Unreasonably Short Construction Schedule

Nov 24, 2025

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On today’s show we are looking at the compressibility of construction schedules. We often hear that projects will take longer and there are all kinds of reasons why they legitimately need to take longer.

It’s a large site and the site work will take a long time. The utilities are not available. The city infrastructure isn’t ready. We can’t find enough labor. The excuses are abundant.

As developers we are no strangers to delays and we have experienced many of them. Most of them having to do with the entitlement process. Sometimes there are delays at the hands of lenders, delays at as a result of it taking longer to raise capital.

But then there is the XAI Colossus Data Center. This supercomputer is the largest AI super computer in the world.

This first phase of the data centre was built in 122 days. I don’t know how many days or weeks of planning went into it. But all I can say is that there are many examples of decisions that were designed to save time in the most significant ways.

This was just the first. They built a second data centre and from March to October, that data centre was also brought online with all the power, cooling, networking and computing, and of course all of the construction required to make that happen.

This is a project that would have taken several years under normal conditions. What it does is it demonstrates precisely how compressible a construction schedule can be if you take the constraints off the problem.

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