From the Server Room to the Robot Cell: Everything About IT Office Infrastructure

When a new office plan is drawn, where in the order does the server room get decided? Office design is usually discussed around people, but in a company that houses servers and lab equipment there are things that have to claim their place before people do. Power and HVAC, soundproofing and networking are all decided before the walls go up, and what gets missed then is hard to undo after move-in. SPACEBASE reviews an office where equipment works alongside people across four infrastructure systems. From the server room to the equipment room to the robot cell, take a look at the standards that came out of real drawings and meeting records.

The office of the tax filing and refund service Jobis&Villains. The office of the AI semiconductor company Rebellions. And for the physical AI company RLWRLD, the headquarters we worked on earlier. SPACEBASE has taken on the spaces of technology companies like these.

An office that equipment moves into has rooms on its plan that an ordinary office doesn't have. Server rooms, equipment rooms, robot spaces. They come to very little in floor area, but they're the spots where the electrical, HVAC, fire and telecom drawings have to be fixed first.

What you see first in a finished office is the lounge and the robot cell beyond the glass. Behind them, rooms that an ordinary office doesn't have go in as well.

System 1. Equipment never goes home — electrical

🤔 The concern "I have no idea how many outlets to put in the server room. Isn't the power already coming into the building anyway?"

💡 The space solution SPACEBASE proposes

Outlets for people and power for equipment are planned in different units. A person uses a laptop and then goes home, but a server rack draws the same load 24 hours a day. So server racks are planned on dedicated circuits at 2–5 kW per rack. That said, the planning figure and the load a room actually draws are two different things. On one project the server room's actual load was 700 W, but we left headroom up to 1,300 W to allow for expansion.

On the Jobis&Villains project, the servers had to move in ahead of the furniture. So we put one server room each on the 9th and 10th floors and sequenced the work so that those two rooms would be finished first. Outlet circuits (*the power circuits for receptacles, planned separately from lighting) were laid out on the basis of one three-gang outlet per rack, the dedicated distribution panel was placed inside the room, and the air conditioner and the rack servers were put on separate breakers.

The colored area is the server room. It sits inside the floor plate, next to the core and the EPS. It's a small room, but it's the spot where the electrical, HVAC and fire drawings get fixed first. (Jobis&Villains project drawing)

For a company that works on servers, losing the network means losing money. So a UPS (*a device that keeps power flowing to the servers even during an outage) goes in next to them. A UPS is a machine you plug into an outlet too, so when the building loses power it holds out for 60 to 80 minutes on its own battery. The problem is what comes after that.

On the Jobis&Villains project we worked the math all the way to the battery running out. We agreed with the building to pull wiring and conduit from the emergency generator distribution panel in the building's EPS room (*the room on each floor where the electrical equipment is gathered) and leave one more plug in place. Day to day it runs on ordinary outlet power, when the power goes out the battery carries it, and in the meantime the emergency generator in the basement takes over as uninterruptible power. Splitting the electrical panel into a normal circuit and an uninterruptible circuit was for the same reason.

This kind of setup is usually already in the building — an emergency generator in the basement, and an uninterruptible distribution panel in each floor's EPS room. It varies from building to building, though, so when we get a request we check first whether it's there. It isn't impossible to do the work after completion either. But once the finishes are in, that much more wiring is left exposed and the work gets harder. So when there's a server room, we ask about the setup at the estimate stage and build it in from the start.

System 2. Cooling alone won't protect the equipment — HVAC

🤔 The concern "Isn't it enough to just run the air conditioning? Is there really a reason to keep the server room away from the windows?"

💡 The space solution SPACEBASE proposes

Server room HVAC is a question of constant temperature and humidity, not of cooling. It isn't only about bringing the temperature down; the humidity has to be held as well, and since the equipment can't be allowed to stop, an N+1 setup with one spare unit is preferred. The server room isn't the only place giving off heat, so the switch room needs a vent too.

What has to be blocked before heat is condensation. The basics are to minimize the effect of outside air and solar gain, so SPACEBASE places server rooms away from windows and from orientations that get a lot of sun wherever possible. The temperature gap between a permanently cooled interior and the outside translates directly into condensation risk. If it has to sit against a window, we leave a buffer space between the window and the server room, build the wall inside that, and apply an insulation and vapor-barrier plan all the way to the ceiling.

