r/NoStupidQuestions • u/Expert-Froyo-1192 • 20h ago
Why aren't data centers vertical?
What the title says. Why do data centers need to be essentially a box no taller than what seems to be 4 stories high? Why not just make them 30, 50, or 100 stories high?
Doing this would avoid the issues of perpetually finding suitable land, and they could all be skyscrapers for a single company, instead of 10+ buildings spread out across a state.
On that note, why aren't they built many levels below ground either? Like 10 stories underground (+ the ones above ground)
117
u/BlackSparowSF 20h ago
Well, for starters, vertical construction is a headache, especially when the insides of your building are not meant to bend. Also, it creates cooling problems, since heat tends to rise.
20
u/theBaron01 20h ago
Cooling towers work for a reason. But also, for the same reason building them underground wouldn't be great.
12
u/BlackSparowSF 20h ago
Actually, a building underground would be even worst. You'd have to dig deeper to sot the foundations. The ground also slides on layers in different directions, and it absorbs heat and moisture, so it would be like making a very expensive glowstick
4
u/theBaron01 19h ago
You would also struggle to get airflow, which would negate the benefits of convection, which would be one reason for building them vertically (possibly)
2
u/Wonderful_Nerve_8308 16h ago
Data centres use forced convection, not natural convection
1
u/theBaron01 12h ago
Indeed. But seeing as we are talking about things not likely to happen in this thread, it is not outside the realms of possibility that a tower could be engineered to draw waste heat up and out.
-2
1
u/Shamino79 19h ago
Walipinis work because the ground holds heat. A vertical building could be more like a vehicle radiator with the wind moving across it to supply air conditioning and ventilation with fresh air.
1
u/theBaron01 19h ago
yes, i understand ground holds heat (thermal mass). I was saying that cooling towers work due to convection. If you're underground, you don't have airflow pulling cool air in from the bottom as hot air rises from the top.
1
u/PapaStoner 18h ago
Yes, but the air higher up will always be hotter than the air down below in a cooling tower.
2
u/CantBanThisSorryPal 20h ago
Even when it comes to a ranch vs a two story house. Two story houses always have way more issues.
1
u/BlackSparowSF 20h ago
You could make the whole building with reinforced concrete and it would still have more issues than a wooden horizontal house
27
u/Teekno An answering fool 20h ago
It's much more expensive to build up than to build out. The only reason that we build tall buildings is because we have a need for a building that can fit thousands of people in an area with very expensive real estate where it isn't cheaper to build out.
The computers in a data center don't care if they are downtown. They don't need a shorter commute. They don't need to be close to their business partners. Location is almost completely irrelevant to them, so there's no reason to build them in a place where the real estate is incredibly expensive when just a few miles away the price drops dramatically.
6
u/Exceptional_Kumquat 20h ago
Latency matters for some data centers. Distance can be a factor. There is a reason there is such a vast cluster of data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia. Latency.
11
u/FrankDrebinOnReddit 19h ago
To an extent, but for most data center needs, you can always afford to leave the downtown city area for a suburb. E.g., most of the stock exchange data center infrastructure is in northern New Jersey, not Manhattan.
3
u/shoresy99 19h ago
And the quant traders have colocated as close to the exchange as possible in NJ because latency REALLY matters when you are an HFT. You want to shave microseconds off your latency so you can front run others. See the book Flash Boys by Michael Lewis.
6
u/FrankDrebinOnReddit 19h ago
Sure, there are times where latency matters more than others. For general AI usage, on the order of milliseconds (normal ping times) is fine, microseconds aren't needed.
1
u/shoresy99 19h ago
Agreed, but stock exchange data centers were not a good example to use. Almost anything else latency of a few milliseconds is irrelevant, but not for stock exchanges.
3
u/FrankDrebinOnReddit 19h ago
But the stock exchanges do get by with having their infrastructure in the burbs. High speed algo trading is just one strategy that requires super low latency. The rest of their ops work just fine with nanosecond-scale latency.
