Run AI on your own metal.
Praecise builds the software and infrastructure to operate AI on bare metal you own — measurement, placement, power and thermal control, forecasting, connectivity and cost. The operating capability that otherwise takes years to build, so the hardware you bought does the work you bought it for. The software is Praecise Furcate, built on the open Furcate OS.
A declared power multiplier, wrong by this much against draw read at the supply.
basis · measuredCarbon understated by a national generation average where consumption was the figure that counted.
basis · computed from measuredDrawn by two always-on machines at idle, before a single request arrives.
basis · measuredReported by a site with no facility meter. The answer is unaccounted.
basis · not measured
01
Owning AI compute is one thing. Operating it is another — and that is what takes years.
The hardware can be bought and the building can be built. What does not arrive with them is the software and the operational expertise to run the thing — measurement, placement, power and thermal control, forecasting, and the discipline that keeps the figures defensible. Built from scratch, that is years.
Praecise is that operating capability. It is for operators putting AI on their own hardware — from a first cluster to infrastructure at scale — who hold the metal but not yet the software or the expertise to run it, and cannot wait years to acquire both.
The hardware is the easy part
Racks, accelerators, power and cooling can be bought. The software that turns them into an operated system does not come in the crate.
Bought in weeks; built in years.
At scale, without the catch-up
For those with the mandate and the hardware to stand up AI compute at scale, but not the operating software or the expertise, and no years to spend building it.
The capability, delivered.
Measured, not modelled
Every figure a Praecise site reports is read from an instrument on the machine, not inferred from a spec sheet. That is where operating it well begins.
The denominator is real.
02
Optimising a number nobody has read is theatre.
Most efficiency work starts with a model of a site. We start with an instrument on it. The gap between the two is not a rounding error: on the first fleet we instrumented, the declared multiplier used to convert processor draw into wall draw was wrong by between four and nine times, in a direction that flattered the report.
Processor counters are free and cover the package. They do not cover disks, fans, conversion loss or anything else in the chassis. A metered PDU or a UPS with power reporting is the highest-value hardware on an efficiency programme, because without it the denominator is a guess and every percentage above it is a guess too.
What the reading changed
The headline technique in this field is a controller that arbitrates a workload against a power cap. It wins where the cap binds. Here the cap sits at 140 W and the workload peaks near 30 W, so there is nothing to arbitrate. What binds is idle. Porting the fashionable controller would have solved a problem the hardware does not have.
03
Software and infrastructure design, in the same practice.
The reason these sit together is that most efficiency lives in the seam between them. A control loop is only as good as the meter it reads, and a meter is only worth installing if something acts on it.
Telemetry
Draw, temperature, airflow and utilisation read at the supply and at the device, with a privileged reader kept small so the agent stays unprivileged.
Per-process attribution that makes waste visible.
Forecasting
Quantile forecasts of load, draw and occupancy, backtested on the site's own data and scored before they are trusted.
Decisions that account for the next six hours rather than the last reading.
Placement
Consolidation, suspend and resume across real failure domains, with the wake cost priced against the idle saved.
Fewer machines awake, and none of them the wrong ones.
Power control
Performance ceilings and turbo state rather than blunt governor changes, tuned to shave peak draw without a cliff.
Demand charges cut without stretching the work.
Thermal and cooling
Headroom per domain, fan work as a measured cost, and cooling strategy chosen against the site's climate rather than a default.
Lower overhead, and a water figure that holds up.
Carbon and tariff
Deferrable work moved to the hours that are actually cheaper or cleaner, and left alone where the spread does not justify it.
Shifting only where shifting pays.
Connectivity
Operator-owned fabric, routing and reach designed so bandwidth cost and latency are properties you set rather than inherit.
Egress that is a line item you control.
Reporting
The indicators regulators now require, produced from the same instruments the control loop reads.
One set of numbers, used for operating and for filing.
Site design
Layout, power distribution, failure domains and growth increments for new sites and retrofits, sized to the building that exists.
Capacity added in steps a site can actually take.
04
Own everything in one view. Control stays where the machines are.
One operator can own core clusters in a hall and edge cells in a home, a business or a city. Praecise Metal is the operator's full view of all of it: inventory, health, power and cost, for every machine and every cell, read from the operator's own chain of keys. It reads ownership. It never reaches into a cell to control it.
A cell is a complete cluster with its own head and its own control, and it keeps running when its link is cut. Cells nest, so a city cell can hold district and business cells, each still in charge of itself. A cell and the people who manage it see that cell and the cells inside it, never the rest of the infrastructure, and the machines enforce that scope rather than the screen. The same holds for anyone whose cell sits on Praecise.
Core clusters
The machines that carry the heavy work, measured and operated as described on this page.
Placement, power and cost, end to end.
Edge cells
A gateway at the head, leaves at the sensors and machines, edge AI where the cameras are, each holding its key in hardware.
A home, a shop or a plant that runs itself.
Nested
Cells inside cells, at home, business and city scale. Ownership rolls up; control stays local at every level.
One owner, any number of places.