The server room wall is built to stop condensation by layering insulation and a vapor-impermeable panel with a humidity-buffering finish that takes moisture in and releases it. When it sits against a window, a buffer space is left and the wall goes up inside it. (Jobis&Villains project material)

Nor is the server room's location decided by condensation alone. On the Jobis&Villains project we put the server room as close to the building's EPS as possible to simplify the cabling routes. Since the company occupied two floors, the 9th and the 10th, the two server rooms were placed on the same vertical line. A server room isn't a room you fit into whatever space is left over. It's a space whose position is set at the early plan stage, after reviewing the constant temperature and humidity environment, the condensation risk, the distance to the EPS, and the floor-to-floor cabling scheme.

The server room on the Jobis&Villains project is 2.0 pyeong (about 6.6 m²) on the 9th floor. A buffer space was left from the windows and the wall was built on the window side inside it, and the ceiling was fixed with gypsum to seal the room. The walls were finished with 30T sound-absorbing board and the door with a steel door. On the floor, conductive tile was laid over the existing raised access floor (*a double floor lifted so cabling can run underneath, noted as 'OA floor' on the drawings) to drain off static electricity.

Fire suppression differs from an ordinary office space too. In the server room a gaseous fire suppression system was used instead of sprinklers, and no powder. The ceiling diffusers were taken out and an access hatch was put in.

All four sides of the server room were finished with 30T sound-absorbing board. A single steel door opening toward the workstations is this room's only entrance. (Jobis&Villains project drawing)

System 3. Equipment is louder than people — soundproofing

🤔 The concern "I want to keep a 3D printer and a cutting machine inside the office, but will people be able to work right next to them?"

💡 The space solution SPACEBASE proposes

Noise is a performance target you agree on in numbers, not by feel. A request to "keep it quiet" doesn't translate into a construction spec. The equipment room in RLWRLD's new office started from a number too. The target to hold outside the room was set at 45 dB, the level of a quiet office.

A 3D printer runs up to 65 dB, and a CNC machine, a band saw, a drill press and a compressor run 80 to 95 dB. Work backwards and you get 20 dB and 35–50 dB of reduction, respectively.

You need a target number before you can discuss wall specs. SPACEBASE works with three grades of soundproof wall: floor to ceiling, floor to slab, and slab to slab. That said, there's no fixed formula that pins a set of materials to each grade. Insulation and an acoustic barrier sheet go into the walls as standard, and perforated gypsum board (*gypsum board punched with holes, used as a sound-absorbing material) is used as the ceiling material in rooms that need absorption, like meeting rooms. System doors go where sound must not leak out. STC 45 for meeting rooms and 40 for phone booths are standards SPACEBASE tries to hold as well, but they shift with the site. A room with a large reduction requirement, like an equipment room, gets a double soundproof wall running slab to slab.

Soundproof wall grades are divided by how far up the wall goes. The higher the grade, the fewer the paths sound has to travel around it. A, B, C and D below are the material codes the drawing uses, and which combination goes in depends on what the room is for. (Jobis&Villains project drawing)

Blocking sound isn't enough on its own. 3D printing gives off volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and aluminum machining produces cutting fluid and metal chips. So the conditions for this room came together as running the ventilation out through a separate outdoor duct rather than tying it into the building HVAC, and holding the inside of the room at negative pressure, lower than the office, so that odor and dust don't cross into the space next door.

The position of a single door is the same kind of problem. Put the door on the workspace side and noise and odor leak out every time it opens. SPACEBASE flagged this in advance, and the entrance was settled on the robot space side.

✅ What to write down in numbers when you order soundproofing

✔️ A list of noise sources — which machines are actually coming in

✔️ Noise levels by machine — catalogue figures are fine

✔️ The target to hold outside the room — 45 dB, not "quiet"

✔️ The reduction required — the 20 dB and 35–50 dB worked back from the target

✔️ The wall grade — to the ceiling, or to the slab

System 4. The cabling is decided before the walls go up — networking

🤔 The concern "Can't we run the LAN cabling after we move in? Everything's wireless these days anyway."

