Engineering
The stack, layer by layer
Every page on this site refers to one drawing: a pyramid of eight layers, applications at the top and jurisdiction at the bottom. It is the company's whole argument in a single figure. This article reads it slowly, layer by layer, and says for each one what exists, what is designed, and who owns it.
Eight layers between an application and the ground it runs on. Which three we leave to tenants, which five we build, and why the drawing is a pyramid.
Why the drawing is a pyramid
The layers are not stacked by importance. They are stacked by how long each takes to build and how hard it is to replace. An application ships in weeks. A model is retrained in months. An accelerator generation lasts about eighteen months before the next one arrives. A fibre route takes a year. A grid connection takes years. Industrial land with the right zoning, water and permits takes longer still, and the law of the ground took centuries. The drawing widens toward the bottom because the bottom carries everything above it, and because the bottom is where scarcity lives. The top is visible and abundant. The base is slow and scarce.
The three layers we do not build
Applications are what a user sees: assistants, agents, products. Models are what the applications call. Compute is the machine the model runs on. None of the three is built here. Our tenants bring their own accelerators and their own software, and they own both. This is a deliberate boundary. The three top layers change fastest and are financed by companies with capital to spare. The five below them change slowest and are financed, in Europe, by almost nobody. We are in the second business.
Signal: fibre, routing, exchange
A data centre with one fibre route is a data centre with one failure. Ours are designed multi-route, with diverse entries to the site, and route to Frankfurt, where the German internet exchange sits. Status matters here. For Blankenburg the carrier procurement is in process and the meet-me room is planned, with the cross-connect model still to be specified. We write it that way because a route on a drawing and a route in a duct are different things, and only the second one carries traffic.
Thermal: cooling, rejection, recovery
Nearly every kilowatt-hour a data centre draws leaves it as heat. Above about thirty kilowatts in a rack, air can no longer carry it, and AI racks are designed at fifty and beyond, so the cooling is liquid and it begins at the chip. At Blankenburg the design couples closed campus and rack loops to source water at 10 to 12 °C, official data, with the source circuit open and all of it returned. The heat is not thrown away by default. The design basis allows export of up to 35 MWth at the transfer point, and a town heat network is the kind of customer it is designed for. That is a design figure, and it is labelled as one.
Energy: generation, storage, grid
The grid connection is the layer that decides a project's date. In Quedlinburg it exists: 1 MW connected today through a 2 MVA transformer, with 2.33 MWh of storage at 1.05 MW and 450 kW of photovoltaics on the façade, all existing. In Blankenburg it is applied for: a 110 kV connection for 60 MW, application filed in March 2026, with an own substation and combined heat and power on site as the design basis. A connection application is a queue position, and we publish it as exactly that.
Physical base: land, geology, structure
A campus needs ground that is zoned for it, stable under it and high enough above the water. Blankenburg is GI-zoned industrial land under §9 of the federal land-use ordinance, on Harz basement rock some four hundred million years old, at 232 to 254 metres above sea level, measured. Quedlinburg is the other case: a seven-storey building that already stands, converted rather than built, with no new ground taken. Two ways to have a physical base, and both are on this site with their status.
Jurisdiction: law, ownership, control
The deepest layer is the legal one. Each site is held by its own German project company; Black Vault Blankenburg GmbH is registered. German building, German and European law, auditable down to the room. Toward KRITIS and NIS2 the design follows a pathway, and we say pathway because nobody here holds a certificate for a building that is not yet in operation. Jurisdiction is the layer a tenant cannot bring along and cannot change afterwards. It is also the one that never depreciates.
Reading the pyramid as a balance sheet
Put the eight layers next to their lifetimes and the business model falls out of the drawing. The top three are bought and replaced by tenants. The bottom five are held: land, grid, water, heat, permits, all in the project company, all gaining value as the queue behind them lengthens. The holding funds the survey, engineering and legal work of each project before outside capital enters, so that what an investor buys into has already been measured. That is why the pyramid is drawn wide at the base. The base is what we own.
Sources
- 01The AI infrastructure stack, as drawn on the home page and on /platform of this site
- 02Baunutzungsverordnung (BauNVO) §9, industrial areas – Bundesministerium der Justiz
- 03Black Vault fact register: grid, storage, water and heat figures with status and date, as reproduced on the Quedlinburg, Blankenburg and Systems pages
