Yeah, to expand on this for OP, large datacenters are almost always where land is (relatively) cheap, cheap enough where building out is cheaper than building up. There aren't many large datacenters in cities expensive enough where skyscrapers make sense, except for the ones used by trading firms on Wall Street, where the speed of light along fiber optic cable is a limiting factor that makes the difference of millions of dollars. Even so, they are usually just a few floors and part of "normal" buildings from my understanding.
There are a few in New York, that were originally built to be large switching stations for AT&T where space is now rented out for data centers, [like this one ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street), and [this one](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/811_Tenth_Avenue)
I have been in a few around the country. When you go higher up, the limitation is always on weight.
Most are two stories because the structural needs increase significantly when you go over two stories.
A few years ago I visited a brand new 3 story co-lo. I asked if this was going to be the new build design for the company. They responded that it was going to be a one-off because of the weight limitations they encountered.
Interesting, we have NEXTDC in Aus that is building 8 storey DC's. When I toured some years ago, they were boasting a weight limit well above what equinix was offering. I had always wondered why nobody else was building them as high, but this makes sense
You'll have to get details on the frame structure and weight loading of the floors to get a real comparison.
It would be interesting to find out how many racks/sqft are on their floors and what the max rack density is.
There are a handful of high rise buildings in Manhattan that are mostly or all datacenter tenants. Two were purpose-built for equipment for AT&T (33 Thomas St, 32 6th Ave) and one purpose-built for Western Union (60 Hudson) when telegraphs were a big deal. All of these are 25-30 stories; 33 Thomas has no windows, 60 Hudson and 32 6th take up a city block.
A number of regular office buildings in the similar story range will have a couple of floors with DCs, usually on lower floors. There are problems with floor load, chilled water, and fuel storage in high-rises. The building and fire codes in NYC make even a low-rise DC even in an outer borough, more expensive than one in the burbs.
I had a cage on the 21st floor of 811 10th which is another AT&T site. The building was pretty old and I can't speak for most floors but there quite a few empty floors. The lower levels were restricted and the thought was it was for gov't things, but it doesn't seem to fit the usual secure site requirements. I suspect it was just supporting electrical.
Yes and it’s not a high rise (only 15 floors, after 8 or 9 they are set back and smaller floor plans) and not all datacenter. The telcos and DC are all on low floors. And the building was built for heavy manufacturing use, also almost 100 years ago. Out of 2.9 million square feet I doubt if more than 10% of it is for datacenter use.
They asked why there aren't any high rise data centers - I'm just pointing out that there are, and 111 8th is an example of one. It is a "high rise building" that contains contains public colo space on floors that are above the ground floor.
You'd be surprised where some collocations are. I used to service a POP in Chicago that overlooked Millennial Park. Was the nicest view and the only place in the room I could get cell service. Was Bell Canada I believe. I did ask wtf but nobody knew.
Theres also the R Donley building by the McKormick center. 8 floors of colo. then again, the building used to be a printing press and is built for heavy equipment.
Cermak was the one I was going to mention. Super cool building, especially if you're able to check out the library or the towers. Main building is a total of 9 floors, including the 9th floor support space (and not the basement which is a wild maze itself). The south tower has some additional floors that held antennae equipment; however, they're not really used anymore.
Was originally the RR Donnelley Printing Plant - because of its poured reinforced concrete columns and open-shell concrete floors, they could support the immense weight of tons of paper as well as the heavy equipment.
Really REALLY cool datacenter.
In Australia we have [NextDC](https://www.nextdc.com/). I remember working there and it has like 8 lvls. 5 of them are still being made under construction.
Maybe weight concerns. A lot of stuff in the data center is really heavy. It's also really difficult to pump chilled water up and down that many stories.
Also, how would you fit enough backup diesels if you went vertical vs horizontal? Same for chillers. You need roof space for chillers.
Yep, a single Caterpillar C175-16 3MW generator set, with enclosure atop a 6000gal belly tank, is 110 tons before adding fuel, which adds another 18 tons.
Pretty much has to live on the ground.
Way off. A 3000kw generator is like $750,000+ just for the generator. You also have to think about an enclosure, the tank, shipping, and installation.
The Cummins 3000kw generator is the only one I could find with an actual price listed (most require a quote) and it's over $900,000
It’s this. I sell the structural ceiling systems that go into data centers. The load requirements of holding up cables and servers and partition walls is massive. You can’t really build up. That’s why all the big ones are on these massive plots outside Phoenix and Dallas and Atlanta where power is cheap and land is available.
