Kansas City Council decides fate of proposed 20-story downtown data center
The Kansas City Council on Thursday knocked down a controversial proposal to build a data center skyscraper in downtown. Miami-based Revitalization Unlimited, a real estate investment fund focused on historic properties, proposed earlier this year building a 384-foot, 20-story tower made of brick and glass at 934 Central St., occupied mostly by data center equipment with a retail space on the ground floor, for a business such as a coffee shop. The development plan needed special zoning approval under city code. The project would have involved demolishing the historic Western Newspaper Union building, which has more recently been used for offices and short-term rentals. The developers have said the project was designed to complement the neighborhood, and its character and would be more akin to a telephone exchange from a previous era than a large industrial hyperscale facility. Downtown Kansas City already has a handful of data centers, include in the Star’s former green glass building in the Crossroads. They have said the noise level would be similar to an office building, while the data center would use a closed-loop cooling system that limits water use and would primarily use natural gas fuel cells to produce electricity through a chemical
