Summary
- Limerick-based DECI is opening a Chicago office and adding 250 jobs, with most positions expected in the US.
- The company is already working on large US data-centre projects through commissioning and testing services.
- The expansion follows growing demand for specialist engineering during the handover of increasingly complex facilities.
Irish engineering and commissioning specialist DECI is opening its first US office in Chicago and adding 250 jobs as it expands its work on large data-centre projects.
The Limerick-headquartered company said most of the new positions are expected to be created in the US, where it is already supporting a number of large data-centre developments.
The Chicago base will support engineers and project managers working in the market and put DECI closer to clients, suppliers, and construction teams.
The company provides commissioning, testing, project management, quality services, and tracking documentation for complex projects. Its work sits towards the end of the delivery chain, when installed systems have to be shown to perform as designed before a facility is handed over for operation.
DECI managing director Colm Phelan said the office would strengthen the company’s ability to deliver “rigorous CxA commissioning and testing that mission-critical projects demand”.
Commissioning becomes more demanding as data-centre electrical loads, cooling systems, controls, and construction programmes grow in scale.
The work extends beyond checking whether individual pieces of equipment switch on. Electrical systems have to be tested through failure and transfer scenarios, mechanical plant needs to respond correctly to changing conditions, controls have to coordinate equipment, and documentation must establish that the installed facility matches its design intent.
Integrated testing is particularly important in facilities built around redundant systems. A data centre may have multiple UPS modules, generators, cooling trains, pumps, switchboards, and control paths, but resilience depends on how they behave together when components fail or maintenance takes equipment out of service.
Finding a fault before live IT load arrives is materially easier than discovering it after customer equipment has entered the building.
High-density computing increases the pressure on that process. Liquid cooling, larger electrical blocks, dense network fabrics, and accelerated deployment programmes can add new interfaces between IT equipment and facility infrastructure while reducing the time available to identify problems before handover.
That creates demand for specialist commissioning personnel at the same time as major data-centre construction markets compete for experienced electrical and mechanical engineers.
DECI’s US expansion is therefore part of the labour and supply-chain story behind the current capacity cycle. Large campuses need not only developers, contractors, generators, cooling equipment, and switchgear, but technical teams capable of proving that those systems will work together under live operating conditions.
The Chicago office joins DECI locations in Ireland and several European markets. The company was founded in 1994 and works across data centres, life sciences, energy generation, and industrial infrastructure.
The move also shows European mission-critical engineering capability following customers into the North American construction market. DECI is not entering the US solely to prospect for future projects; it already has personnel working on large data centres there.
As campuses are delivered in multiple phases, commissioning programmes can themselves become multi-year exercises. Shared electrical or mechanical infrastructure may serve several buildings, while individual halls reach operational readiness on different dates.
That requires testing both at equipment level and across the wider campus as new capacity is added.
DECI’s planned recruitment puts that work alongside the larger capital flows into data-centre construction. The company’s expansion is being driven not by owning compute capacity, but by the engineering effort required to demonstrate that increasingly complex facilities are ready to carry it.