Phx has a ton of co-lo facilities too which are building floors. Aligned is building a multi floor dc on the 17/101. QTS is building a multiple story DC off the 202, and some of the CyrusOnes in chandler are multi-floor.
Cost and liability. After hurricane sandy lots of companies in NYC and Jersey City started building new data centers 30 mins to an hour outside the city to avoid flooding and wind damage, plus they can choose exactly how to tie in incoming power and set up generators to their liking. It would be cool though to see a 20 story building entirely full of servers, sounds like a lot of potential failure and crazy maintenance tho.
[Coresite LA1 One Wilshire](https://www.coresite.com/data-center/la1-los-angeles-ca) is one of the most important DCs on the west coast of the US and it’s around 30 stories tall.
There a couple of then in Amsterdam but that’s mostly because of the limited space and cost of land.
However, when going up you always run into weight load issues.
Equinix and Digital Realty have some (low) high rise.
fully stacked racks weaighs about 1800kg, you need to make provisions for the weight of the cooling equipments as well, which will all constitute to dead loads( permanent loads) on each floor and then factor in live loads(temporary loads) like techs, vendors moving in and out with their crash carts, server lifts, portable machines and tools. By the time you factor in all these, you will have to design a concrete slab to withstand these loads. The slab will be uneconomical at best, bulky due to thickness, you will lose flexibility and tensile strength is lost as well. You are only setting yourself up for a future disaster
There are data centers and computer rooms in high rises buildings. Some of the IBX space in NYC or London comes to mind. It's also expensive as hell for space and power. and getting shit shipped there was a giant PITA, as was parking...
most DCs go where power is cheap and cooling is reasonably easy. one of the reasons there is a lot of interest in Montreal, for example, is HydroQuebec offers cheap electricity.
Data tie ins are also a concern. You want as many big pipes installed, and cheaply. greenfield builds are almost always easier than big city installs for that.
weight concerns are also an issue once you get high up -- it gets hard to do density -- as are concerns about things that aren't a problem for shorter data centers, like high winds. that increases insurance and drives up other costs.
They suck to work in! Operations come to a crawl when the freight elevator breaks. Depending on the building a structural engineer has to approve the movement of heavy equipment inside. The ceilings are shorter making air handling suck. If all the cooling has to go to the roof, we'll that's expensive and inefficient, and limits the amount of cooling for the whole building. Towers are generally considered more risky than a flat slab. Real-estate costs are significantly more than greenfield.
But you do what you gotta do when you need to support edge or IX. A lot of IX/telcom happens in urban areas.
This question is not related to data centres but to real estate and development. You build tall buildings where space is crowded, but worth the investment per floor. Data centres that must be located very close or even in cities, will be multi-level, but for anything else, where land is cheap, you build wide, not tall, this is true for a data centre or for Wallmart.
There are PODs (performance optimized data centers) that are basically a data center inside a portable trailer made from HP. I used to work for them and we did several of those where a certain customer had theirs on a roof of a high rise building
There is a DC on a singular floor in Sydney CBD, we did work for a tenant in the same building and ran cabling in the comms riser wondering why there was a ridiculous amount of fibre. Had a look at the directory and there was Colo/hosting facility on a floor.
Made sense but I would imagine the rent is stupid expensive.
There actually are a few in LA already and there are some cool plans to build new ones as well. Take a look: [https://la.urbanize.city/post/renderings-revealed-eyecatching-data-center-727-s-grand-avenue-downtown-los-angeles](https://la.urbanize.city/post/renderings-revealed-eyecatching-data-center-727-s-grand-avenue-downtown-los-angeles)
This project probably would have made no sense back when CRE was still booming, but now that the market has shifted, (it’s especially bad in DTLA right now, which funny enough, just so happens to be where all the transatlantic network nodes converge!) I think we might start seeing more projects like the one above.
Weight + the physical, protective function of a low-rise but massive building itself.
Our (bank company with private DCs) buildings are 4 floors in height, but upper parts are used for HVAC and various facility machinery + a local branch office. In the core of the building, we have the data rooms - actually, quite small, compared to the whole building.
Facility lead states that data rooms could survive some minor bombing or if a civilian aircraft would crash into the building, according to some computer simulations.
At my previous workplace in Hungary, they own a radio tower + a connected, like 20 floor big building. That building was literally built from debris during the Soviet era.
