosed = company/filing statement; reported = trade press or partner list; inferred = taxonomy lead.