Data Hub

Every building carries its own on-site computing hardware — two liquid-cooled server racks and a coolant distribution unit, tucked into a 6-grid bay in the roof plant run alongside water, fuel cell, cooling, and waste. Each rack measures 0.60 × 1.07 × 2.24 m and weighs 1.4–1.8 tonnes, but because that weight concentrates on a small footprint, the floor loading directly beneath it runs 2,100–3,900 kg/m² — one of the two heaviest point loads in the entire plant run.

This isn’t a standalone server room. It’s one node in a distributed farm: 160 kW of computing per building, times 24 public buildings, comes to exactly 3.84 MW community-wide — the numbers close precisely, confirming the design intent of one identical node per building rather than a central data center serving them all.

Power comes from the same fuel-cell plant running everything else in the building (see Energy & Power) — 300 kW to the building, 60 kW to the greenhouse, 160 kW to this bay, one shared budget with three destinations. Heat is the part that doesn’t fully resolve: only a fifth to two-fifths of the 160 kW leaves through the liquid-cooling loop as intended; the rest escapes as ordinary waste heat into the air, adding to what the building’s cooling system has to absorb.

Where the design has a real, acknowledged weak point

Because every building’s fuel-cell plant is islanded — no outside utility grid behind it — a sudden load step in the data hall, or the loss of a hall entirely, can collapse the plant’s frequency faster than the fuel cells can respond; they follow load in minutes, not seconds. The fix is a grid-forming battery, which wasn’t part of the original design and is now a separate procurement item specifically because of this gap.

Governed by Bureau 23.