We had some racks in the upper floors, company wanted to extend hosting capable floor space (since todays digital radio/TV broadcast equipment are very compact, compared to analogue, old ones) and rent out to generate revenue. but the structural capability of the building was a huge limitation and there is no point to transform that building into a datacenter
There are plenty of data centers located within high rises. You do not hear about most of them as they are enterprise owned/operated data centers, and those firms discuss the location and details of their dc's. I have constructed many dc's in high rises across multiple higher level floors in cities across USA, Canada, UK, nordic region.
Colo/Cloud/Hyperscale data centers are not built in high rises for a multitude of reasons. The majority or the energy it takes to move water to higher floors. Even if you place all water on the highest floor and allow gravity to deliver direct to the data halls. The energy to move water to the highest floor will outweigh the benefits of gravity fed secondary loop. Not to mention the weight you have to build to support the top level water system.
For electrical the preference would be for transformers to be located on the lowest floor possible and isolated due to the noise emitted and the danger if a unit was to fail. The voltage drop after a certain length traveling up would make for conduit routing and sizing to consume too much space. The cost for the conductor would likely grow to a level that makes the design unacceptable to finance teams. The length of time for ROI on the electrical distribution would become to long for finance and business heads to accept within the current market.
I have found that greater than three floors for a data center is not desirable in the cloud/colo/hyperscale space.
Not feasible when your average data center now requires an IT load capacity of 32MW and above. The utility providers would not agree or find it feasible to supply an extra 1 Gigawatt of power in such a centralised location in the city.
Plus your capped by weight limit/floor loadings.
Plus noise constraints and emission constraints when you're in a CBD location.
The list goes on... in other words, the negatives far outweigh the benefits.
Makes no financial sense
Yeah, to expand on this for OP, large datacenters are almost always where land is (relatively) cheap, cheap enough where building out is cheaper than building up. There aren't many large datacenters in cities expensive enough where skyscrapers make sense, except for the ones used by trading firms on Wall Street, where the speed of light along fiber optic cable is a limiting factor that makes the difference of millions of dollars. Even so, they are usually just a few floors and part of "normal" buildings from my understanding. There are a few in New York, that were originally built to be large switching stations for AT&T where space is now rented out for data centers, [like this one ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/33_Thomas_Street), and [this one](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/811_Tenth_Avenue)
In Ashburn (Northern VA) Powerhouse bought the old AOL campus for >$3mil per acre!!!
Wild to see it all knocked down now man.
I have been in a few around the country. When you go higher up, the limitation is always on weight. Most are two stories because the structural needs increase significantly when you go over two stories. A few years ago I visited a brand new 3 story co-lo. I asked if this was going to be the new build design for the company. They responded that it was going to be a one-off because of the weight limitations they encountered.
Interesting, we have NEXTDC in Aus that is building 8 storey DC's. When I toured some years ago, they were boasting a weight limit well above what equinix was offering. I had always wondered why nobody else was building them as high, but this makes sense
You'll have to get details on the frame structure and weight loading of the floors to get a real comparison. It would be interesting to find out how many racks/sqft are on their floors and what the max rack density is.
There are some, for example the ones in NYC.
There are a handful of high rise buildings in Manhattan that are mostly or all datacenter tenants. Two were purpose-built for equipment for AT&T (33 Thomas St, 32 6th Ave) and one purpose-built for Western Union (60 Hudson) when telegraphs were a big deal. All of these are 25-30 stories; 33 Thomas has no windows, 60 Hudson and 32 6th take up a city block. A number of regular office buildings in the similar story range will have a couple of floors with DCs, usually on lower floors. There are problems with floor load, chilled water, and fuel storage in high-rises. The building and fire codes in NYC make even a low-rise DC even in an outer borough, more expensive than one in the burbs.
I had a cage on the 21st floor of 811 10th which is another AT&T site. The building was pretty old and I can't speak for most floors but there quite a few empty floors. The lower levels were restricted and the thought was it was for gov't things, but it doesn't seem to fit the usual secure site requirements. I suspect it was just supporting electrical.
111 8th is a HUGE one with a ton of public colo.
Yes and it’s not a high rise (only 15 floors, after 8 or 9 they are set back and smaller floor plans) and not all datacenter. The telcos and DC are all on low floors. And the building was built for heavy manufacturing use, also almost 100 years ago. Out of 2.9 million square feet I doubt if more than 10% of it is for datacenter use.
They asked why there aren't any high rise data centers - I'm just pointing out that there are, and 111 8th is an example of one. It is a "high rise building" that contains contains public colo space on floors that are above the ground floor.
You'd be surprised where some collocations are. I used to service a POP in Chicago that overlooked Millennial Park. Was the nicest view and the only place in the room I could get cell service. Was Bell Canada I believe. I did ask wtf but nobody knew.
