Low-slung data centers look to the sky
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Data centers’ squat, industrial aesthetic is getting a vertical and visual upgrade, driven by artificial intelligence-fueled demands for computing power, as well as geographic necessity. A movement of data centers from the boonies to the burgs has led operators to reconsider the windowless, prison-like look that has defined data-center design for decades, resulting in projects 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-center 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-center 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. Equinix also began using acoustic sensors this year to track pollinators like bees, helping it better select foliage, according to Donohoe. “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-center construction in the first half of this year, according to real-estate firm CBRE. And overall construction of data centers is up more than sevenfold in just two years, says commercial property giant JLL. The traditional data center evokes images of sprawl—vast, one-story server farms set on thousands of acres of rural land.
Read more on livemint.com
