SOM designs 20-story vertical data center in downtown Kansas City to tackle suburban sprawl — but 18 floors are reserved just for power and cooling | Daily Reports Online
- Kansas City developer proposes 20-story data center on only 0.23 acres
- Only two floors of Revitalization Unlimited’s 20-story tower would house servers
- The vertical data center would cost $183 million — $1,300 per square foot
Recent research from real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield claims the average data center land transaction covers 224 acres, pushing many projects away from urban centers toward larger sites.
Revitalization Unlimited has a different idea: instead of spreading facilities across larger cities, why not build upward within the city?
The developer has proposed a 20-story facility in central Kansas City that would concentrate computing equipment and supporting infrastructure on approximately 0.23 acres.
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Power and cooling take most of the space
The proposed tower would provide 24 MW of IT capacity, but only two of its 20 levels would contain computing equipment; 18 floors accommodate power and cooling.
Approximately 109,000 square feet of the building’s 141,000 gross square feet would instead accommodate mechanical systems and related infrastructure.
This arrangement could provide dense connectivity while avoiding the land requirements associated with conventional suburban campuses.
Revitalization Unlimited argues that the vertical data center is important because some computing workloads benefit from being physically closer to users and networks.
“We are not arguing that every data center belongs downtown. We are arguing this one does, and we are paying a construction premium to prove it,” says Steve Austin, founder and CEO of Revitalization Unlimited.
For some inference services, shorter distances between computing resources and users can reduce delays during interactions requiring rapid responses.
Financial trading can also justify exceptionally close network locations because tiny timing differences can matter.
“It is not uncommon for stock traders to seek addresses closest to the actual stock exchange servers where transactions are processed in order to gain a few fractions of a second in any given transaction,” Luis Fernandes, IDC senior research manager.
Generally, finance, telecommunications, content delivery, and inference are workloads that could potentially make dense urban sites useful.
Large AI training operations, however, generally require substantial land and electricity, making conventional sites more suitable for those deployments.
Higher construction costs test the urban case
The total development cost for this project is $183 million, equivalent to about $1,300 per square foot, exceeding typical suburban construction economics.
Mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection systems would account for about $107 million of the estimated $167 million in hard construction costs.
The facility would seek a PUE of 1.25 and rely on 30 MW of Bloom fuel cells for primary power generation.
Natural gas would form part of the operating expense, meaning onsite generation would not eliminate fuel consumption or related environmental considerations.
Cooling would also involve evaporative equipment, complicating descriptions suggesting that water use could be eliminated through a closed-loop arrangement.
Vertical construction can create difficulties involving equipment weight, elevator capacity, and crane access.
This could increase the overall construction cost and also complicate replacement logistics during future maintenance work.
The vertical data center, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM), remains subject to approval, with a related development ordinance currently listed as pending until October 13 2026.
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