1. Why the Architect Is Involved Early
A sovereign AI appliance is a small amount of equipment with large consequences for a building. It needs a room, a dedicated supply of power, a path for heat, acoustic care and a controlled door. Each of those is cheap to include in a design and expensive to add to a finished building.
The client may not mention the appliance until after the plans are fixed. That is the moment the lack of a room, a circuit or a heat path becomes a problem, so raising it at the briefing stage serves everyone.
2. What to Ask the Client
- Which SARION tier is intended, or is it undecided?
- Where does the client expect to use the assistant: a study, a boardroom, a primary suite, a yacht?
- How many people will use it, and will they need separate private instances?
- Is continuity critical? Does the client need two independent nodes?
- Will it be reached remotely, or kept physically isolated?
- Are there second properties or a vessel where a replica may run?
The answers decide most of the rest.
3. What to Ask Us
We hold the site requirements for each tier. Request them for the tier in question. The briefing below sets out the categories they cover, and the engineering team will provide the figures for a specific installation.
4. The Room
- Choose a low-traffic room away from sleeping spaces. Silence and discretion are both easier there.
- Treat it as a controlled space. A lockable door, named access and no glazing to the outside.
- Plan service access. Technicians should reach the equipment without crossing private rooms.
- Check structure. Dense compute concentrates load. Confirm floor loading with the structural engineer.
- Keep it separate from the household. The room should not double as storage, a utility corridor or a guest route.
5. Power
- Dedicated circuits. The appliance should not share a circuit with other loads. As a reference, each SARION Sovereign node draws roughly 850 to 900 W under sustained load and requires its own independent, dedicated circuit.
- Two independent circuits for Sovereign. The two nodes sit on separate circuits, each with its own UPS, which ships with the system.
- Conditioned supply and UPS. Specify to the performance and test requirements of IEC 62040-3.
- Generator changeover. If the property has a standby generator, check how the appliance behaves during the transition.
- Higher tiers. SARION Monarch requires institutional-scale power and is a separate conversation. See our briefing on the Monaco option for clients whose buildings cannot host it.
6. Heat and Acoustics
- Calculate the continuous heat load and agree where the heat goes with the building services engineer.
- Do not trap it. An enclosure without a rejection path warms the equipment inside it.
- Treat acoustics at the room level. Place the appliance away from shared walls, decouple it from the structure and keep acoustic treatment clear of the heat path.
- Remember the cooling design. The range uses closed-circuit liquid cooling for quiet thermal exchange in private residences and yacht interiors. Quiet equipment still needs a sensible place.
7. Network and Security
- Keep the AI network separate from household, staff and guest networks.
- Decide on isolation. Confidant and Regent carry a physical, manual mechanism for isolating the network interface. Decide who holds control of it and when it is used.
- Plan for remote access deliberately, if the client wants it, with a policy for approved devices and lost-device response.
- Avoid casual cabling. No uncontrolled network drops into the room.
8. Drawings and Specification Checklist
- Equipment room identified on plans, with access route and door type.
- Structural loading confirmed.
- Dedicated circuits scheduled, two independent circuits if Sovereign.
- UPS specified to IEC 62040-3 performance requirements.
- Heat load calculated and rejection path shown.
- Acoustic treatment and resilient mounting detailed.
- Network separation and any remote-access path documented.
- Named-access and key policy agreed with the client.
- Second-site or vessel needs identified.
9. When to Involve Us
Early. A call at concept stage costs little. A call after first fix costs more. Send us the intended tier, the room options and the site constraints, and we will respond with the engineering requirements.
To start, contact our engineering team at volta.quest.