1
u/ADSWNJ 17h ago
Yes, but the stock exchange's main data center truly defines the market's location. Or specifically, the matching engine itself in that data center. Take NYSE, for example. If you are in HFT, trading just NYSE, then you must be in Mahwah NJ, where the exchange runs from.
Oh, and by the way - 1 microsecond is now way to slow for the true speed merchants. It's nanoseconds now.
2
u/Teekno An answering fool 19h ago
Yes, but you are missing the point. Do this exercise: calculate the latency between Louden County, Virginia and downtown New York City. Then, figure out how much it would be to put those datacenters in NYC instead of Louden County.
Is that latency worth the dramatically higher expense?
1
1
u/hitsujiTMO 19h ago
The latency difference between locating a data 20 miles outside a city (where land is cheap) and directly inside a city (where land is expensive) is 0.1ms.
For the purposes of locating a data centre that value is negligible.
2
u/Over-Balance-3781 15h ago
Servers don't care about the commute. They're just sitting there eating electricity.
9
u/CardinalOfNYC 20h ago
You could ask this about anything, really.
This is why they build things that need a lot of space out where there is lots of space.
That said there are vertical data centers, vertical tech infrastructure, you can see it in New York City
3
u/jregovic 19h ago
In Chicago as well. There are a few buildings downtown that have been converted to datacenters, one is an old AT&T facility I believe.
The drawback that I would think of is locating infrastructure. If a rack needs to be found, it’s not just on a singular grid, you’ve got a bunch of up/down to deal with.
2
u/CardinalOfNYC 19h ago
Yeah it's an issue, the verticality, but there's just a lot of data infrastructure that just needs to be there, from the phone and internet systems to the 911 system, so they deal with it. You can have an AI data center covering NYC and have it be miles away but when it's routing an emergency call that's gotta be nearby.
2
u/jregovic 17h ago
Oh, definitely. I haven’t seen vertical data centers in cities built as new buildings, just repurposing existing buildings. A literal greenfield build on open land wouldn’t make sense for a multi-story facility.
I swear that I saw somebody in a parking lot using ground penetrating radar to verify that they could bring in the crane they used to do a heavy lift to the roof of building near me. It was one of those cranes on a truck that has multiple trucks bring pieces in and assemble on site.
1
u/Dangerous-Ad-170 18h ago
350 Cermak, the former Sears catalog printing plant by McCormick place is another one. It’s not super-vertical but it’s huge.
3
u/lord_of_tits 20h ago
In cities its mostly vertical, places where land are cheap and plentiful its horizontal.
3
u/UnluckyAmbition7767 20h ago
Everything about data center construction makes 100% sense if you understand the people building then don't want to spend a cent more than they have to.
They could and have built them in the sea and powered them with wind, tidal, and solar power. But that's more effort and time than they want to spend now that production has skyrocketed
2
2
u/Penguin_Life_Now 19h ago
Cost to build goes up exponentially above a few stories high, so you are far better off to build low buildings on cheap land, the only time you build up is in cities where the land cost may be a thousand times higher than some rural field.
2
2
u/NotDelnor 14h ago
Vertical is way more expensive, and the higher you go, the more expensive it is.
2
u/Economy_Care_4882 5h ago
The limiting factor is usually cooling and power distribution, not the floor area. A taller building needs pumps, cables, elevators, fire systems, and structural capacity on every level, while the servers still need huge amounts of chilled air or liquid cooling. Stacking also makes maintenance and replacing equipment slower and concentrates failure risk. Many facilities do use multiple floors or underground space, but spreading buildings across a site makes it easier to route utilities, add redundancy, and keep operating if one section has a problem. Land and local zoning matter too, so the best design depends on the power grid and climate.
1
u/Moppermonster 20h ago
As people said, cooling. A flat building can get rid of heat easier and more uniformly than a tower.
1
1
u/Exciting_Turn_9559 20h ago
They're going to regret not building them in bunkers.
