Summary

Corgan is a Dallas-based, employee-owned architecture and engineering firm founded in 1938 that has become the dominant design firm for large-scale datacenter infrastructure. The firm established its critical facilities practice in 1979 — designing its first datacenter for US Tel Communications Switching Center — and has since completed more than 1,200 datacenter projects encompassing over 15 million square feet. Building Design + Construction ranked Corgan the #1 Data Center Architecture Firm in both 2024 and 2025, a position driven by the firm’s integrated architecture-and-engineering model, its depth of repeat-client relationships with major colocation operators, and its ability to compress construction schedules through prefabricated modular approaches. In 2024, Corgan’s datacenter revenue reached approximately $135 million — more than double the ~$61 million it reported in 2020 — reflecting the AI infrastructure buildout’s direct impact on design-firm demand. Approximately 300 of its 1,200 employees now work on datacenter projects.

The firm’s competitive position is built on institutional knowledge rather than proprietary technology. Unlike developer/operators such as Crusoe or Applied Digital, Corgan is a pure design-services firm — it designs facilities for clients but does not own or operate them. This means Corgan’s competitive moat is its roster of client relationships, its depth of datacenter-specific engineering expertise (structural, mechanical, electrical, plumbing integrated with architecture), and its ability to execute on compressed schedules across a range of building typologies. Managing Principal Dan Drennan, who has led the data centers studio since 2013, oversees a global portfolio that includes hyperscale campuses in Northern Virginia, urban multistory facilities in Chicago and Silicon Valley, and international projects in Dublin, London, and Singapore.

The AI infrastructure wave is forcing Corgan — and its clients — to rethink core building assumptions with every new project. As Drennan noted publicly in 2025, “The demand that they’re having to serve is changing so quickly that we do have to reevaluate almost the entire building as part of each delivery.” Power densities that were exceptional in 2020 (10–15 kW/rack for air-cooled facilities) are now baseline minimums for AI workloads, with 40–120+ kW/rack liquid-cooled GPU clusters becoming standard planning assumptions. Corgan’s challenge — and value proposition — is translating these rapidly evolving infrastructure requirements into constructable buildings delivered on compressed schedules.

Key Facts

  • Founded: 1938 (Dallas, TX)
  • HQ: Dallas, TX
  • Type: Private; employee-owned (no outside investors)
  • Ownership model: Employee-owned firm; no private equity or institutional shareholders
  • Revenue (2024): ~$510.47M (firm total); ~$135M from datacenter design work
  • Employees: 1,200+ total; ~300 dedicated to datacenter projects
  • Offices: 22 offices — domestic (Dallas HQ, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Amarillo, Frisco, TX; Phoenix, AZ; Los Angeles, San Francisco, CA; Denver, CO; Orlando, FL; Atlanta, GA; Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Boston, MA; Seattle, WA; Washington, D.C.); international (Dublin, London, Singapore)
  • Data center practice start: 1979 — first project: US Tel Communications Switching Center
  • Projects completed: 1,200+ datacenter projects since 1979
  • Portfolio scale: 15M+ sq ft designed (Dan Drennan studio alone)
  • Silicon Valley portfolio: 70+ datacenter projects in 5 years, 40 large-scale, 6M+ sq ft
  • Ranking: BD+C #1 Data Center Architecture Firm, 2024 and 2025; #4 overall architecture firm
  • Revenue growth: Datacenter revenue more than doubled 2020–2024 ($61M → $135M)
  • Key clients: QTS, CoreSite, CyrusOne, Vantage, Cologix, Aligned, Iron Mountain, Social Security Administration, confidential hyperscalers and Fortune 500 tech companies
  • CEO: Scott Ruch (with Corgan since 1989; founder of critical facilities practice)
  • President: Lindsay Wilson
  • Data Centers Sector Leader: Dan Drennan, Managing Principal (at Corgan since 1998)
  • 2025 acquisitions: Dyer Brown & Associates (Boston, interior design); Cooper Robertson (New York, architecture and urban design) — Corgan’s first-ever acquisitions

What It Is / How It Works

Service Model: Integrated Architecture and Engineering

Corgan is an architecture-first firm that has evolved an unusually deep mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (MEP) engineering capability within its datacenter practice. Traditional architecture firms hand off MEP to separate engineering consultants; Corgan’s competitive differentiation is that its datacenter architects and engineers work in tightly integrated teams, compressing the design iteration cycle that is normally the bottleneck for fast-track datacenter delivery. This integrated model is why repeat clients — colocation operators running multi-year campus buildouts with QTS, CyrusOne, Vantage — continue to use Corgan as their design partner of record. Early contractor involvement in design is standard practice for Corgan’s fast-track projects.

