Repurpose

Is it possible to repurpose an existing building as a data centre?

This gets the usual great engineering answer ‘it all depends’!

What does it depend on?

While each building is different and each client likes to think that their requirements are unique, an analysis of the requirements reveals that many of the answers are similar.

1.       Power – Does the building have the ability to have an increased power supply from the utility? Without enough power the data centre will not function. If you are looking at converting the whole floor plate, your anticipated power draw could be in the region of several megawatts. Is there the ability to have additional emergency power generation units on site? The existing building power generation may be served by several other tenants and not adequate for a data centre facility. Is there sufficient on-site fuel storage for this?

2.       Clear height from finished floor to underside of slab. This dimension has tended to change depending on what solutions are used. If the racks are sat just on the slab, the heights would stack up with 2m for the rack, 1m for power and IT cabling baskets and another 2m clear for hot air recovery. Total of 5m+ clear space.

3.       Floor Loading. This is the area that might cause a concern in the conversion of buildings. The current floor loadings for DC’s are 15kN to 20kN per m2. Often office buildings are around 3.5kN/m2 to 5kN/m2 nearer to the core. The ability to transfer load to columns within existing buildings might be more challenging with these increased loadings.

4.       Provision of Cooling Plant. Is there enough space to add in dedicated cooling plant be it either cooling towers and chillers or DX external units? The provision of DX might be lighter in weight than cooling plant, however, is this as efficient and able to cool the higher loads that are being experienced today.

Of course, for carbon accounting purposes, an existing building is very attractive. The carbon in that construction has already been accounted for. However, it may not always be possible for every use case.

There are some notable re-use of facilities such as:

The Chicago Press Building in USA

The Financial Times Press Building in London UK

The Suma Paper Mill in Finland.

All of these buildings have similar characterises, great floor loading capability and good floor to ceiling heights. The previous uses also required a good supply of electricity.

What does all of this now show? That not every building is suitable, but those that have the right characteristics are able to be successfully reused and repurposed as a data centre.

Another use case could be for edge facilities, if the intent is to bring compute closer to the end user, a data centre is a repurposed facility, such as a telco facility or even a shop, may be suitable for housing some immersion cooling baths and help with content delivery networks.