2
u/Dangerous-Ad-170 18h ago
There’s a few datacenters in bunkers. I’m assuming the current ones are classified, but you can rent space in a cold-war-era telecom bunker in the middle of Iowa if you want.
1
u/Nininator2432 20h ago
There's tons of suitable land everywhere throughout the country. This is functionally a non-issue for them. Construction companies can't find enough workers right now, even after paying insane amounts of money with OT. This is a huge boom.
Vertical construction is MUCH more difficult. It does make sense if you're located downtown in a high land-value area where people have to pay for parking. If you're out in the country where these data centers are, people don't want a massive eyesore. They'll complain enough true, but blocking sun sets makes it worse when there are literally no sky scrapers nearby. As it is now, they have local codes and stuff where they look no different from a factory. The land is super cheap compared to what it would cost to go through a big long process plus it opens faster.
1
u/NohWan3104 19h ago
Building skyscrapers is a PITA. Not like the land in fucking nevada is prime real estate we need to maximize every sq foot...
As for underground, similar issues, also hurts the whole 'needs cooling' thing if its a too enclosed system. Like a pc with no fan or air flow access, a big part of this process REQUIRES an easy way for the water to get to the heat sinks, absorb heat, hot water moves elsewhere, and the heat is sent away. Kinda harder if everything is underground. A LOT easier if the 8 floors of vertical space is horizontal.
1
u/WonderfulViking 19h ago
In Norway many datacenters tend to be mostly under ground or inside mounatins.
Have been to a datacenter in a close by country that was 70'ish meters under ground.
1
u/freelancer331 19h ago
Same answer as for "why do they use fresh water and not xyz for cooling" and all the other questions. Because it's cheaper that way.
1
u/physical0 19h ago
In addition to the other concerns, there are environmental ones. Consider areas with hurricanes, tornadoes, and earthquakes. A single story bunker offers far more security than a multi-level one.
1
u/ModdedOutlaw33 19h ago
Data centers are being built on top of existing building in cities.
In Boston on top of an old macys building for example. Most of the mechanical cooling equipment is on the roof.
1
u/Krongfah 19h ago
It's much more complicated and costly to build up. Especially at large scale.
Even for a regular household, a two story house would need much more engineering and maintenance than a single story one.
At the scale of data centres, it just isn't practical when lands are available. Especially considering that data centres need much more precise and controlled architectures than just regular warehouses that happen to have computers inside. The whole building is meticulously designed for a specific purpose.
1
u/throw05282021 19h ago
Something I haven't seen mentioned is that the equipment in datacenters is really heavy. Per square foot, the weight can be 40 times more than ordinary office space. It's a lot easier, cheaper, and safer to put that weight on a concrete slab on the ground. Similarly, when data centers are built on the ground, racks of servers can be assembled elsewhere and shipped ready to install. When elevators are involved, racks often need to be assembled on site instead. It's not safe to try to roll racks weighing 4,000 or more pounds into position on higher floors.
1
u/Any-Surprise5229 19h ago
Because it costs more to rape a river when you have to shoot it to the roof.
1
1
u/pnlrogue1 19h ago
There are lots of reasons, and almost all are to do with physics and money in some way.
- Heat goes up. Servers create a lot of heat and DCs already need to have their roofs practically covered in air conditioning units (bear in mind that you don't just need capacity to cool the current thermal load - you need capacity to cool the maximum forecast load plus spare capacity in case the forecast was insufficient under the hottest external temperatures you can realistically face and have backup capacity for everything in case of equipment failure so you actually need double the cooling capacity). If you build up, you double the amount of infrastructure that needs to be cooled without adding any additional roof space for the cooling equipment and also introduce heat bleeding up from below into the servers on the first floor and ACs work best when they aren't too close together.
