Comment by markhahn
1 day ago
Maybe, but I'm skeptical, because current DCs are not designed to minimize footprint. Has anyone even built a two-story DC? Obviously cooling is always an issue, but not, directly, land.
Now that I think of it, a big hydro dam would be perfect: power and cooling in one place.
> Has anyone even built a two-story DC?
Downtown Los Angeles: The One Wilshire building, which is the worlds most connected building. There are over twenty floors of data centers. I used Corporate Colo which was a block or two away. That building had at least 10 floors of Data Centers.
I think Downtown Seattle has a bunch too (including near Amazon campus). I just looked up one random one and they have about half the total reported building square footage of a 10-story building used for a datacenter: https://www.datacenters.com/equinix-se3-seattle
Multistory DCs are commonplace in major cities.
> Has anyone even built a two-story DC?
Every DC I’ve been in (probably around 20 in total) has been multi storey.
Skepticism is valid. The environmentalists came after dams too.