Hi, I’m Jules Carney! As a front-end engineer at Othersphere, I’ve had the chance to work on features that would have felt impossible to bring to the web even a few years ago. We bring together detailed, accurate data from across the globe, and use it to paint a picture with graphs, maps and other visualizations. It brings insights on potential sites that tell meaningful stories for any audience. Needless to say, working on these features is a web developer’s dream come true!

Today I’ll walk through one of my favourite feature sets, because it imparts so much info about a potential site that users looking for a site could feel like they’re on the ground with their measuring tapes.

For a full video of the walkthrough below, please click here!

Let’s say a team wants to build a data center near Boulder, Colorado, but is worried about how the landscape will fit in with their building designs.

First, we’ll make a stop at the main map, where we can filter based on attributes we want the site to have, like average slope, land cost, distance to roads or power sources, and many other crucial factors. In the picture below, we’ve filtered to return sites with only 0-5% built area, and are colouring our heat map based on topography. Less populated areas tend to have steeper slopes, but with just this three second search we see some pale yellow hexes which are nice flat sites with few built-up areas. We could also do another search including our slope requirement filters if we wanted to just get back the hexes with lower slopes.

‍

After we’ve picked a site, we can jump into site analysis. Looking at the left-hand tabs, we can see many ways to evaluate our location, including factors relating to economics, emissions, and fit with local human and environmental factors. These factors are then rolled into detailed project modeling, to bring the whole story together.

But let’s assume that the fundamentals look good, and so we want to move to the footprint tab as concern becomes fitting our data center to a given site.

First we check out a site, and we have a good sized potential footprint to work with, close to high voltage powerlines and data transmission cables.

‍

Let’s assume we want to build a site about 1km square, so we check out an area with our Measure area tool.

‍

It looks decent, and not built up, but let’s dig into the elevation and landscape a little more. We draw a line to measure the distance of our potential site, and we also get an elevation profile, which reveals a pretty significant variation of over 20 metres.

‍

This area looks more promising! We see less variation in the elevation profile.

‍

When we check out the area, it looks like there will be ample space here.

‍

As a project developer I’d likely now loop back to iterate on the project model, using this area analysis and all of our other data to fine tune potential cost, emissions, and planning for aspects of local fit such as protected areas. From there I would likely review details on the land parcels and owners, to get ready for external engagement.

By bringing all of this together in one place, we can pick a great site with no surprises and everything we need for our data center to succeed!

Markets are currently fixated on energy access as the near-term bottleneck for data centers... but strong underlying fundamentals are still the key to long-term asset performance.

Water access is one of those fundamental factors, and this MIT Technology Review article on data centers and water constraints in Nevada is well worth a read.

‍Elements that caught my eye:

- Direct cooling demand could reach 0.9–5.7 billion gal / yr and electricity generation could indirectly add ~15 billion, but actual figures general remain proprietary

- Tribal and local experts are working to highlight the risks of additional pressure on local systems

- Closed‑loop, water‑free air and immersion cooling could lead to meaningful demand reductionsHow does the rest of the world stack up?

Our Othersphere platform includes over 10,000 existing data centers, with World Resources Institute Aqueduct 4.0 basin‑level water stress (0‑5 scale) included as one search attribute.

Today nearly 15 % of data centers operate in the most water stressed locations (4.75 to 5), and the general distribution of data centers implies that water hasn't really mattered to siting... at least to date.

But that may be changing as:

1️⃣  Leading operators raise the bar

2️⃣  Public scrutiny climbs

3️⃣  Cooling tech continues to improve

Reach out if you want to learn more, or see how your site or company portfolio fits in into all of this.