As the data center services market is projected to grow by more than 50 per cent by 2026, Wyoming Hyperscale White Box, have announced the start of construction on their Aspen Mountain Hyperscale Data Center campus – which they say will become the world’s first sustainable ecosystem for hyperscale data center development.
The 120-MW master-planned campus is aiming to be a carbon-negative, multi-business ecosystem through 100 per cent heat reuse. Additionally, it hopes to leverage 100 per cent liquid-cooled, technology-agnostic information technology equipment (ITE) alongside renewable energy, and aims to eliminate industrial water consumption and the use of refrigerants.
Founded in 2020 by members of a 6th generation ranching family, Wyoming Hyperscale White Box is combining resources to sustainably satisfy parabolic demand for hyperscale data center capacity while implementing best-in-class solutions to directly address global climate change and eliminate the waste inherent in conventional data center designs. Wyoming Hyperscale decided to change the industry with patented and patent-pending technologies that are innovative, efficient, sustainable, and significantly less costly to build and operate.
“Designing and building the data center of the future to overcome climate change and environmental obstacles – while creating agile infrastructure to handle future challenges – requires technology as we have never seen as well as the support of a progressive, knowledgeable team,” says Trenton Thornock, Wyoming Hyperscale White Box founder and managing member. “With our forward-thinking partners, we are setting the new standard for mission-critical facilities with this sustainable data center ecosystem.”
The 30-MW first phase of the Aspen Mountain project is currently under construction and expected to begin commissioning in 2023.
Through its use of liquid immersion cooling, the development is set to be 50 per cent more power efficient and deliver energy cost savings of up to 95 per cent compared to a traditional air-cooled data center. As an additional sustainability measure, the campus will be one of the first in the world to use nickel-zinc batteries as its sole source of backup energy storage. The project team is strategically designing the facility to achieve LEED v4.1 BD+C Gold certification.
Wyoming Hyperscale White Box also notes that the project’s market-leading density-per-construction acre should result in one of the lowest development costs per acre for a U.S.-based hyperscale data center campus. This efficiency is made possible by 10-MW vaults consuming less than 15,500 square feet of space each. With 80-kW average rack density at scale and 100+kW/rack high-density compute capacity at scale, Aspen Mountain should be one of the most space-efficient data centers in the world.
Additionally, all waste heat generated from the initial development is designed to serve the adjacent Wyoming Hyperscale Indoor Farms facility, yielding fresher produce for local communities throughout Wasatch valley in Utah. The program’s heat reuse measure will also offset nearly 70 gallons per truckload of diesel from the current source of produce. To help minimise the exacerbation of megadrought in the Western U.S., no industrial water will be consumed by the Aspen Mountain campus.
In addition to targeting industry-leading LEED certifications, the project team is also pursuing Uptime Institute Tier III certification for Data Center Design Documents and Constructed Data Center Facility.
