Inside the Race to Build—and Power—the World’s Largest Data Centers 

Ground investigation is often seen as a project cost, not the critical insurance policy it truly is, says Carl Grice, who leads geotechnical data management at Seequent. “Having a good understanding of the underground is how you de-risk your project, and that starts with good data,” he says.

Site investigation data—such as boreholes, core photos, field tests, and lab results—needs to be captured, quality-checked, and instantly made available across disciplines. Everyone involved in the design process should be working from the same trusted ground model.

This is where OpenGround comes in. Seequent’s cloud platform for subsurface data management, OpenGround tracks every site test, sample, and lab result, showing exactly which boreholes informed which models and which analyses were run using them. This transparency is essential for collaboration, accountability, and learning—especially on multi-year projects.

But good data doesn’t only come from today’s investigations. The industry is waking up to the untapped value locked in decades of legacy records. “There’s a frenzy of activity across the industry,” Grice says, “to extract information from historic ground investigation reports—sometimes stored in boxes and boxes of paper.”

When done right, the payoff is substantial. For example, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers recently used OpenGround to centralize its historical ground investigation data from 8,600 sites across the U.S., including boreholes, lab results, and cone penetration testing data. That’s roughly 2.5 million meters of exploration. The Corps now has a half-billion-dollar data asset that will enable future savings from more targeted drilling and data reuse.