The Mother of All Motherboards: Skyscrapers in Iceland to Store the World’s Data

Two Italian architects, Valeria Mercuri and Marco Merletti, recently won third place in eVolo’s 2016 Skyscraper Competition for their project ‘Data Tower.’ While much attention was given to the first-place winners, Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu, for their horizontal skyscraper wrapping around the perimeter of a sunken Central Park, Mercuri and Merletti stepped away from the traditional urban setting for skyscrapers to address the very pressing issue of increasing internet traffic and data storage.

According to Cisco servers, by the end of 2016, annual global IP traffic will reach the zettabyte threshold — a figure approximating to two billion years’ worth of music. An ADEME study also reveals that a 100-person company alone produces an average of 13.6 tons of carbon dioxide each year simply from sending internal emails, which demonstrates every individual’s contribution to this endlessly growing base of data.

These figures offered the groundwork for Mercuri and Merletti’s proposal, though neither of them are experts in the field of urban IT infrastructure. While the construction of their project is not currently planned, it is sure to interest many of the internet’s main actors, as their ecological impacts are increasingly being put in question with changing climates and growing user networks.

Currently, data centers are massive industrial buildings that expand over large plots of land and have very high carbon footprints due to the energy required to cool down the servers that drive so much electrical power. Inspired by the form of a computer motherboard, Mercuri and Merletti’s project proposes to both solve the problem of energy consumption in current data centers as well as offer an architectural edge to the building, bringing attention to the function and reality of data storage.

Mercuri and Merletti’s project consists of a model for a 980-foot-tall (300-meter-tall) skyscraper that would house 400,000 modular servers. These units will be placed along the walls of the tower, allowing for air circulation to ventilate the whole building from the bottom up — as in a smokestack — easy access for maintenance through an internal elevator and a flexible system for growing the capacity of the center as necessary.

Part of the hot air produced by the units serves to heat the laboratories and greenhouses located in the basement of the tower, while the rest is released through the central corridor. The architects also propose a way to store the heat during the winter, so as to provide warmth to neighboring houses.

The architects picked Iceland for the site of their proposal due to its cold temperatures, which make for ideal conditions to naturally cool the entrails of a building as heat-productive as a data center. Iceland also holds important production centers for hydroelectricity and geothermal energy, demonstrating its key status as a green and affordable ecosystem.