Patmos is expanding its Kansas City, Mo., presence with a second data center campus. The company is spending $1 billion to repurpose a vacant printing plant, formerly used by the Kansas City Star, into a 100-megawatt facility.
The data center and cloud provider will oversee each development phase in-house and expects to have the first 5 megawatts online next month, while over a period of 18 months it plans to have 40 megawatts ready.
Patmos’ new facility at 1601 McGee St. will have liquid and immersion cooling systems, along with rear-door heat exchangers. This is the company’s second campus in Kansas City. It also has data centers in Dallas and Phoenix.
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Ambassador Hospitality LLC owns the building, having picked it up in 2019 for $30.1 million, according to CommercialEdge data. Initially, Kansas City Star had plans to lease back the property for another 15 years, but it moved out in 2022, and the asset remained vacant until Patmos signed the agreement to occupy it, Kansas City Business Journal reported.
Midwest data center sector grows
Kansas City is one of the fastest-growing tech hubs in the U.S. The metro’s low natural disaster risk, together with its affordable green energy and robust fiber optic infrastructure contribute to it also becoming a hotspot for data center talent.
On a larger scale, the Midwest is attracting more and more investment from the data center sector. Last month, Vantage Data Centers begun work on a $2 billion development, in Columbus, Ohio—its first project in the region.
In Chicago, one of the primary data center markets, CyrusOne started construction on its second data center campus. Plans call for two buildings, encompassing 446,000 square feet, which will deliver an initial 40 megawatts.