The stylish data center operators who brought you the underground bunker from outer space and the modular data center of the future are cooking up a new plan. This one involves a 120-year-old gas plant in the center of Stockholm stacked with five floors of servers and a high-tech theater on top.
The data center company, called Bahnhof, is in negotiations with the city of Stockholm to build the thing. CEO Jon Karlung wants the theater to sit atop a special black “privacy glass” floor that turns from black to clear at the flip of a switch. And of course, he wants a bar too.
“I think it’s an elegant mix: culture and technology and business,” says Karlung. “They kind of strengthen each other.”
It’s only a dream right now, but Bahnhof wants to put a theater on top of its data center. Photo: BahnhofBut, first, Bahnhof has to fill up the five stories of space that will get him to the building’s dome, which tops out at about 130 feet. For that, the company is using a modular data center design that lets them quickly add new floors, much in the way you’d slap together an Ikea shelving set.
Bahnhof is starting work on the first floor of the plant and is looking to form a partnership with another internet service provider to help fill up the next four floors. Each floor will house seven megawatts worth of equipment, making it at 35-megawatt facility, when completed.
In Bahnhof’s plans, the data center has the same inspired-from-science-fiction look that has become the company’s calling card. A few months back, we took readers on a tour of Bahnhof’s White Mountain Facility, which was built in an underground nuclear bunker. Its indoor plants and fountains were inspired by films such as Silent Running and Dr. No.
A model of what the data center should look like when the first floor is completed. Photo: BahnhofInstead of cooling down the heat from all of those servers, Bahnhof plans to transfer it into hot water and sell the energy to Stockholm, where it will power the city’s centralized heating system. “All this heat generated in the data center will be pumped out by a heat pump in the district heating system,” Karlung says.
Bahnhof is also building another 10-megawatt data center not far away. This one is right on top of Stockholm’s heating system plants, making it even easier for Bahnhof to sell off its excess heat.
Power is the biggest issue in data center operations these days. Most data centers still burn a considerable amount of power, keeping their servers from melting. But Google, Microsoft, and others have taken a page from the swamp cooler tech manuals, and they’re now cooling their latest centers with mist-cooled air. They’re also using seawater, toilet water, and outside air when they need to.
By reusing his waste heat, Karlung thinks that he will make his data center more efficient than many of the world’s best.
Take a trippy cartoon-like tour of the imaginary data-center-in-a-gas-plant here:
