Vertical Data Centers Face Cost-Proximity Trade-Offs
Data Center Knowledge, Monday, October 5th, 2026
A proposed 20-story Kansas City data center tests whether urban proximity justifies higher build costs.
A proposed 20-story downtown Kansas City data center designed by SOM would stack compute, power and cooling on a 0.23-acre parcel, trading suburban sprawl for carrier-rich connectivity close to users.
The developer argues that latency-sensitive inference and dense interconnection justify the central location.
IDC and JLL experts note that vertical construction carries cost and operational premiums that only certain workloads, such as low-latency financial trading, may justify.