- OVHcloud’s data center strategy centers on reuse and retrofits, turning former offices, factories and industrial sites into cloud infrastructure
- OVHcloud’s Northern Virginia site earned local praise for its low community and environmental impact
- Redeveloped sites may offer a path for AI infrastructure growth as data center backlash grows
The public at large has had it with data centers – so much so that a Fierce story from 2023 about the top 10 ugliest data centers in the world is suddenly trending again. Though aesthetics are only one part of the equation, that got us thinking: is there a better way to develop data centers?
Turns out there is.
Cloud provider OVHcloud has 46 data centers live across 9 countries and 7 more planned. Two of its existing facilities are in the U.S. And surprisingly, at least one of them – a facility it has in the data center hub of Northern Virginia – has earned praise from locals for its minimal impact on the surrounding community.
During a March 2024 meeting of the Fauquier County Board of Supervisors, local resident Tim Hoffman expressed concerns about more data centers coming to the area and argued new facilities should follow the “good example” set by OVHcloud’s Vint Hill campus. He stated OVH’s facility is “architecturally acceptable, sited properly and produces no adverse effects to the environment or our adjacent neighborhoods.”
“As far as I’m concerned it has been a good neighbor,” he added. Hoffman was not the only one to say that about the facility, either.
But what is different about this particular data center in a region full of them? It’s neither towering nor new.
Going retro
Jeffrey Gregor, General Manager of OVHcloud in the U.S., told Fierce OVH’s Vint Hill campus is a repurposed single-story office building that was once used by the U.S. Army, Federal Aviation Administration and Central Intelligence Agency. Its facility in Hillsboro, Oregon, he added, is in a retrofitted pipe organ factory.
OVHcloud has repurposed buildings for its international data centers as well. Its Beauharnois, Canada, facility is in an old aluminum plant that sits right next to a hydropower station; its Limburg, Germany, campus is in an old printing factory; and its Gravelines, France, facility is in another old aluminum plant.
Gregor said as the industry grapples with increasing backlash, a new playbook is starting to emerge around how to build more sustainably. But OVHcloud, he said, has been doing this all along.
“Typically, when we decide to put in a data center, we don’t build one from the ground up. It’s not new construction,” he said. “We don’t have to come in and build this eyesore and monstrosity and create whole new infrastructure. There’s already some infrastructure that we could just reuse and repurpose.”
The concept of reuse, recycling and operating sustainably isn’t new for OVHcloud. Gregor noted the company has used closed-loop, direct-to-chip cooling in its data centers since 2003, a move that has allowed its facilities to use both less water and less electricity.
“Everybody else is waking up to it saying ‘hey, we have to figure out how to do this,’” Gregor said.
The catch
Putting OVHcloud’s approach into practice for some could be easier said than done.
Gregor said most of its facilities are one story and have been designed from the ground up to factor in liquid cooling. For folks looking to retrofit existing multi-story data centers, retrofitting can be tricky due to limited space for new piping and limited weight thresholds on upper floors, he said.
Gregor added that OVHcloud’s facilities are generally much smaller than the 500 MW or gigawatt campuses hyperscalers are building now. Its Vint Hill facility, for example, has a site capacity of 18-20 MW.
It goes without saying that it would be much harder to find an existing site and power source for data centers at such scale. But there’s something to be said for redeveloping existing sites to accommodate data center growth.
In a recent report, PwC noted “data center developers can shorten project timelines by building at existing industrial sites that already have grid connections and energy infrastructure.” In addition to supplying existing grid connections – which can take years to secure for new builds – these redevelopment locations are sometimes supported by government programs.
“Savvy developers are expanding their selection criteria and seeking out industrial sites in areas outside established data center clusters,” the report noted.
Redevelopment of smaller buildings could also prove a perfect solution for distributed compute requirements for inferencing in a world where new data center developments are increasingly frowned upon.
Read more about data center development here:
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