Hosting provider Patmos uses brownfield facilities to speed colocation data center development. Its latest is a former printing press.
Data center hosting and compute services provider Patmos set up and deployed a new AI data center in just 90 days, when it usually takes two to three years to set up a colocation facility. All it needed was an unused printing press in the heart of Kansas City.
Patmos took over the former newspaper production facility of the Kansas City Star, which has seen its physical print edition go extinct like many newspapers across the country. The site is unique in the fact that the newspaper had brought in two different utility feeds to power the press equipment, a chilled water system for cooling, and some fiber optics.
“So they really had some of the core features that we needed,” said Joe Morgan, chief operating officer of Patmos. “But from start to finish, 90 days later, I’d done demolition, planning, permitting, engineering, construction commissioning, and then the data center was online, and that’s over five megawatts.”
And if Patmos had tried to build a data center from scratch? “We’d probably still be [getting the permits],” Morgan said.
To facilitate a purpose-built AI, high-performance computing, and GPU workload facility, Patmos engaged in a brownfield strategy.
A brownfield site is a previously occupied location with some sort of existing infrastructure, while a greenfield site is wide open and undeveloped. In the case of data centers, there has been talk of using everything from old coal power plants to abandoned malls and other factories. The reasoning is that many of these facilities have solid walls, considerable power stations, and a water source, all of which are needed in a data center.
Morgan, obviously, is pro-brownfield. “Personally, I think that a brownfield is very creative way to deal with what I think is the biggest problem that we’ve got right now, which is time and speed to market,” he said. “On a brownfield, I can go into a building that’s already got power coming into the building. Sometimes they’ve already got chiller plants, like what we’ve got with the building I’m in right now.”
Patmos has made the most of the liquid facilities in the old printing press building. The facility is built to handle anywhere from 50 to over 140 kilowatts per cabinet, a leap far beyond the 1-2 kW densities typical of legacy data centers.
The chips used in the servers are Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell processors, which run extraordinarily hot. To manage this heat load, Patmos employs a multi-loop liquid cooling system. The design separates water sources into distinct, closed loops, each serving a specific function and ensuring that municipal water never directly contacts sensitive IT equipment.
“We have five different, completely separated water loops in this building,” said Morgan. “The cooling tower uses city water for evaporation, but that water never mixes with the closed loops serving the data hall. Everything is designed to maximize efficiency and protect the hardware.”
The building taps into Kansas City’s district chilled water supply, which is sourced from a nearby utility plant. This provides the primary cooling resource for the facility. Inside the data center, a dedicated loop circulates a specialized glycol-based fluid, filtered to extremely low micron levels and formulated to be electronically safe.
Heat exchangers transfer heat from the data hall fluid to the district chilled water, keeping the two fluids separate and preventing corrosion or contamination. Liquid-to-chip and rear-door heat exchangers are used for immediate heat removal.
The facility has a robust infrastructure, since it was formerly a printing press, with dual utility feeds and heavy-duty flooring capable of supporting the weight of modern transformers and AI hardware.
Even though it was a brownfield conversion, Morgan says that you still have the same constraints and concerns that any data center project has. “So floor loading, ceiling height, you still worry about physical security, those sorts of things,” he said.
Morgan plans to add another 5 megawatts of capacity in the next 90 to 180 days, as quickly as he did the first 5mW.
Patmos owns and operates datacenter infrastructure offering decentralized connectivity, open peering, and free Internet Exchange hosting with datacenters in Kansas City, Dallas, Phoenix, San Jose, Newark, Frankfurt. Its services span multi-megawatt colocation for AI and hyperscale workloads, GPU/high-performance compute, custom data centers, domains, web and cloud hosting, colocation and tailored website and application development.