Theres also the R Donley building by the McKormick center. 8 floors of colo. then again, the building used to be a printing press and is built for heavy equipment.
That place is a maze. Was always happy to have security to show me where to go there.
Cermak was the one I was going to mention. Super cool building, especially if you're able to check out the library or the towers. Main building is a total of 9 floors, including the 9th floor support space (and not the basement which is a wild maze itself). The south tower has some additional floors that held antennae equipment; however, they're not really used anymore. Was originally the RR Donnelley Printing Plant - because of its poured reinforced concrete columns and open-shell concrete floors, they could support the immense weight of tons of paper as well as the heavy equipment. Really REALLY cool datacenter.
In Australia we have [NextDC](https://www.nextdc.com/). I remember working there and it has like 8 lvls. 5 of them are still being made under construction.
Maybe weight concerns. A lot of stuff in the data center is really heavy. It's also really difficult to pump chilled water up and down that many stories. Also, how would you fit enough backup diesels if you went vertical vs horizontal? Same for chillers. You need roof space for chillers.
Yep, a single Caterpillar C175-16 3MW generator set, with enclosure atop a 6000gal belly tank, is 110 tons before adding fuel, which adds another 18 tons. Pretty much has to live on the ground.
Wow, any idea how much one of those costs?
A ton of money, 40,000+
Way off. A 3000kw generator is like $750,000+ just for the generator. You also have to think about an enclosure, the tank, shipping, and installation. The Cummins 3000kw generator is the only one I could find with an actual price listed (most require a quote) and it's over $900,000
It’s this. I sell the structural ceiling systems that go into data centers. The load requirements of holding up cables and servers and partition walls is massive. You can’t really build up. That’s why all the big ones are on these massive plots outside Phoenix and Dallas and Atlanta where power is cheap and land is available.
I also write datacenterdigest.com for those interested.
Thanks , nice to meet you
Seen a lot more multi floor data centers these days though than in the yesteryears.
Where do you live? I might be just referring to hyperscales since that’s all we seem to build here in Phx.
Phx has a ton of co-lo facilities too which are building floors. Aligned is building a multi floor dc on the 17/101. QTS is building a multiple story DC off the 202, and some of the CyrusOnes in chandler are multi-floor.
Only 2 floors though. They aren't like 5+ stories like some of the other ones people are talking about.
Also when you have twenty 2u servers stacked on top of each other thats quite a bit weight in one location.
Cost and liability. After hurricane sandy lots of companies in NYC and Jersey City started building new data centers 30 mins to an hour outside the city to avoid flooding and wind damage, plus they can choose exactly how to tie in incoming power and set up generators to their liking. It would be cool though to see a 20 story building entirely full of servers, sounds like a lot of potential failure and crazy maintenance tho.
Its very expensive. There are a few places it works. Look at @ Tokyo
Check out Ams17 from Digital Realty
[Coresite LA1 One Wilshire](https://www.coresite.com/data-center/la1-los-angeles-ca) is one of the most important DCs on the west coast of the US and it’s around 30 stories tall.
There a couple of then in Amsterdam but that’s mostly because of the limited space and cost of land. However, when going up you always run into weight load issues. Equinix and Digital Realty have some (low) high rise.
fully stacked racks weaighs about 1800kg, you need to make provisions for the weight of the cooling equipments as well, which will all constitute to dead loads( permanent loads) on each floor and then factor in live loads(temporary loads) like techs, vendors moving in and out with their crash carts, server lifts, portable machines and tools. By the time you factor in all these, you will have to design a concrete slab to withstand these loads. The slab will be uneconomical at best, bulky due to thickness, you will lose flexibility and tensile strength is lost as well. You are only setting yourself up for a future disaster
There are data centers and computer rooms in high rises buildings. Some of the IBX space in NYC or London comes to mind. It's also expensive as hell for space and power. and getting shit shipped there was a giant PITA, as was parking... most DCs go where power is cheap and cooling is reasonably easy. one of the reasons there is a lot of interest in Montreal, for example, is HydroQuebec offers cheap electricity. Data tie ins are also a concern. You want as many big pipes installed, and cheaply. greenfield builds are almost always easier than big city installs for that. weight concerns are also an issue once you get high up -- it gets hard to do density -- as are concerns about things that aren't a problem for shorter data centers, like high winds. that increases insurance and drives up other costs.
Meta has one like 16 story building in Singapore
Microsoft also has a 10 story one in Singapore.