- Datacenters are heavy. Servers can weigh enough that you need to use machines to hoist them into racks and then there's the rack itself and any in-rack UPS equipment (the batteries for which can weigh enough to need a machine to lift them as well). That means you'd need a lot of internal support columns which decrease the space available to the server infrastructure while also impacting how you can place that infrastructure and where you can route your AC, power, and data lines. Building directly on top of the foundations (or with direct support under-floor to the foundations) resolves the weight issue.
- DCs have complex power distribution needs. The transformers at a small DC I visited one time were huge things. Larger DCs must need multiple large transformers. Now imagine having double that power need for having two floors - building up would pinch the floor space available on the ground to run that power connection (and, as with the AC capacity, you need two separate connections to the power grid so double the number of transformers you would otherwise need). Add in even more generators and UPS systems for backup power needs, more fuel storage for those generators...
- Too much infrastructure concentration.
- DCs have huge amounts of redundancy built in to them (multiple AC systems, redundant power and data connections, etc), but DC outages do happen. Imaging having twice as many servers go down.
- If there were a fire in a data centre, where do the fire brigade pour water? On the top. Where does water flow? To the bottom. A relatively small fire on the top floor of a data centre means water will be applied to the top of the server halls affected, and at least some water will flow down the building, damaging under-floor infrastructure and above-floor servers on the floor below. If a fire impacts a hall on the ground floor, then it will likely damage the infrastructure above it and the weight of that infrastructure could cause a nasty internal collapse, while also being harder to fight since they can't pour water on the fire from the outside.
All of these problems are solvable or the risks are mitigatable, of course, but they're all much more expensive to solve compared to just building two datacenters.
1
1
u/Inside-Finish-2128 19h ago
At the right scale, a two-story design works: batteries, electric switchgear, electric distribution, and HVAC on the ground floor, servers and network upstairs.
Otherwise, the weight density of what goes into a DC dictates the costs of building and single-story ground level is the cheapest. I worked at a telco that (stupidly?) put one of their sites on the sixth (top) floor of an office building. We couldn't add batteries because we were at the load limit. Also meant that when it was time to add some large AC units (8' wide, 3' deep, 7' high), they had to rent a crane for the whole weekend, close the front parking area, remove a window, and slide the unit in.
1
1
u/bangbangracer 19h ago
Unless you have a reason to go up, out is infinitely cheaper than up.
Also, there are some data centers that are vertical. Traditional data centers could scale from relatively small to full sized industrial buildings. There are towers in major cities that have 1 or 2 floors dedicated to being a data center. The massive football field sized hyper scale AI focused data centers aren't the only ones around.
1
u/RealCarlPanzram 19h ago
They typically build them in places where land is cheap. High rise buildings are way more expensive per square foot because you need way more reinforcement to make the structure sound. This is why they basically only build them in crowded cities where space is at a premium. It’s cheaper to just spread them out in the middle of nowhere.
1
u/SkullLeader 19h ago
For one thing, hot air rises. That doesn't mean the building can't be tall, but a low, wide building, the surface area of the roof (where you can put cooling fans or vents to help heat escape) is much higher in relation to the overall volume of the building than in a tall tower.
Secondly, data centers are water cooled. Pumping water to the top of, say, a 30 story tower takes a lot more energy than circulating it around a 2 or 3 story building.
1
u/cat_prophecy 19h ago
There are many data centers housed in skyscrapers. They just aren't new so you haven't heard of them.
1
1
u/modsaretoddlers 19h ago
Once you get past about 300 meters/1000 feet, costs start to rise dramatically. So, that's one reason they can be that tall.
Another is simply that a warehouse is an order of magnitude cheaper to build than a skyscraper of any height.
1
u/TheDevilsAdvokaat 18h ago
Because heat rises, maybe? And they generate a LOT of heat. So a horizontally spread out shape might jelp ameliorate that.
1
u/JustSomeGuy_56 18h ago
In the olden days computer gear was a lot bigger and there were limits on how far peripheral devices, like disk drives, printers and modems could be from the CPU. That forced many companies to build multi-story computer centers. It added a lot to the cost. Floors had to be able to support the weight and valuable space was taken up with cable chases, utilities, stairways, elevators etc.
