Data Center Business Fundamentals
This course introduces the commercial and economic structure of the data center and AI factory industry to prepare students for roles that intersect operations with business decision-making. Topics include colocation and wholesale lease structures, power purchase agreements, capital expenditure versus operating expenditure planning, total cost of ownership for compute and cooling assets, service-level agreements and their financial penalties, uptime economics tied to Uptime Institute Tier classifications, basic tax-credit concepts relevant to infrastructure investment, and vendor and supply-chain relationships for critical equipment. Students read and interpret an SLA, build a simplified total-cost-of-ownership model in a spreadsheet, and calculate the financial impact of an outage against a stated SLA penalty schedule. The course closes with a field or virtual practicum in which students interview or shadow a facility operations or account-management professional and produce a written summary connecting a business concept to an observed operational decision. No prior finance or accounting coursework is assumed.
What you'll be able to do
- Compare colocation, wholesale, and build-to-suit lease structures against a stated customer requirement.
- Calculate the total cost of ownership of a compute or cooling asset over a stated service life.
- Interpret the service-level and penalty clauses of a data center services agreement.
- Calculate the financial service-credit impact of a stated outage against an SLA penalty schedule.
- Relate an Uptime Institute Tier classification to its associated availability commitment and cost profile.
- Distinguish capital expenditure from operating expenditure treatment for a list of infrastructure line items.
- Summarize the general eligibility concept and stated benefit of a named infrastructure tax-credit mechanism.
- Map a critical-equipment supply-chain disruption scenario to its likely schedule and cost impact.
- Produce a written summary connecting an observed operational decision to a business concept covered in the course.
Train the team that runs the factory.
The Institute travels with every SAVRN campus.