The mechanism
A cloud region, campus, building, availability zone and project phase are different entities. One campus can operate an early phase while constructing another and announcing a third. Different organizations may describe the same physical capacity as owner, operator, cloud provider or customer, creating double-counting risk. The Stargate and India hub announcements illustrate why dated status belongs to a specific phase and amount. Source date, checked date and power boundary distinguish the reported snapshot from later events; announced megawatts do not automatically count as operating capacity. Counts of factories or access centers require their own definitions and cannot be treated as equal-sized facilities.
- Resolve the physical site and identify any separately dated construction or operating phases.
- Identify each organization’s role without counting the same hardware again under another name.
- Attach capacity only to the phase and status directly supported by the source.
- Preserve unspecified IT/facility boundaries and distinguish checked date from the reported event date.
- Aggregate only compatible non-overlapping records and display the census’s coverage limits.
Science and assumptions
Status-scoped aggregation
Status-scoped capacity sums each nonoverlapping phase’s compatible capacity only when its status matches the selected category.
The subscript s replaces the repeated word status to distinguish a selected category from the phase’s status function. Unknown capacity is not silently treated as zero.
Symbols and units
- C_s(t)
- Compatible capacity with selected status s at time t
one declared capacity unit
- C_p(t)
- Capacity of nonoverlapping phase p at time t
same capacity unit
- status_p(t)
- Source-reported categorical status of phase p
category
- s
- Selected status category
category
- 1{…}
- Indicator: one when the stated status matches, zero otherwise
0 or 1
- p
- Nonoverlapping phase index
index
- t
- Snapshot time
date or consistent time coordinate
Cp is compatible capacity for non-overlapping phase p at time t; the indicator selects one status.
Assumptions Only sum identical units and power boundaries; unknown amounts remain excluded or explicitly unresolved.
Engineering example
Synthetic campus has 20 MW operating and a separate 80 MW planned expansion. Its operating total remains 20 MW; 100 MW describes combined eventual scope only if both figures use the same boundary.
Distinctions and tradeoffs
A planned gigawatt campus is not a gigawatt of operating compute, and an access antenna is not an equivalent data-center building.
A smaller verified map is more interpretable than a large collection of incompatible announcements, though it must state its incomplete coverage.
Available AI service depends on the operating phase and access arrangement, not on the largest planned campus headline.
Specifications and interfaces
- Status vocabulary
- Operating, commissioning, construction, planned and retired
Apply status to a dated phase rather than an entire ambiguous name.
- Entity identity
- Physical site versus service or organization
Shared ownership and customer claims can refer to one installation.
Interfaces
- Operator and public records Input
- Dates, identities, capacities and explicit status statements
- Curated phase record Output
- Comparable evidence with unknown boundaries retained
Check your understanding
How should a partly operating campus with an announced expansion be recorded?
- As two unrelated copies of the same total
- As separate phases with their own status and capacity
- As fully operating at its final planned size
Answer and reasoning
As separate phases with their own status and capacity
Phase records preserve real progress while preventing planned and operating quantities from being merged.
Evidence and scope
This lesson supplies evidence methods and selected public cases, not a complete world census. The atlas’s facility records preserve the selected geographical examples.
No current calculator directly models this lesson’s main mechanism. Use the library for related bounds while retaining their stated omissions.