A proposed vertical data center in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, puts hard numbers on a question developers keep circling: what does it cost to stack a data hall instead of spreading it across farmland? By the developer’s own estimate, about $1,300 a square foot.
Data Center Knowledge laid out the figures Oct. 5. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the 20-story tower for developer Revitalization Unlimited on roughly 0.23 acres. It isn’t approved. A related city development plan ordinance is on hold until Oct. 13.
Where $183 Million Goes in a Vertical Data Center
Founder and CEO Steve Austin put total development cost at $183 million, with $167 million of that in hard construction. About $107 million of the hard cost is mechanical, electrical, plumbing and fire protection. That’s 64% of the construction budget in four trades.
The stacking plan explains it. The building would support 24 MW of IT load, yet only two of its 20 floors would house computing equipment. Roughly 109,000 of 141,000 gross square feet is mechanical space. That’s 77%.
Run the developer’s numbers and the project comes to about $7.6 million per megawatt all-in, or just under $7 million in hard cost. Austin concedes the per-square-foot figure exceeds a suburban build. He calls it a premium worth paying.
Why Stack It: Inference, Fiber and a Small Lot
The argument is latency. Austin told the outlet that inference “has to happen near that user,” and pointed to nearby carrier infrastructure and a carrier-neutral design.
JLL’s Michael Martin, managing director of data center operations, was cooler on the premise. Clients “don’t come to us asking for a downtown data center,” he said. He sees a fit for financial services, telecom, content delivery and inference at urban sites, while large training clusters keep going where land and power are plentiful.
Power here is on-site. The design calls for 30 MW of Bloom fuel cells as the primary electricity source, with natural gas among the expected operating costs, and it targets a PUE of 1.25. Those are proposed figures, not measured ones.
The Constructability Problems in Urban Data Center Design
IDC research manager Luis Fernandes raised what a builder would. Most power and cooling equipment is designed to sit at grade. Go vertical and floor loading, freight elevator dimensions and crane access govern every chiller and switchgear lineup, on day one and again at replacement. Swapping equipment may mean coordinating with the surrounding streets. He also questioned describing the cooling as closed-loop when the design includes evaporative cooling, which consumes water.
None of this is exotic for a contractor that builds hospitals or labs downtown. It’s the same logistics with heavier equipment and a stricter owner. It also rhymes with what’s happening in life science buildings, where lab space is filling with AI hardware tenants and the constraint is watts per square foot, not floor area.
An urban tower sidesteps some of the land and water fights behind California’s new water supply assessment rule for data centers. It doesn’t sidestep the neighbors. Austin says he isn’t seeking a tax abatement and will accept binding conditions on noise, generator operating hours and construction apprenticeships.
Martin’s longer bet is conversion, reusing existing buildings and their utility connections for smaller edge loads. If that’s where urban compute goes, the Kansas City tower marks the expensive end of the range: 5,875 square feet of building for every megawatt, most of it plant.