Storing data on a commercial or industrial level is not just expensive – it’s also difficult to do sustainably. It generates enormous amounts of heat and requires a lot of water to cool it. But Wyoming Hyperscale White Box plans to change that.
Founded in 2020 by sixth-generation cattle ranchers, Wyoming Hyperscale is building an ultra-green, liquid-cooled, next-generation data center on 58 acres on the north ridgeline of Aspen Mountain, 11 miles southeast of Evanston, Wyoming.
“Usually, 70% (or more) of a Data Center’s operating cost is power. Up to 43% of that power is dissipated by cooling storage drives, network equipment, servers, and power provisioning systems. Our architecture cuts cooling power usage by 95% and enables the sale of that heat to a cleantech ecosystem,” notes the company on its website.
The Aspen Mountain Hyperscale Data Center Project will offer its data center clients up to 100kW rack density, 10MW vaults for retail and wholesale implementation, and a dedicated on-site substation with a 120MW design capacity. It will also provide 24/7 security, remote hands, implementation solutions, and multicarrier internet connectivity on five different laterals.
The data center is expected to be commercially viable in 2022 and will be the world’s first sustainable hyper-scale data development.
It will use liquid immersion cooling and closed-loop external cooling. Liquid cooling uses a bio-based dielectric fluid to remove heat and increase the data center’s cooling power efficiency by 95%.
It also helps to reduce power consumption by 50%. By combining this method with Wyoming Hyperscale’s proprietary technology, no additional water consumption will be necessary.
The data center will also use wind farm generation switchgear to directly power its facilities. The computer-generated heat will be used for a neighboring indoor farm project, the Wyoming Hyperscale Indoor Farms.
“One of the most important aspects of the project is the focus on its implementation of cutting-edge technology to make it as efficient as possible, with the smallest footprint environmentally,” said Wyoming Hyperscale operating partner Brady Thornock.
In addition, “The land selected is a pad consisting of excavated material from one of the tunnels below Aspen Mountain, deposited between 1947 and 1974. While ideal for building, the site does not support sufficient plant life and would be best capped with concrete and repurposed to prevent erosion. It also just happens to be at a splice point in the global fiber optic network infrastructure.”
The company has partnered with several sustainability partners, including Lumen, Submer, Egg Geo, Gensler, Upstack, and ZincFive to build the data center.
Lumen Technologies plans to provide adaptive networking and security solutions for the data center. This digital infrastructure will support high-bandwidth connectivity and deliver data on-demand to the customers. It will also help the data center in its efforts to prevent cyberattacks by providing dedicated denial-of-service attack solutions (DDos).
“Lumen’s commitment and unique abilities to use technologies to support environmental sustainability aligns with Wyoming Hyperscale’s pursuit to change industry norms for datacenter developers,” said Ed Morche, Lumen president of North American Enterprise and Public Sector. Another partner, Upstack, has secured early access to the data center for its advisors and customers.
“Simply put, Wyoming Hyperscale’s approach to data centers hasn’t been done before. The amount of computing power in a smaller footprint is simply amazing,” said James Caulfield, partner and managing director at UPSTACK. “We’re excited to introduce customers to the data center of the future – today – while also benefiting the environment and helping businesses execute against their corporate ESG initiatives.”
