What could be more exciting than a datacenter? Don’t answer that – at least, not until you’ve seen what’s happening at our facility in Kansas City.
Maybe you don’t care about datacenter infrastructure, and if you’ve ever seen a typical datacenter you would be forgiven for that. Normally they are anonymous industrial sheds on the outskirts of town – ugly, boring slabs of steel that have zero connection to human beings, and often have close to zero human beings working inside.
That sucks. We wanted something different, and a unique facility in Kansas City was the first space on our list to transform into something better.
If you’re local, you know it as the KC Star building, where the Kansas City Star newspaper used to be printed. It was the perfect place for a datacenter retro-fit, and Patmos assumed operations there in November 2024.
It’s a high-capacity GPU / AI datacenter
In terms of datacenter capacity, it’s a 30MW facility, right now, with space, power and cooling for next-generation GPU and AI infrastructure – hardware that requires not a few tens of kilowatts per cabinet, but hundreds.
The datacenter part of the building has been operational with clients for some time, and we’ve just made another 10MW available for new clients to roll in – and when we say roll in, it’s as close to an on-demand roll-in of your racks as possible.
Normally when high-density colocation space is available, it takes the datacenter operator six months or more to prepare it for new clients.
We’ve cut that down to 90 days by working in parallel with customers to fit out their space, to their exact specifications, and project-managing everything so that when their hardware is delivered we’re ready at the datacenter.
It’s also a multi-use datacenter by design
That’s the first twist, but there’s another. This building is an iconic part of the cityscape, with history that everyone local knows. We set out to make it very different from typical anonymous datacenters, by making it useful for humans, not just AI servers.
It’s a very large building, and alongside the datacenter facility we’re creating shared working spaces, conference spaces, and venues for concerts, art and culture, and events for the local community… the sky’s the limit.
Patmos COO, Joe Morgan, spoke about the concept in a recent interview with local station KCTV5.
“A lot of times, data centers that are coming in, they’re not really giving back to the community in any way,” Joe said. “We’re finding creative ways to re-use those buildings for tech working spaces, for event spaces, art installations… whatever we can do to take what is probably an eyesore and turn it into something that fits inside the community.”
Robot security rolls in too
While we’ve been making the KC facility ‘rack and roll ready’ for clients, something else has rolled onto the scene – the heaviest member of the Patmos team. Meet Lance, our new security robot!
Standing just shy of five feet tall, but weighing in at 420lbs, Lance is no pushover. It’s an automated security bot that patrols the perimeter of the building, keeping an eye on ne’er-do-wells and helping to secure the premises for datacenter colo clients, and future co-working space users or concert-goers.
Lance complements the human security team at the facility, and this week caught the eye of The Kansas City Star, who caught up with Joe Morgan to learn more.
“Lance is actually a tool for the security people as much as anything else,” Joe explained. “Even with 24/7 security, it’s like, do you really at two in the morning want to send one individual by themselves to, you know, go inspect something? It’s a big building, right, it’s essentially a full city block.”
With autonomous AI and remote-control modes, Lance’s 360-degree camera has already captured footage of an attempted burglary in the area, which was passed on to the police to help their investigation. As it patrols the area, Lance has also become a feature for downtown KC locals.
“I think there’s like five different TikToks out there now about Lance. He’s definitely the most popular employee, I think, at Patmos right now,” said Joe. “And he brings a smile to people’s faces.”
You can read the full article and watch an interview with Joe over at The Kansas City Star – which, as well as being quite a detailed write-up, is also a strong contender for this week’s Headline Editor Tries Hard For Clicks award. We appreciate the coverage and traffic, guys – thanks! 🙂
Learn more?
If you’d like to know more about our AI datacenter capabilities, check out the Patmos AI Campus page – or contact us for more info.
