The new Aligned SLC02 data center in scenic West Jordan, Utah. (Photo: Aligned)
The climate in Utah that supports using fresh air for cooling for about 75 to 80 percent of the year, which reduces cooling costs. But weather isn’t the only factor attracting data center projects to the Salt Lake City region, which sits on long-haul fiber routes, and has affordable power. Salt Lake City’s cost profile has been boosted by economic incentives that opened sales tax abatements on data center equipment to tenants of colocation space.
Salt Lake City now has several major data center campuses, including single-tenant sites for Facebook, eBay and the National Security Agency, as well as a multi-tenant facilities for DataBank, Flexential and newcomer Novva Data Centers.
But no one is building bigger than Aligned, which earlier this year opened its second data center on its Salt Lake Campus, a 240,000 square foot, 48-megawatt facility that can be expanded to 60 megawatts (MWs).
Large, expandable buildings provide customers with the flexibility to add new capacity in large chunks. In a period of rapid growth for Internet services, hyperscale operators are seeking runway to accommodate accelerated growth that can be unpredictable. This need was reinforced during the early weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, as demand for cloud services surged rapidly as users shifted activity online during government-imposed lockdowns.
Aligned operates data center campuses in Dallas, Phoenix, Salt Lake City and Ashburn, Virginia. The company recently lined up $250 million in additional expansion capital, expanding its sustainability-linked senior credit line to $1.25 billion.
Each Aligned data hall includes a cooling wall featuring vertical stacks of its Delta Cube cooling units, which are about 4 feet wide and house multiple fan coils, allowing them to cool workloads of up to 50 kW per cabinet. The wall also contains space that allows for additional rows of Delta Cube units to be installed, providing additional capacity within the data hall.
