After our first site visit at the Margaritaville hotel, we stopped for lunch in downtown Kansas Cityís City Market District. We ate at the Opera House Food Emporium. The food was delicious, and the downtown area was fun to explore. The city center was quieter than expected.
After lunch, we departed for Meta’s data center site. The site was massive, and we initially had trouble finding the correct entrance. We met up with Justin Collins, a project manager from Turner Construction. He showed us their field office and gave us a brief introduction about the project. The numbers on this project are extreme; the first project included 2 connected data centers and cost roughly 1.2 billion dollars to construct. They are currently building a third data center, called a ìhalf Hî structure that is approximately 500 thousand square feet. Unfortunately, photos were not allowed on this site, so I have included photos before and after the visit.
The site was very large, so we had to be bussed to the actual project. We went through tight security to get into the site. Due to safety considerations, the speed limit on the site was 9 MPH. We were all amazed to see the logistics of this construction site. The site was massive and flooded with people. Justin said that they usually have 450 total workers on site per day. The exterior of the site is filled with storage and site offices for different trades and fabrication. The structure of the building was simple. The exterior of the building consisted of concrete precast walls, and it was framed with steel beams and steel joists.
Data centers are split into multiple sections. The exteriors are strictly for power generation and are lined with diesel generators. Each data center requires roughly 30 mW of energy. We learned about the complexities of moving such large generators and the efforts that they are taking to limit the emissions of the generators. A large section of the data centers is dedicated to the cooling of the facility. The technology inside produces considerable heat, especially in the summer months. This data center uses water to cool the equipment and has large air handling systems to pump the hot air out of the facility. This data center has 4 16,000-gallon water tanks to provide chilled water throughout the facility. In many data centers, the first floor is for the servers and technical equipment and the second floor is for all the cooling systems. Upon completion, the data center will only have a few people monitoring the site to ensure that things are running properly. Meta intends to build approximately 14 data centers at this location. This would require construction operations for roughly 20-25 more years.
While we were on the tour, we asked the project managers about their experiences managing such large, chaotic projects. Each of them recommended treating everyone on the site with respect, regardless of their job or how long they have been there. We had a great time looking at the site and learning about how data centers operate.
Blog by Calvin Piemonte