What is the biggest logistical challenge for Submarine Food Storage?

The biggest challenge is space and duration. Submarines must store 90 to 120 days' worth of food for over 140 people without a traditional pantry. This requires using living spaces like the mess decks floor ('eating your way out') and relying heavily on non-perishable goods, making Submarine Food Logistics the key limiting factor for patrol length.

Why is food considered a 'Zero-Downtime Morale Policy'?

The Zero-Downtime Morale Policy recognizes that in high-stress, isolated, and high-risk operational settings, the crew's psychological readiness is critical. Food is the primary tool used by leadership to maintain comfort, focus, and discipline, ensuring the crew's operational efficiency and reducing human error.

Who are Culinary Specialists (CSs) and how are they trained?

Culinary Specialists (CSs) are the Navy's highly trained cooks. They receive formal Navy training and are often sent to prestigious civilian culinary schools (like the Culinary Institute of America) to ensure they can produce high-quality, varied meals—even under severe limitations in space and ingredient freshness.

What is the 'Auto Dog' and why is its function critical?

The 'Auto Dog' is the nickname for the soft-serve ice cream machine on a submarine. It is considered a critical morale lifeline. Its ability to dispense a small comfort on long patrols makes its function so vital that maintenance issues are often prioritized by the engineering teams to prevent a drop in crew morale.

The 3-Year Tenant in a 30-Year Building: The Industrialized Data Center Strategy of the "Universal Dock"

Tony Grayson
Nov 30, 2025
5 min read

Updated: Dec 15, 2025

By Tony Grayson, Tech Executive (ex-SVP Oracle, AWS, Meta) & Former Nuclear Submarine Commander

3D exploded view of an industrialized data center strategy showing modular power and cooling skids plugging into a concrete exoskeleton shell. — **The Universal Dock:** Separating the 30-year Shell from the 3-year Cell. This is not a shipping container; it is volumetric, industrialized construction designed for rapid technology swaps.

The golden era of the 15-year hyperscale lease is rapidly evolving into something far more volatile. We have moved from 10–15-year, single-tenant data halls to 3–5-year, hardware-driven deployments. The lease used to outlive the gear; now the AI hardware roadmap dictates the lease.

For hyperscalers with decade-long visibility, "Build-to-Suit" still has a place. However, that population is shrinking relative to the market's total volume. Net new demand is shifting toward AI Training (short-term, massive density), Inference (distributed, churny), and Repatriated Enterprise workloads. Companies are realizing public cloud isn’t the only answer for steady-state AI but still demand flexibility.

The problem? We are building static monuments for a fluid market. With the arrival of the NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 and the massive density spike that comes with it, we face a hard truth: If you build a bespoke hall for today’s AI requirement, you are risking stranded capital tomorrow. As I wrote earlier, we are seeing signs of a Vendor Financing Trap where infrastructure spend is outpacing sustainable demand. In this environment, you need an Industrialized Data Center Strategy that prioritizes agility over monuments.

We need to stop building data halls and start building "Universal Docks."

The "Universal Dock": Rethinking Data Center Industrialization

By "Universal Dock," I mean a long-life shell with standardized power and liquid interfaces that can accept any vendor’s skid-based power and cooling. This concept is central to a robust Industrialized Data Center Strategy.

The "Lease Mismatch" and IRR Destruction

The risk profile has fundamentally shifted. If you hard-code a facility for a specific high-density tenant who leaves after a single hardware generation, the economics collapse.

Consider this scenario: You build a $150M Build-to-Suit (BTS) hall with a 7-year underwriting horizon. The tenant signs a 3-year lease for a specific AI cluster. When they exit, retooling the embedded plumbing and rigid power distribution can cost $40–60M.

This leads to Capital Inefficiency and IRR destruction.

The Real Estate Case: Valuation & Liquidity

A forward-thinking Industrialized Data Center Strategy focused on the Universal Dock concept changes the asset class:

Tighter Cap Rates: Assets that can pivot rapidly between AI Training and Standard Cloud without costly demolition have lower re-tenanting risk and shorter downtime (weeks vs. months). The market will reward this liquidity with tighter cap rates.
Redeployable Assets: By moving Tenant Improvements into skid-based modules, we shift from "write-off when tenant leaves" to "redeployable inventory." Lenders and rating agencies will ultimately price this differently than sunk concrete costs. This approach also minimizes the risk of Business Continuity Plan failures during tenant transitions.

The Tenant’s Perspective: Why Should You Care?

If you are an AI tenant, you might ask: "Why do I care about your IRR?" You should care because fungibility equals velocity:

Speed to Deploy: You don't wait 18 months for a bespoke build; you plug into a dock that’s already permitted and energized.
No Exit Penalties: You aren't amortizing a concrete monument over a 3-year lease.
Roadmap Insurance: If NVIDIA or AMD shifts the cooling spec in 2027, you aren't stuck in a facility hard-wired for 2025. You just swap the skids.