Physical Design Typology Range

Corgan designs across four distinct datacenter building typologies, each with different structural, cooling, and site planning requirements:

Single-story campus buildings: The traditional hyperscale typology — wide, low-slung structures on large parcels with exterior mechanical yards (generators, cooling towers/dry coolers). This is the dominant typology for non-urban greenfield campuses (e.g., Northern Virginia, Atlanta). Structural requirements are straightforward but floor load capacity for high-density liquid-cooled racks is a critical design variable.

Multistory urban datacenter: Increasingly common in land-constrained markets (Silicon Valley, Chicago, New York). Multiple floors of data halls stacked above ground-level power infrastructure. Structural design must accommodate heavy distributed loads from servers and liquid cooling systems across multiple levels. Cooling system routing (piping risers, rooftop dry coolers) and seismic design are primary engineering challenges. Corgan has designed five-story facilities (Metro Edge IMD1, Chicago) and notes demand for taller configurations as urban markets tighten.

Mixed-use datacenter: Office building or public-facing program combined with secure data hall space, sharing a site or building envelope. The Skybox Santa Clara project — a four-story datacenter alongside a six-story Class A office building on an 11-acre site — is Corgan’s most prominent example. This typology is driven by urban planning requirements and community relations, particularly in Silicon Valley where municipalities resist “blank box” industrial buildings.

Edge/metro datacenter: Smaller-footprint, lower-capacity facilities (16–50 MW) located within city boundaries to minimize latency for local enterprise and institutional clients. The Metro Edge IMD1 in Chicago’s Illinois Medical District is the canonical example — 184,720 SF, five stories, serving healthcare, financial, and government tenants in the medical district.

Prefabricated Modular Power Rooms

Corgan’s most concrete construction methodology innovation — verified by the CyrusOne Project Kincora case — is the design-for-prefabrication of power infrastructure rooms. Rather than building switchgear rooms, UPS rooms, and power distribution equipment on-site using sequential trades, Corgan designs the power rooms as self-contained factory-built modules. Manufacturers build and wire 32 modular power rooms completely, then ship them to site for crane installation during shell construction. This parallelizes the two most schedule-critical paths: structural/shell construction and power room assembly. At Kincora (45 MW, 650,000 SF, Sterling, Virginia), this approach delivered an 11-month schedule for one of Northern Virginia’s largest single data center structures.

Similarly, the Kincora project prefabricated chilled water loop sections and underground plumbing off-site for rapid field connection. The approach reduces on-site skilled labor demand (which is the binding constraint for datacenter construction schedules in Northern Virginia’s overheated labor market), improves quality consistency through factory QA, and enables the shell and power systems to proceed simultaneously.

Adiabatic Dry Cooling and Water Conservation

Corgan has become an advocate for adiabatic dry cooler designs that dramatically reduce facility water consumption compared to traditional evaporative cooling towers. The CoreSite SV9 project (Santa Clara, 34 MW, 240,000 SF) is the documented example: the design incorporated Adiabatic Dry Coolers (ADC) that reduced annual water consumption from a projected ~370 million gallons (traditional cooling tower approach) to approximately 2 million gallons — a ~99.5% reduction. In California’s water-stressed regulatory environment, this water use figure was both a competitive advantage for the project’s permitting and an operational cost reduction for CoreSite.

The adiabatic dry cooler operates by evaporating a small quantity of water from a pre-wetting pad to lower the air temperature entering the dry cooler coils during peak ambient conditions — the evaporative “assist” is used only when needed (hot days), not continuously as with traditional cooling towers. The baseline mode is dry-air heat rejection with zero water consumption; the adiabatic mode adds minimal evaporation during temperature peaks.

AI-Era Design Recalibration

The transition from conventional enterprise colocation (5–15 kW/rack) to AI training and inference infrastructure (40–120+ kW/rack) requires rethinking nearly every building system assumption:

Structural: AI GPU racks with liquid cooling infrastructure (CDUs, overhead piping, in-rack cooling) are significantly heavier than legacy air-cooled racks. Floor load capacity assumptions built into earlier-generation datacenter designs are often insufficient for dense AI clusters without structural reinforcement.

