Data center steel installation on a single-level roof gantry
Frankfurt am Main is Europe’s busiest interconnection market. DE-CIX, the exchange at the centre of it, peaks above 18 terabits per second and reaches more than thirty data centres in the region. That demand is what keeps steel packages running around the city. FRA24-1 is Metal KLS’s third.
FRA24-1 is a hyperscale build, still in construction. The building measures 80 m by 167 m — a footprint of roughly 13,360 m². Above the main roof sits a single-level gantry carrying the cooling plant and the walkways that serve it. Several steel crews worked the site. Metal KLS erected about a third of that gantry, and the access steelwork through the building.
The package
A foreman-led steel erection crew of four mobilised in week 38 of 2024 and finished on 9 May 2025. Winthrop Technologies ran the project. Metal KLS worked via another subcontractor.
- Main and secondary structure to roughly a third of the single-level roof gantry
- Facade steelwork to the gantry, handed over ready for another subcontractor’s panels
- External staircases with guardrails, and handrails to the building interior
- Walkway gratings across the gantry deck
- The crew slung every lift itself and provided its own banksman to the crane
Two things this package was not. Metal KLS did not hang the facade panels — the crew erected the steel they fix to. And the gantry was not one crew’s job. Other crews took the rest of it, and this was one share.
Two working seasons, 26 weeks
Metal KLS came off site the week before Christmas 2024 and remobilised in week 8 of 2025. Eight weeks with no crew on the roof, and none on the invoice.
So the calendar runs about 33 weeks. The crew worked 26 of them — fourteen in 2024, twelve in 2025.
That distinction matters if you read crew size against duration. Four men for 26 weeks is about 104 man-weeks. Read against the elapsed calendar it looks like 132, and the productivity looks worse than it was by about a fifth.
Across both seasons the headcount held at four. Metal KLS rotated men through leave rather than shrinking the crew. So the foreman had four pairs of hands every week the team was on site, in February as in September.
Re-sequencing rather than waiting
A footprint this size changes how a steel crew works.
On a small platform the sequence is rigid. FR11x is the example: three grated levels on a 53 m by 46 m deck, each one waiting on the trade above or below it. There, a grating crew sits permanently behind two trades.
Here there was always somewhere else to go. Once the crew erected and grated a section of gantry, the following trades moved onto it. The crew moved to the next phase of its own works — facade steel, staircases, handrails inside the building. Then it came back.
That is the practical case for a supervised installation team on a long package. A foreman who can re-sequence his own men keeps four of them productive without a variation every time the programme shifts. On a fixed-scope subcontract, the same programme change is a claim.
All gantry material came over the top by crane. The crew ran its own lifting duties — slinging the bundles, banksman to the crane. On a deck that other trades are waiting to walk on, that control is what stops you moving a delivery twice.
Outcome
- About a third of the roof gantry erected, grated and handed over across two working seasons
- Four men on site throughout the main intervention, the headcount held through rotation rather than reduced
- Twenty-six worked weeks with no lost-time incidents
FRA24-1 followed Metal KLS’s two Frankfurt packages for Equinix — FR11x in 2022, and FR10 in 2023–24. Further data center packages are running elsewhere around Frankfurt am Main.
