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The former Kansas City Star printing press building will be converted into a new data center. Photo credit: Business Wire.
Posted November 18, 2024
Updated at 3:22 p.m., November 21, 2024
Kansas City-based Patmos announced it plans to repurpose the Kansas City Star’s former printing press building into a new flagship data center.
The 400,000-square-foot building plotted on roughly 5 acres, will be transformed into an over 100-megawatt AI innovation facility as part of a billion-dollar retrofit project. Patmos expects to have the first 40 MW online and rack-ready in 18 months with the first 5 MW online next month, according to a release.
“In a world where Big Tech is investing over $20 million per MW to stand up new data centers years down the road, the infrastructure already in this building allows us to build at a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time,” CIO of Patmos, Joe Morgan, said in the release.
Patmos said they hope to create and attract high-paying tech jobs to Kansas City following the fallout of tech giants leaving Silicon Valley.
The transformation of the former Kansas City Star will make the second data center Patmos operate in Kansas City. The company already operates facilities in Phoenix and Dallas.
The building first opened for the newspaper in 2006 before being sold to Ambassador Hospitality LLC for more than $30 million in 2019. The building has been vacant since.
Update
Patmos announced the first tenant for the data center is Amsterdam-based Nebius. The tech company provides AI-centric infrastructure and network solutions for clients.
Through this partnership, Nebius will deploy its first GPU cluster—3,500 GPUs—in the U.S. by the first quarter of 2025, according to a release. Nebius selected Patmos for its expertise in phased construction for custom data centers. The first phase will include infrastructure upgrades, backups, generators and cage space tailored to Nebius’ workload.
“Our first GPU cluster in the U.S. is a landmark for Nebius and enables us to better serve our American customers from American infrastructure,” Nebius CIO, Andrey Korolenko, said in the release.
