Developer Revitalization Unlimited, working with Chicago architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, has proposed a 20-story data center tower on a 0.23-acre parcel in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, designed to support 24 MW of IT load across 141,000 gross square feet, with only two floors housing computing equipment and approximately 109,000 square feet devoted to mechanical space. Founder and CEO Steve Austin estimated total development costs at $183 million, or roughly $1,300 per square foot, with about $107 million of the $167 million in hard construction costs going toward mechanical, electrical, plumbing, and fire protection systems. Austin said the facility would use 30 MW of on-site Bloom fuel cells as the primary electricity source, with natural gas listed as an expected operating expense, and targets a power usage effectiveness of 1.25. A related city development plan ordinance is listed as on hold until October 13.
The proposal tests whether the cost premium of vertical urban construction, estimated at a higher per-square-foot figure than suburban alternatives, can be justified by proximity benefits for latency-sensitive workloads such as financial transactions and inference. IDC senior research manager Luis Fernandes noted that most vendors design power and cooling equipment for horizontal placement, meaning vertical builds introduce practical equipment-placement and replacement challenges that the broader industry has not widely solved.
Vertical data center design is an emerging construction trend driven by urban land scarcity; Data Center Knowledge's analysis of cost-proximity trade-offs is timely for developers in constrained markets.