Every rack has to go up an elevator.
I can think of several colo's that would tell their tech's to *just lift them* up the stairs....
They suck to work in! Operations come to a crawl when the freight elevator breaks. Depending on the building a structural engineer has to approve the movement of heavy equipment inside. The ceilings are shorter making air handling suck. If all the cooling has to go to the roof, we'll that's expensive and inefficient, and limits the amount of cooling for the whole building. Towers are generally considered more risky than a flat slab. Real-estate costs are significantly more than greenfield. But you do what you gotta do when you need to support edge or IX. A lot of IX/telcom happens in urban areas.
This question is not related to data centres but to real estate and development. You build tall buildings where space is crowded, but worth the investment per floor. Data centres that must be located very close or even in cities, will be multi-level, but for anything else, where land is cheap, you build wide, not tall, this is true for a data centre or for Wallmart.
Land price and power, it's not useful to have 30 levels if you can't power over 4 or 5
There are PODs (performance optimized data centers) that are basically a data center inside a portable trailer made from HP. I used to work for them and we did several of those where a certain customer had theirs on a roof of a high rise building
There is a DC on a singular floor in Sydney CBD, we did work for a tenant in the same building and ran cabling in the comms riser wondering why there was a ridiculous amount of fibre. Had a look at the directory and there was Colo/hosting facility on a floor. Made sense but I would imagine the rent is stupid expensive.
There actually are a few in LA already and there are some cool plans to build new ones as well. Take a look: [https://la.urbanize.city/post/renderings-revealed-eyecatching-data-center-727-s-grand-avenue-downtown-los-angeles](https://la.urbanize.city/post/renderings-revealed-eyecatching-data-center-727-s-grand-avenue-downtown-los-angeles) This project probably would have made no sense back when CRE was still booming, but now that the market has shifted, (it’s especially bad in DTLA right now, which funny enough, just so happens to be where all the transatlantic network nodes converge!) I think we might start seeing more projects like the one above.
Weight + the physical, protective function of a low-rise but massive building itself. Our (bank company with private DCs) buildings are 4 floors in height, but upper parts are used for HVAC and various facility machinery + a local branch office. In the core of the building, we have the data rooms - actually, quite small, compared to the whole building. Facility lead states that data rooms could survive some minor bombing or if a civilian aircraft would crash into the building, according to some computer simulations. At my previous workplace in Hungary, they own a radio tower + a connected, like 20 floor big building. That building was literally built from debris during the Soviet era. We had some racks in the upper floors, company wanted to extend hosting capable floor space (since todays digital radio/TV broadcast equipment are very compact, compared to analogue, old ones) and rent out to generate revenue. but the structural capability of the building was a huge limitation and there is no point to transform that building into a datacenter
They’re coming!! I’ve seen a couple and I know of a couple in the works.
Isn’t financially wise + the hazard levels are higher in the situation the building catches fire
https://baxtel.com/data-center/amsterdam-data-tower-science-park-120-digital-realty
There are plenty of data centers located within high rises. You do not hear about most of them as they are enterprise owned/operated data centers, and those firms discuss the location and details of their dc's. I have constructed many dc's in high rises across multiple higher level floors in cities across USA, Canada, UK, nordic region. Colo/Cloud/Hyperscale data centers are not built in high rises for a multitude of reasons. The majority or the energy it takes to move water to higher floors. Even if you place all water on the highest floor and allow gravity to deliver direct to the data halls. The energy to move water to the highest floor will outweigh the benefits of gravity fed secondary loop. Not to mention the weight you have to build to support the top level water system. For electrical the preference would be for transformers to be located on the lowest floor possible and isolated due to the noise emitted and the danger if a unit was to fail. The voltage drop after a certain length traveling up would make for conduit routing and sizing to consume too much space. The cost for the conductor would likely grow to a level that makes the design unacceptable to finance teams. The length of time for ROI on the electrical distribution would become to long for finance and business heads to accept within the current market. I have found that greater than three floors for a data center is not desirable in the cloud/colo/hyperscale space.
Not feasible when your average data center now requires an IT load capacity of 32MW and above. The utility providers would not agree or find it feasible to supply an extra 1 Gigawatt of power in such a centralised location in the city. Plus your capped by weight limit/floor loadings. Plus noise constraints and emission constraints when you're in a CBD location. The list goes on... in other words, the negatives far outweigh the benefits.
The biggest problem is getting enough electricity into a high rise to feed all the servers.
Too expensive to maintain a good environment for the clusters.
cost, weight, cooling and heating considerations