Power distribution: 40+ kW/rack density requires bus duct or high-capacity PDU designs that differ from the branch circuit distribution used in conventional datacenter designs. Power room sizing must account for higher per-rack draw, and generator backup must be sized for peak AI cluster demand.

Cooling infrastructure: Direct-to-chip liquid cooling loops (for 40–120 kW/rack GPU racks) require facility-level warm-water infrastructure — supply/return piping loops, cooling distribution units (CDUs), facility-level plate heat exchangers — that is architecturally distinct from traditional CRAC/CRAH air cooling. Floor penetrations for piping, ceiling-level supply/return headers, and mechanical room sizing for CDUs must be designed from the start rather than retrofitted.

Zoned hybrid design: Corgan designs new AI-era facilities for mixed cooling zones: conventional air-cooled zones for network equipment and moderate-density servers, transitioning to liquid-cooled zones for dense GPU clusters. This reflects the operational reality that a single facility may host both AI training clusters (120 kW/rack) and conventional enterprise colocation (10 kW/rack) simultaneously.

Per Drennan, Corgan now evaluates “almost the entire building” as changed for each AI-focused delivery, because the density, structural, cooling, and power distribution assumptions have all shifted from the prior generation.

Notable Developments

  • 2025 (October): BD+C ranks Corgan #1 Data Center Architecture Firm for 2025, second consecutive year. (Corgan)
  • 2025 (April): Corgan opens San Antonio office to serve growing Texas datacenter market demand. (BusinessWire)
  • 2025 (March): Corgan expands to Pacific Northwest (Seattle office). (BusinessWire)
  • 2025 (August): Acquires Boston-based Dyer Brown & Associates (interior design) — first acquisition in firm’s 87-year history. Followed by acquisition of New York-based Cooper Robertson (architecture, urban design). (The Architect’s Newspaper)
  • 2024: Datacenter revenue approximately $135M, more than doubling the ~$61M recorded in 2020. 300 of 1,200 employees now dedicated to datacenter work. (Architect’s Newspaper)
  • 2024 (September): Opens Washington, D.C. office targeting federal datacenter clients and Northern Virginia colocation market growth. (Corgan)
  • 2024: QTS Project Granite, Atlanta — 200 MW, 495,000 SF, 9 months from groundbreaking to first tenant. Recognized as “most connected datacenter in the Southeast.”
  • 2023: CyrusOne Project Kincora, Sterling, VA — 45 MW, 650,000 SF, 11-month schedule using 32 prefabricated modular power rooms. ENR Mid-Atlantic Award of Merit.
  • 2023: CoreSite SV9, Santa Clara — 34 MW, 240,000 SF, 4-story, adiabatic dry cooler design reducing water use by ~99.5% vs. traditional cooling towers.
  • 2023: Opens Dublin office; also operates in London and Singapore for European and Asia-Pacific datacenter clients. (Corgan)
  • 2022 (est.): Skybox Santa Clara — 60 MW, 550,000 SF, 4-story datacenter + 6-story office mixed-use on 11-acre Silicon Valley site.
  • 2018: By this date, Corgan had completed more than 1,200 datacenter projects for technology and telecommunications companies worldwide since founding its critical facilities practice in 1979.
  • 1979: Established critical facilities architecture practice; first project: US Tel Communications Switching Center.
  • 1938: Founded by Jack Corgan in Dallas, TX.

Key People

Scott Ruch — CEO and Founder of Critical Facilities Practice

  • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/scottruch (Corgan profile)
  • Tenure: With Corgan since 1989 (35+ years); CEO since ~2018
  • Background: Founded Corgan’s critical facilities (datacenter) architecture group; has been involved in design of more than 500 datacenter projects encompassing over 5 million square feet. Career began in 1989; datacenter work since 1992.
  • Notes: Ruch is the architect of Corgan’s market-leading position in datacenter design — building the practice from an early movers’ bet in 1979 into the #1 ranked global datacenter architecture firm. His tenure spans the mainframe era, internet build-out, cloud colocation, and now AI infrastructure.

