Appendices & Reference Data

There is no single global standard for an AI data center — there is a stack of overlapping resilience, thermal, efficiency, hardware, and compliance regimes from different bodies that do not map one-to-one. This appendix is the crosswalk: the tables you reach for when a spec, a tier letter, a class number, or a framework name shows up in a contract, an RFP, or a commissioning script and you need to know what it is, what it maps to, and whether it actually applies to a 2026-density liquid-cooled hall.

A reference design is the cascade made arithmetic: pick the archetype, the accelerator generation, and the scalable unit, and the megawatts, liters-per-minute, fiber strands, switch ports, and dollars all fall out of a small set of multipliers you can carry in your head — this appendix supplies those multipliers and works three reference builds end-to-end (a scalable-unit budget, a 50 MW campus, and a 100k-GPU cluster BOM) so you can sanity-check any vendor's sizing in an afternoon.

Most of the irreversible decisions in this guide reduce to a handful of arithmetic checks — cost per useful GPU-hour, cost per million tokens, the density that forces liquid, the redundancy tier the workload actually values, and whether a contracted cash flow can carry its debt. This appendix is the live calculator layer plus the static reference tables that anchor it.

A number with no date, no source, and no caveat is not a fact — it is a rumor with a decimal point; this appendix is the live, date-stamped register that turns every volatile headline figure in the guide into one you can re-check before you bet a slab, an interconnection slot, or a financing structure on it.

An appendix earns its place by being the page you keep open at the bench: this one collapses the guide's vocabulary into a single scannable glossary, lays the 24–60 month land-to-go-live schedule on one critical-path table, and points you at the certifications, conferences, and feeds that keep the rest from going stale between editions.

Every failure in an AI factory is dual-use — the same coolant-leak cascade, grid trip, or thermal runaway can be a random fault or an attacker's objective — so this catalog gives each mode a single uniform record (trigger, propagation, detection, blast radius, mitigation, recovery) that feeds the availability model in Chapter 12.5 and the cyber-physical analysis in Chapter 11.10 from one consistent source of truth.

A design that is correct in Ashburn is non-compliant, mis-cooled, and under-powered in Frankfurt, Mumbai, Riyadh, or Singapore — because frequency, voltage class, earthing regime, code family, grid character, water law, and climate envelope all shift across borders, and each shift quietly re-decides choices you thought you had already made in Parts 3 through 6.