The Exoskeleton Approach: The Future of Industrialized Data Centers

The solution is to separate the shell from the cell. We must treat the shell as an Exoskeleton: a durable, long-life structure providing only physical security and a "Utility Bus" (main power/water). Everything inside, like the "data hall" itself, must be a swappable cartridge.

This is not the "container fallacy" of poor ergonomics. This is Industrialized Construction, creating massive, open white space using volumetric skids that plug and play.

In the nuclear navy, we learned that Contextual Intelligence is everything. You cannot apply a static framework to a dynamic battlefield. The same applies here: You cannot apply stick-built construction methods to a dynamic AI hardware market. Moving complexity to the factory floor (Industrialized Construction) is the only way to achieve the precision and speed required.

The Standardization Imperative

For this to work at scale, we need standardization. We are seeing real traction:

Power: Project Mount Diablo (led by Meta within OCP) is driving standards for 400V disaggregated power delivery.
Cooling (Hardest Problem): Project Deschutes (led by Google within OCP) is attempting to standardize liquid cooling interconnects. This is the highest-risk area. If we don't standardize the plumbing interface, we risk a proprietary lock-in war that benefits no one.
Grid: OCP’s roadmap now includes grid interactions and BESS, this is critical because the substation connection must outlive the first tenant.

The Playbook: Navigating the Industrialized Shift

We are likely 2–3 years away from this being table stakes. Here is how we get there:

Developers: Stop pouring complexity into the slab. Design shells as Universal Docks with "USB-like" utility headers.
Tenants: Demand fungible shells. Refuse to pay for the demolition of the previous tenant's mistakes.
OEMs: Build against OCP-style interfaces so your skids are plug-compatible across different developers' sites.

The days of the static data hall are numbered. We have to stop building "perfect" data centers for today's specs. As I often say, you will die with one of two things: a collection of scars or a collection of "what-ifs." Read more on The Math on Regret. Sticking to the "safe" Build-to-Suit model because it worked for the last decade is a recipe for a "what-if" when the market leaves you behind.

In this new market, physical agility is the only true hedge against volatility.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

What is an "Industrialized Data Center Strategy"?

An Industrialized Data Center Strategy involves moving significant portions of data center construction from traditional stick-built methods on-site to factory-based, modular, and standardized manufacturing. The goal is to achieve greater speed, precision, quality, and cost-effectiveness in building highly adaptable infrastructure.

What is the "Universal Dock" concept?

The "Universal Dock" refers to designing a data center shell as a long-life, power-agnostic structure (the "Exoskeleton") with standardized utility interfaces that can accept interchangeable, skid-based, high-density computing modules (the "Cartridges"). This enables rapid swapping of AI hardware generations and tenant types.

Why is "Build-to-Suit" becoming problematic for AI infrastructure?

"Build-to-Suit" is problematic because it creates static, highly customized facilities (e.g., specific liquid cooling) for a market driven by rapidly evolving AI hardware (18-36 month refresh cycles). This leads to a "lease mismatch," where expensive, specialized infrastructure becomes obsolete and costly to retool long before the building's lifespan.

What is the "3-Year Tenant in a 30-Year Building" problem?

This phrase highlights the temporal misalignment between short-term AI hardware lifecycles (often requiring new facilities every 3-5 years) and traditional data center real estate investments (underwritten over 15-30 years). It exposes the risk of stranded capital when a tenant leaves, and the bespoke infrastructure is no longer viable for the next generation of hardware.

How does OCP's standardization efforts support this strategy?

The Open Compute Project (OCP), through initiatives like Project Mount Diablo (power) and Project Deschutes (cooling), is working to formalize open standards for data center components and interfaces. This standardization is crucial for the "Universal Dock" strategy to achieve true plug-and-play fungibility across different vendors and developers, preventing proprietary lock-in.

Tony

___________________________

Tony Grayson is a recognized Top 10 Data Center Influencer, a successful entrepreneur, and the President & General Manager of Northstar Enterprise + Defense.

A former U.S. Navy Submarine Commander and recipient of the prestigious VADM Stockdale Award, Tony is a leading authority on the convergence of nuclear energy, AI infrastructure, and national defense. His career is defined by building at scale: he led global infrastructure strategy as a Senior Vice President for AWS, Meta, and Oracle before founding and selling a top-10 modular data center company.

Today, he leads strategy and execution for critical defense programs and AI infrastructure, building AI factories and cloud regions that survive contact with reality.

THE CONTROL ROOM

Where strategic experience meets the future of innovation.