Lindsay Wilson — President

  • Corgan profile: corgan.com/firm/leadership
  • Background: Interior design background (University of Arkansas); specializes in project vision, programming, and real estate opportunity evaluation
  • Notes: Less publicly profiled in datacenter-specific context; broader firm strategy and operations role

Dan Drennan — Managing Principal and Data Centers Sector Co-Leader

  • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/dan-drennan-aia-ncarb-274765
  • Corgan profile: corgan.com/firm/leadership/dan-drennan
  • Tenure: At Corgan since 1998; principal of data centers studio 2013; co-sector leader since 2019
  • Background: BS Civil Engineering (University of Oklahoma); Master of Architecture (Texas A&M). 25+ years in mission-critical facility design.
  • Portfolio: Responsible for 15M+ sq ft of datacenter design globally
  • Notes: Drennan is Corgan’s primary external voice on AI datacenter design trends — cited in Architect’s Newspaper, Data Center Knowledge, and BD+C. His comments on “reevaluating almost the entire building with each delivery” and the inevitability of gigawatt-scale facilities define Corgan’s current AI-era positioning.

Tom Kruger — Vice President / Associate Principal, LA Data Center Studio

  • LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/thomas-kruger-aia-leed-ap-4271389
  • Corgan profile: corgan.com/firm/leadership/tom-kruger
  • Tenure: 13+ years at Corgan; leads Los Angeles studio
  • Background: BA Architecture (UC Berkeley, 2001–2005); prior experience at Gensler and RMJM Hillier; also worked on LAX T4 Connector
  • Notes: Primary architect for Silicon Valley and LA-area datacenter projects, including Skybox Santa Clara. Quoted on water conservation, community integration, and CEQA compliance for California projects. Corgan designed 70+ datacenter projects in Silicon Valley/SF in five years under this studio’s tenure.

People — Last Reviewed: 2026-04-02

Supply Chain Position

Corgan is a pure design-services firm — it occupies the architecture and engineering layer of the datacenter supply chain but does not develop, own, or operate facilities. Its supply chain position is defined by its client roster (colocation operators, hyperscalers, enterprise) and its relationships with general contractors and MEP specialty contractors who build what Corgan designs.

Layer Corgan’s role
Architecture & Engineering Primary: integrated A+E for datacenter shell, core, and tenant improvements; structural, MEP, civil engineering within the design team
Site selection / pre-design Advisory: site feasibility, power infrastructure assessment, zoning and permitting strategy (AI-era site selection emphasis on power-first criteria)
Prefabrication design Design-for-manufacturing: modular power room design (proven at Kincora), prefabricated MEP module coordination
Colocation operators Primary client segment: QTS, CoreSite, CyrusOne, Vantage, Cologix, Aligned, Iron Mountain — all multi-project repeat clients
Hyperscalers Client (confidential): “Fortune 500 technology companies” and hyperscalers named indirectly; specific hyperscaler relationships not disclosed publicly
Federal / government Client: Social Security Administration; federal expansion targeted with new D.C. office (2024)
General contractors Downstream: GCs build from Corgan’s designs; Corgan coordinates with major datacenter contractors (Mortenson, Turner, etc.) as designer of record; not a construction firm
MEP manufacturers Coordination: designs specify Schneider Electric, Vertiv, and others’ power/cooling equipment; prefab module designs require close coordination with equipment manufacturers

⚑ Client concentration in colocation operators: Corgan’s disclosed client base is heavily weighted toward established colocation operators (QTS, CoreSite, CyrusOne, Vantage, Cologix). If the datacenter market continues its secular shift toward hyperscaler-owned campuses (displacing third-party colocation), Corgan’s design work may shift toward confidential hyperscaler relationships where public project attribution is typically restricted. This is already occurring — Corgan’s website lists “confidential high-profile tech clients” without naming them.

⚑ Design-services firms are not capital-constrained in the same way as developers/operators — but they are capacity-constrained. Corgan’s constraint is architect and engineer supply: 300 staff on datacenter projects in a market where AI demand is driving record colocation absorption. The 2024–2025 office openings (D.C., San Antonio, Seattle) and acquisitions (Dyer Brown, Cooper Robertson) are consistent with a capacity expansion strategy to serve more datacenter clients.

⚑ Competition from integrated design-build firms: As hyperscalers push for faster delivery, some are engaging design-build contractors (Turner Construction with its integrated design team, Mortenson’s in-house design capability) that can compress schedule by eliminating the handoff between designer and builder. Pure A&E firms like Corgan must demonstrate that their design-for-prefabrication approach and early contractor involvement offset this potential schedule advantage.

Claim Verification

Claim: #1 Data Center Architecture Firm globally (BD+C)

Status: Confirmed — BD+C Top 30 Data Center Architecture Firms ranking, published annually by Building Design + Construction. Corgan held #1 position in 2024 and 2025.

