- New entrants in the data center area are building some facilities in less than ideal locations
- These decisions could leave data centers underwater – literally – as flood risks increase
- Proper planning and knowledgeable staff can help mitigate many weather-related uptime threats
Tornadoes, hurricanes and floods, oh my! As power and land constraints push new data center projects outside traditional urban hubs, builders are facing a new threat: extreme weather.
According to Synergy Research Group’s count, there are currently 504 known data center projects in the construction pipeline. Based on where hyperscalers are buying up hundreds of acres of land, it looks like a fair chunk of these will be built in areas like Ohio, Indiana, Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas and Iowa. There’s just one problem. These remote locations are more prone to natural disasters like tornadoes, earthquakes, floods and ice storms than legacy data center hubs.
Google, for instance, just scooped up several hundred acres to build a data center in Stillwater, Okla. – an area smack dab in the middle of the so-called “Tornado Alley.” In 2024, there were 152 confirmed tornadoes in Oklahoma, a figure up from 74 in 2023 and which topped the previous record of 149 set in 2019.
While a direct hit may be unlikely, the choice begs the question: is it possible to tornado-proof a data center? Google declined to comment but another data center operator – ValorC3 – told Fierce the answer is, "Yes."
The company actually has a data center facility in Oklahoma City that it retrofitted last year to withstand an EF5 tornado with winds up to 310 miles per hour. ValorC3 CEO Jim Buie told Fierce that upgrade included installing 12-inch thick reinforced concrete walls, a hardened roof, on-site indoor generators and advanced battery storage.
He added the incremental cost of doing so wasn’t “as much as you would think.” Buie said ValorC3 was able to make the updates with costs in-line with industry averages (which are around $10 million to $12 million per megawatt).
The data center opportunity
Interestingly, both Buie and Flexential COO Ryan Mallory pointed to floods as a larger and growing threat.
“There are a lot of new players in the industry who have maybe a commercial real estate background and sometimes they choose suboptimal locations for fire or flood risk,” Buie said.
“You really have to study the flood plain,” he added, noting ValorC3 only builds above 100-year event flood plains.
Why? Well, as Mallory explained, the environment is changing and flooding doesn’t just come from rivers. It also comes from events like derechos in the Midwest and hurricanes along the East Coast. The latter in recent years have increasingly taken aim at traditionally “safe” cities like New York and Tampa.
“Even 100 to 500-year flood plains just aren’t a as predictable as they once were,” Mallory said. “That’s the biggest concern, flood plains. People are becoming too aggressive in trying to capture near term opportunity and you need to look at the 100, 500-year flood plains.”
Managing data center threats
Of course, there are also threats like earthquakes, ice storms and fires. While earthquakes can’t necessarily be predicted, they can – for the most part – be avoided by skirting known fault lines. Ice storms, meanwhile, can be mitigated with proper planning for redundant connectivity and backup power generation.
Fire, Mallory said, is the one threat you can’t really do much about. Sure, you can create a defensive offset area where there’s no burnable material or use fire resistant concrete or paint, but that’s pretty well the upper limit of what can be done in terms of prevention.
Perhaps the biggest move any data center builder can make is getting the right people in place to react appropriately when things go wrong. But as Mallory noted, that can be a problem for data centers located in remote areas without the necessary infrastructure (think schools, grocery stores and entertainment) to attract transplants.
“The big challenge that we’re going to have here within the next three to four years isn’t on the natural disaster side…it’s around the staffing,” Mallory said, pointing to how long it took for Google and AWS to really establish themselves in Iowa. “There’s a lot of power in the Dakotas and there’s a lot of power in northern Iowa. But being able to have a qualified employee base is going to be really difficult and that’s the challenge.”