Data centres’ squat and industrial aesthetics are getting a vertical and visual upgrade, driven by artificial intelligence-fueled demands for computing power and geographic necessity.
A movement of data centres from the boonies to the burgs has led operators to reconsider the windowless, prison-like look that has defined data centre design for decades, resulting in projects that are more pleasing to the eye from street level.
Buildings of two stories or more are becoming more common, as urban and suburban builders don’t have the land to spread out, or don’t want to pay the higher costs of doing so.
“Data centre footprints are continuing to expand, and if you can’t go outwards, sometimes you have to go upwards,” said Stephen Donohoe, vice president of global data centre design at Equinix.
The company has properties that rise eight, nine and 10 stories high in cities across the globe—plus its tallest, a 12-story building in Amsterdam. Some of its facilities have slick facades, exterior “green walls” of plants, or rooftop greenhouses powered by excess heat. According to Donohoe, Equinix also began using acoustic sensors this year to track pollinators like bees, helping it better select foliage.
“They can’t just be big boxes anymore,” he said.
Meeting the AI boom’s exponentially greater power demands is among the factors that fed record-high data centre construction in the first half of this year, according to real estate firm CBRE. Overall, data center construction is up more than sevenfold in just two years, says commercial property giant JLL.
High-rise, high cost
The traditional data centre evokes images of sprawl—vast, one-story server farms set on thousands of acres of rural land. That’s the design developers have carefully refined over the past few decades to optimize their “cost per megawatt,” said Raul Martynek, chief executive of data centre operator DataBank.
“Ideally, the best scenario is an industrial warehouse building, single-story,” Martynek said. “When you go up, you introduce certain cost elements.”
He said those additional costs include more copper piping to extend from the data centre floor to the generator yard and less roof space for equipment like chillers. Plus, urban land and power are just more expensive.
Yet building taller in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and San Francisco has allowed data centre operators to keep their services close to the areas they serve, said Dan Drennan, a principal and data centre sector leader at design firm Corgan.
Closer data centres mean faster connections and lower lag time for city dwellers and local companies—especially for uses like internet-connected devices—and it’s easier to find workers to staff the facilities.
Skyscrapers? Not just yet.
Compared with the U.S., international data centre hubs in denser regions have more and taller multistory buildings, which the industry generally defines as more than two stories.
Singapore, for instance, is home to an 11-story Meta Platforms data centre campus, while tightly packed Hong Kong boasts the 30-story iAdvantage data centre. Drennan said land constraints have forced data centre designers to “be more creative” in choosing which mechanical and cooling systems to use and how to stack them.
Sabey Data Centres added several floors of servers to a 1970s-era 32-story high-rise, formerly the Verizon Building. PHOTO: SABEY DATA CENTERS
As long as there are still large tracts of land to build on elsewhere, data centres over ten stories aren’t likely coming to the U.S. anytime soon, according to Brett Rogers, chief development officer of data-centre provider EdgeCore.
However, some tall data centres—typically retrofitted older buildings—predate their sprawling rural cousins in New York and Chicago. In 2011, Sabey Data Centres put several floors of servers in a 1970s-era 32-story high-rise, formerly the Verizon Building, in Manhattan’s financial district. In Chicago’s South Loop, an eight-story Digital Realty data centre was originally built as a printing press around 1912.
But even mid-rise urban data centres need a makeover to blend with the cityscape. “Local engagement is something that we just don’t have that luxury of not having anymore,” Donohoe said.
A sketch of IMD1 Metro Edge Data Centre in Chicago ILLUSTRATION: CORGAN
A five-story data center designed by Corgan for commercial real-estate firm Metro Edge on the West side of Chicago will incorporate metal panels, bricks and glazing, the design firm said, and trees and planter beds will surround its perimeter.
A suburban boom
Over the past two years, suburban areas have started to see growth in multistory data centres, too.
Suburbs near Chicago, such as Elk Grove and Franklin Park, are running out of land for data centres, said Andy Cvengros, a managing director and co-lead of JLL’s U.S. data centre markets group. Data centres in Dallas and Atlanta are also pushing out into the burbs.
In those areas near Chicago, land prices have nearly tripled over the past 36 months, and “you’re butting up against residential, golf courses, highways, airports,” Cvengros said. Add on the cost of power—especially if a utility provider needs to build a substation on-site—and “you’ve got to go vertical to make sense of those numbers,” he said.
By Belle Lin – Published by The Wall Street Journal – https://www.wsj.com/articles/low-slung-data-centers-look-to-the-sky-66f6c481 – Republished with thanks