Supporting:

  • BD+C ranking methodology is based on firm self-reported datacenter design revenue, confirmed by third parties; widely cited in industry publications
  • Corgan’s $135M datacenter revenue figure (2024) places it clearly above competitor firms in the same rankings

Refuting / questioning:

  • BD+C ranking reflects design revenue, not construction completions, facilities under management, or any operational metric; it measures market share within architecture-firm peer group, not the broader AEC/developer market
  • Other large MEP engineering firms (e.g., Arup, AECOM) or integrated design-build contractors that do not separate datacenter revenue identically may not be fully captured in the same ranking

Summary: The ranking is credibly industry-recognized. Treat as confirmed within the architecture-firm competitive set.

Claim: 11-month schedule for CyrusOne Kincora (45 MW, 650,000 SF)

Status: Reported on Corgan’s project page; supported by ENR award recognition; timeline specifics not independently timed by third parties

Supporting:

  • ENR Mid-Atlantic Award of Merit for Manufacturing provides independent external recognition of the project’s exceptional delivery
  • The prefabricated modular power room approach (32 rooms built off-site) is technically consistent with the schedule compression claim — parallelizing shell and power room construction is a proven schedule reduction mechanism
  • Northern Virginia Data Center Alley projects at this scale typically run 14–18+ months from groundbreaking; 11 months is notable but not implausible given the prefab approach

Refuting / questioning:

  • “11-month schedule” likely measured from groundbreaking to mechanical completion or first power delivery — final commissioning, tenant fit-out, and tenant activation may extend the timeline to live compute
  • Kincora was built on an established campus (CyrusOne’s existing Sterling, VA campus) which likely had utility infrastructure, permitting, and site work already in place — a “bare land” comparison would show a longer timeline

Summary: Directionally accurate. The 11-month figure applies to a specific phase of delivery on an established campus. The prefabricated modular approach is a genuine and documented schedule compression methodology.

Claim: CoreSite SV9 adiabatic dry coolers reduced water use from ~370M to ~2M gallons/year

Status: Reported in public project documentation and confirmed by Banker Steel (structural contractor) project profile; specific figures not independently audited

Supporting:

  • The directional math is plausible: a 34 MW datacenter with traditional cooling towers in a California climate (high annual cooling hours) would consume ~300–400M gallons/year at typical Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE) of ~1.5–2.5 L/kWh; ADC technology reducing to ~2M gallons/year represents true baseline dry operation with adiabatic assist only during peak ambient conditions
  • Adiabatic dry coolers are a commercially proven technology (Nortek, EVAPCO, and others manufacture them); the physics of near-zero water use in dry mode is definitional, not a performance claim

Refuting / questioning:

  • The 2M gallon/year figure represents water evaporated in the adiabatic assist mode only; it does not include water used in construction, landscaping, or human HVAC systems
  • Actual annual water consumption depends on local climate (ambient temperature hours above the dry cooler setpoint) and operational load factor; the published figure may represent a design target rather than measured operational performance
  • At 34 MW, 2M gallons/year works out to approximately 0.002 L/kWh — an exceptionally low WUE that would rank among the best globally; independent operational WUE reporting has not been published

Summary: The technology mechanism is sound and the order-of-magnitude reduction is credible. The specific figures are design targets; independent operational confirmation has not been published.

Claim: QTS Project Granite — 9 months from groundbreaking to first tenant

Status: Reported on Corgan’s project page; independently consistent with QTS/Corgan’s multi-phase master plan approach

Supporting:

  • The QTS Granite campus in Atlanta was built on a former 100+ acre rail yard site, which provided a large clear parcel without complex demolition or remediation; this site characteristic is consistent with fast delivery
  • QTS is a well-capitalized Blackstone-owned operator with established supply chain and procurement relationships, enabling rapid equipment delivery
  • Multi-phase master plan approach allows early infrastructure phases (site prep, utility connections) to proceed while building design is finalized

Refuting / questioning:

  • “First tenant occupancy” may reflect delivery of shell and core with power, not full operational datacenter with cooling and IT infrastructure
  • 200 MW total master plan capacity was not delivered in 9 months — the 9-month claim likely applies to the first phase of the multi-phase buildout

Summary: Plausible for a well-resourced first phase on a clear brownfield site. The full 200 MW campus required multiple additional phases beyond the 9-month figure.

Sources