A conventional 50MW data centre can take years to become ready for IT and consume roughly 600,000 on-site labour hours, according to Armada, a San Francisco company that builds modular data centres. At Nvidia GTC in Berlin it said it would attack that timeline by building the facility in a factory instead.
Armada announced support for Nvidia's DSX POD reference design, which lets partners make standardised, factory-integrated containers for the Nvidia Vera Rubin platform. With Johnson Controls, Armada will engineer, manufacture, integrate and deploy pre-fabricated sites, with cabling, wiring, piping and functional validation finished before a unit leaves the factory. Armada plans to build 500MW of distributed sovereign capacity with Johnson Controls in 2027. That figure is a plan, not a delivered capacity.
Simulate first, then ship
Armada says it uses Nvidia DSX Air to simulate a site and validate its Bridge GPU management software before hardware ships, the DSX POD design to build the containers, and DSX MaxLPS to maximise token output within a site's power limit once it is running. Its platform also supports Nvidia AI Grid, which targets telecoms operators, service providers and enterprises running distributed, latency-sensitive AI.
On site, Armada connects the containers to prepared power, water, cooling and networking, and customers add more containers as demand grows. It describes the result as a grid of modular sites placed near energy sources, including stranded and renewable power, built on an open architecture with no cloud dependency, so customers own their models, data and infrastructure. The company makes its units at Galleon Forge One in Gilbert, Arizona, and Galleon Forge Two in Dublin, Ireland, in partnership with Johnson Controls.
Dan Wright, Armada's co-founder and chief executive, argued that building speed is the constraint.
“The SI race isn't going to be won by whoever pours concrete the fastest,” said Dan Wright, Co-founder and CEO of Armada.
Armada uses “SI” for superintelligence, which its release defines as AI that matches or exceeds human experts across most fields. Johnson Controls chief executive Joakim Weidemanis said the partnership pairs Armada's edge deployment experience with Johnson Controls' thermal management and manufacturing scale.
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