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!

OpenAI is looking for new sites around the world for the next Stargate facilities. Is your jurisdiction a good fit?

‍The ability to rapid search the globe for ideal infrastructure locations based on the characteristics of a site or asset is just one of the user powers made possible by the Othersphere platform.

See here for a short video walkthrough of the Stargate 1 site in our Explorer tool.

In this quick example we instantly find the locations that are a close match with the initial Stargate 1 site in Abilene, Texas—characterized by excellent access to critical infrastructure, low power and gas prices, and a business-friendly operating environment, relative to middle-of-the-pack metrics on factors such as regional water scarcity, grid carbon intensity, and proximity to end users.

But is this the only type of location that can serve the future of AI? Absolutely not.

Are there locations that are even better than Stargate 1? Absolutely, especially as ‘better’ is all in the eye of the beholder.

Each developer, operator, utility, and government will take a different approach to building out the future of compute, and our global search engine for infrastructure enables you to test your own strategies quickly and efficiently.

Want to understand if you have a location that Stargate 1 stakeholders such as OpenAI, Crusoe, Oracle, Microsoft, Blue Owl Capital, J.P. Morgan, SoftBank, MGX, Newmark, or Primary Digital Infrastructure may be interested in?

Want to understand the types of locations that might be appealing to others?

Want to blaze a new trail entirely?

If you want to move fast but not break things, reach out to learn more.