First images of Gensler-designed 60-building data centre development in Utah revealed
Infrastructure firm O'Leary Digital has exclusively revealed the first images of the Stratos Hyperscale Data Center in Box Elder County, Utah, which is being designed by architecture studio Gensler as one of the largest data centres in the world.
The 7.5-gigawatt Stratos Hyperscale Data Center is part of the Wonder Valley development and may become one of the largest data centres in the world. It will be built on one of the sites in a 40,000-acre parcel designated for development by Utah's governmental Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA).
The huge development is set to contain 60 data centres on an initial 10,000-acre portion of the site. Confusion surrounding the overall size of the site has led some to report that the data centre will be twice the size of Manhattan. This does not appear to be accurate.
O'Leary Digital, led by celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary, has commissioned Gensler to design the master plan and architecture for the data centre development.
The master plan shows six data centre clusters spaced out and with a buffer on the edge of the property, solar arrays and a "mixed-use innovation district".
Renderings of structures show buildings with a similar design language to the Wonder Valley data centre in Canada, also designed by Gensler. However, the structures have pale siding, adjusted to the desert climate.
The entries have deep recesses with large panes of glass and the broad sides have horizontal bands of colouration with different shades.
O'Leary Digital CEO Paul Palandjian told Dezeen that O'Leary Digital is seeking to deviate from the typical, drab data center design, which he called "eyesores".
"The default for this industry is a windowless concrete & metal box dropped on a slab – ugly monolithic buildings that are eyesores," said Palandjian.
"We refused to do that. So, the question we kept asking Gensler was how we can reimagine data center design. We want a beautiful poetic design that belongs to the West Desert."
"Art and architecture are a real passion of mine, and I wanted to bring out-of-the-box thinking – pun intended – to a category that has almost none. Our job is to honor the place it sits in and to be poetic about it."
Palandjian also said the construction might include a "man camp" or workers' housing.
"Building at this scale in a rural county means importing thousands of skilled tradespeople, and the industry's historical answer has been the 'man camp'," he said.
"We want this to be the sexiest, coolest construction posting in America. It’s a recruitment strategy toward building a culture of excellence."
The Stratos project received authorisation from the Box Elder County Commission, despite pushback from locals, who are concerned about water usage from the already stressed nearby Great Salt Lake, as well as noise and light pollution.
Currently, the land is used mostly unincorporated and used for agriculture and the Ruby Pipeline, an interstate gas pipeline, runs through both major parcels designated by MIDA.
The shareholders are still exploring on-site power generation beyond the planned 3,000-acre solar array. Palandjian said that the project would use "closed-loop cooling", and that water usage would not have an outsized impact on the Great Salt Lake.
"Our design uses closed-loop cooling — the project's potable water draw is a fraction of what’s been claimed publicly, and meaningfully less than the agricultural use already occurring on this same land today," he said.
"Yes, the campus is 7.5 gigawatts at full build-out, but that's phased over more than a decade, on a MIDA-designated project area zoned specifically for this kind of generational infrastructure. The building footprints are a small percentage of the total acreage — the rest is preserved native landscape, stormwater detention with native vegetation, and ecological corridors."
Details on the rest of the MIDA-designated parcel are unclear. Box Elder County said future uses "may include manufacturing, retail, restaurants, hotels, and public works infrastructure".
Ahead of the installation of on-site solar or other means, connections to the Ruby Pipeline will likely power the plant.
It ranks among the largest data centre complexes. For comparison, the dense China Telecom Data Center in Hohot covers around 247 acres, and the current footprint for Meta's Hyperion data centre in Louisiana is just under 4,000 acres.
AI investment has continued to require this energy-intensive infrastructure.
Recently, Canadian infrastructural firm AdkinsRealis announced it was teaming up with Nvidia to explore on-site deployment of nuclear power plants to facilitate the energy needs of the structures, which threaten local grids.
The effects of the so-called hyperscale data centres are just now starting to be understood. Earlier this year, a group of researchers released a study tracking heat island effects around these structures.
The images are courtesy of O'Leary Digital.
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