Scoped
A cell knows only its own controller. Upward it sends summaries, never its raw state.
Managing a cell exposes nothing else.
Where this stands
The first edge cell runs today: its gateway holds a key in its own silicon, and its controller holds the cell's authority in a TPM. Nested cells, scoped managers and cell roll-ups in the ownership view are coming, built on Praecise Furcate cells.
05
An instrument that guesses is worse than no instrument.
Every system we build returns nothing where it does not know, and says which kind of nothing it is. This is the single most valuable property in the whole practice, because a plausible wrong number propagates into a decision and an absent one does not.
- pue_is_reportable
A site with no facility meter upstream of the IT load cannot compute a PUE.
Records the overhead as unaccounted. A published 1.0 claims the overhead was measured and was nil.
- consumption_intensity
Where imports are material and their origin is undeclared, no carbon intensity is returned.
Treating unknown imports as zero-carbon is how a coal-backed third of a grid disappears from a report while every arithmetic step stays correct.
- shifting_pays
Below a 25 per cent spread between cheap and peak hours, deferral is refused.
Returns nothing to gain rather than picking an arbitrary best slot. A scheduler that always defers looks like a bug to whoever is waiting.
- price
A minute not covered by any tariff period is not priced.
Charging zero for uncovered hours makes them the cheapest of the day and quietly attracts every deferrable job on the site.
- water
On-site and source water are carried separately and never summed.
A closed-loop site is a structural zero on-site and can still sit a long way down the table on the water its power consumed.
- no rating
An undeclared limit draws no bar.
No denominator is not zero headroom. A full meter and an empty one are both claims about a machine nobody measured.
06
The cleanest grid is not the cleanest place to compute.
A site we instrumented sits on a grid generating almost entirely from hydro, around 25 gCO₂eq/kWh, one of the three lowest production intensities in the world. Every instinct says a rack there is about as clean as computing gets.
The answer is on the import meter. About a third of that grid's consumption is imported, across interconnectors from the most coal-dependent grids nearby. Consumption intensity comes out at 203 gCO₂eq/kWh. The standard behind the software carbon intensity metric is location-based by design. It asks what the wire carried, and will not take a national generation average instead.
The gap widens in exactly the wrong season. When reservoirs are low the grid imports more, and it competes for those imports when the neighbouring grids are short and the marginal generator is coal. A system with the clean figure hard-coded reports its best numbers during the worst weeks.
07
Every power decision was already a forecast with a horizon of zero.
Whether to consolidate depends on whether load is about to return. Whether to shed depends on how long the supply will last. Whether to defer depends on what the next six hours cost. All three were being answered from the present reading.
Quantiles, not points
Provisioning to an expected value under-provisions half the time by construction. The planner sizes against the upper path, and crossing quantiles are detected rather than planned against.
Intervals come from each method's own residuals, because load floors at idle and spikes upward.
The model earns its place
A foundation model never simply replaces the baseline. Both run, both are backtested on rolling held-out windows of the site's own data, and the model is used only while it is measurably ahead.
A 10 per cent margin to be adopted, and merely not losing to be kept.
Scored for the decision
Scale-free error for the median, so watts and occupancy counts are comparable. Pinball loss for the quantiles, which punishes overshooting and undershooting differently, the way a planner's exposure does.
A better median with worse quantiles is refused outright.
Eight windows minimum
One window is an anecdote. Swapping the forecaster on an anecdote is how noise becomes policy.
An idle fleet at 08:50 on a working day is idle in a way that is about to stop being true.
08
The numbers you file should be the numbers you run on.
Data centres at or above 500 kW of IT power increasingly report annually on energy performance and sustainability indicators. Rating schemes and minimum performance standards are following, with carbon-neutral targets for the sector.
Most operators answer this with a reporting exercise bolted on once a year. We instrument the site so the same readings drive the control loop and populate the return. That costs less and goes wrong less often.
| Indicator | What it measures | What it needs on site |
|---|---|---|
| PUE | Total facility energy over IT energy | a facility meter upstream of the IT load |
| WUE | Litres consumed per kWh of IT energy | make-up water metering, or a declared closed loop |
| ERF | Energy reused rather than rejected | heat offtake metering at the boundary |
| REF | Renewable share of energy consumed | supply contract and grid mix, consumption-based |
Where a figure cannot be produced
We install the instrument or we report the indicator as unaccounted. We do not estimate one into existence, because an estimate filed once becomes a baseline everything afterwards is measured against.
09
Four ways in, and the first one is always measurement.
Survey
We instrument what you have and report what it draws, what that costs, what it emits and which figures cannot yet be produced.
Ends with a metered baseline you own.
Programme
Efficiency levers priced individually against that baseline, applied in order of return, each one reversible.
Ends with the saving measured, not modelled.
Software
Control loops, forecasting, placement, telemetry and reporting built into your operations rather than sold as a dashboard, on Praecise Furcate.
Ends with the site operating itself.
Design
New sites and retrofits: layout, power distribution, failure domains, cooling strategy and growth increments.
Ends with a site that can be added to.