Data Center Campus

Salas O’Brien’s client purchased land for a new 334.5MW data center campus — a two-building campus with roughly 167MW of capacity per building, the first of which our team has designed to date — in the middle of a residential neighborhood, where ambient nighttime noise already approached the local ordinance limit at the property line. The land sale conditions left effectively no margin for additional noise. We worked as part of a design-build team to develop a solution that met the client’s cost target while meeting the acoustical requirements through deliberate design, not expensive attenuation measures. The solution included containing the chilled water plant within pre-fabricated, enclosed modules, with heat rejection through dry coolers using large fans spinning at slower speeds — engineered to hold 45 dB at the property line at night, even with all equipment, including full redundancy, running.

This concept didn’t just maintain cost but pushed to lower it, by utilizing larger chiller plant modules and innovative design strategies that reduced installed chiller capacity by 40%. Operationally, compressorized cooling is required less than 150 hours per year.