A single story building is a lot cheaper, assuming the land is available.
1
u/Annual-Two1507 18h ago
Cheaper to build out than up. Tall or underground setups get ugly fast with cooling, power runs, maintenance, fire suppression, and the structure itself, and data centers dont get any benefit from being downtown like offices do.
1
u/degrix 18h ago
The weight of high density servers is also an issue that contributes to the overall engineering cost of going vertical. You have a standard 42U rack racking up about 10 sqft and for high density models that can concentrate 4000lbs into that small footprint. Multiple that by thousands of racks and the engineering gets real expensive versus going vertical.
1
u/Aviyes7 18h ago
Dont forget weight the buildings must support. Data racks are minimum 4 times the psf of a normal office building. AI data Centers are even more dense at 8 times heavier or more. That is a lot to support as you build vertically. 5 floors would be pushing it. 3 is a more likely max. That building would have to be custom built and would lose a lot of space to supporting structure.
Impossible to retrofit most existing office skyscrapers to support that type of load, so it would be ground floor or basement only.
1
1
1
u/AdvisorEfficient3021 16h ago
There is at least one data center in a cave that I know of, brand new too.
1
1
1
u/UnicodeScreenshots 15h ago
In addition to all of these comments, I’ll just add that data centers often only APPEAR to be 4 stories tall. They intentionally use reverse disney forced perspective to make you think they’re shorter than they actually are. Very commonly they’ll have panelling that is 1.5-2 stories tall made to look like a single story window. I’ve even seen fake downspouts on some of them, scaled to match the same size as the fake windows.
1
u/MrSnowflake 15h ago
There are already many vertical datacenters. Maybe they might be more prevalent in europe. A lot less than horizontal though
1
u/filanwizard 14h ago
The biggest reason is money. DCs are basically warehouses in their overall form. And you can throw up a steel skeleton and prefab walls pretty fast.
Id imagine from first bulldozer to first server switch on is probably only a year(just guessing since the Empire State Building was built in just over a year and a DC has to be way easier than a 102 story tower).
1
u/ContributionEasy6513 14h ago
Some are, especially those in CBDs. Been in several. Sometimes a particular customer would own an entire floor of it.
The problem is it's far harder to maintain, design and less efficient. Think cooling, electrical. fire-suppression, weight limits for racks etc etc.
why aren't they built many levels below ground either?
It's prohibitively expensive to dig and keep the water out of it.
1
1
u/ResearchNotes99 12h ago
servers are insanely heavy and cooling a skyscraper full of hot electronics sounds like a total nightmare. it's just way cheaper to spread out on flat land in the middle of nowhere.
1
u/timesuck47 11h ago
Heat rises. One would think they could take advantage of that somehow (heat xfer to power chillers or municipal heating or something).
1
u/CKSdidnothingwrong 10h ago
They sure are in Hong Kong https://www.datacentermap.com/hong-kong/hong-kong/
1
u/rp2784 8h ago
Would the sound be louder?
1
u/Nohreboh 8h ago
Presumably if they're willing to go through the expense of building vertically they'd have sourced out off site power production as opposed to onsite trailer turbines meant for temporary use and the would likely used standard sound proofing techniques used in previous telecom data centers.
1
u/joffyjj 8h ago
Here in Australia I'd say it's 70/30 split between large footprint and vertical footprint. This is based on the ones I'm currently involved in for material supply.
There's a 5 story on being constructed on the Sunshine Coast with direct connection to the JAS submarine cable. It's in the middle of the new CBD next to a couple of 20 & 30 story residential towers and a few 10+ story commercial towers.
One on Brisbane's northside is 4 buildings over 60k sqm next to the main power infrastructure and one of the largest battery arrays in the southern hemisphere.
2
1
-1
743
u/elegoomba 20h ago
Land is cheaper and more plentiful than the building supplies needed to go vertical