A data centre stacked twenty storeys into a downtown block

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill has designed a 20-storey data centre at 934 Central Street in downtown Kansas City, on a site of just 0.23 acres — the inverse of the single-storey sheds the sector usually builds on cheap land outside cities. The developer is Miami-based Revitalization Unlimited, and the building would replace the Western Newspaper Union Building; it went before the Planning Commission on 5 August 2026.

The scheme is described as a vertical closed loop of power, water and cooling, with water cycled internally, evaporative cooling at the bulkhead and on-site natural gas fuel cells intended to run fully independent of the grid. Earth-coloured masonry and glass, plus 436 square metres of ground-floor retail, are meant to settle it into the street. The sharper decision is structural: an external core and generous floor-to-floor heights leave the building convertible to residential or mixed use later, which data centre shells almost never are.