💡 The space solution SPACEBASE proposes

The electrical, fire and telecom trades that disappear inside the walls come before the others. The cable routes have to be fixed before the walls go up, which means you need the port count first. One LAN drop per seat is the baseline, and floors used by engineering teams are planned at two. For the spec, 10G means Cat6A and 1G means Cat6. If there's any plan to raise the speed, it's better to standardize on the higher spec from the start.

In a space where equipment comes in, a per-seat basis doesn't apply. The robot test space in RLWRLD's new office is about 3 m × 3 m per cell. Depending on the test setup, as many as four cells had to be able to run together as one. So the cells were divided by floor lines alone, with no fixed walls, and the LAN ports were provided with more headroom than the equipment count.

Cameras and sensors hang from the mount structure along with the cabling. The outlets go up on this grid too.

A cell's boundary is a line drawn on the floor and a number, not a wall. When the test setup changes, cells are joined and used as a single space.

Since the robots have to move freely, keeping the floor clear was the first principle. Rails or cabling exposed on the floor interfere with travel, and they become a constraint when several cells are used together. So the cabling was planned to be fed from the walls or from the ceiling mounts. The mounts aren't only a place to hang cabling, they're also the infrastructure that holds cameras and sensors.

The aluminum profile on the wall meets the ceiling channel. The cabling was planned along this route.

Mount structures hang from the ceiling in a grid following the cell divisions. The floor was planned to be left as clear as possible.

For height, the client gave only a minimum condition of 2,000 mm or more. The effective floor-to-ceiling height on site was about 2,600 mm, and rather than settling for the minimum, we raised the structure as high as roughly 2,500 mm, leaving only enough room above to install and adjust equipment. It was to secure that much more range of motion for the robots.

The mounts form a grid following the cell divisions. Two-gang outlets go up on the raceway (*a metal channel that carries and hangs cabling), and the floor system boxes sit close to the walls.

Outlets and network outlets were placed on the channel so power and LAN can be dropped down anywhere in a cell.

Putting outlets up on the ceiling mounts means power and LAN can be dropped anywhere in a cell. They don't read as visually tidy, though, so it was settled by adding wall outlets alongside them.

The flooring wasn't taken as requested either. The initial request was for self-leveling followed by an epoxy finish, the same as the previous space. But the new site already had a raised access floor with cabling running underneath, and the robot test space alone was over 100 pyeong (about 330 m²). Tearing it out and building new drives up the construction cost, the schedule and the scope of demolition together. So we proposed leaving the raised access floor in place and finishing over it with PVC tile, and that's what went in. Being able to get underneath when the cabling changes later was part of the reason.

PVC tile was laid over the raised access floor without tearing it out. The floor system boxes sit close to the walls, clear of the travel routes.

In an interior estimate, networking and telecom often drop out as 'optional work (separate contract).' Cable pulling is the extent of the interior scope, and the equipment setup is ordered separately. We covered how to read items like these in an estimate in ③ How to Get a Good Estimate & the Importance of the 'Site Briefing'. The LAN testing period before move-in has to be scheduled in advance too, so on the Jobis&Villains project we made those two or three days a requirement from the ordering stage.

✅ What gets missed most often in IT office infrastructure

✔️ Room to expand — whether power and LAN can be pulled to added seats

✔️ Server room cooling — the office runs on business hours, the servers run 24 hours. Independent cooling, heat output, and a spot for the condenser unit

✔️ Which rooms need soundproofing — which room gets built to which grade

✔️ Whether night work is required — sites where noisy trades can only run at night because of complaints and building rules

✔️ Items outside the interior scope — who carries out the network work, and things bought separately like electronics and AV

From the power a rack draws to the room's temperature and humidity, the sound the equipment makes, and the port count. We covered the questions that come with the spaces people use in The 4 Spatial Dilemmas of a Scale-Up Startup. A space shared with equipment has these four systems stacked on top of those. All of them are decided before the walls go up, and changing them means opening a wall you've already built.

SPACEBASE fixes the electrical, mechanical and telecom specs for special rooms — server rooms, equipment rooms, robot cells — together with the interior design. If you're preparing an office where equipment and people work side by side, think it through with SPACEBASE.

*Photos and design courtesy of SPACEBASE

Want to get everything from the server room to the robot cell done in a single build-out?

👉 Send SPACEBASE a project inquiry