GARDEN CITY, Texas — If you travel south from Garden City on Ranch Road 33, you’ll see plenty of wind turbines and fields of farmland. However, the wide-open region is now home to something else -- 16 data-center buildings.
On Wednesday, members of the community were welcomed to a ribbon-cutting and grand opening of the brand-new data center. The roughly 125-thousand square foot facility will eventually run on 200 megawatts, and the company behind it all – Applied Digital – chose this location in West Texas for a reason.
“Inside of the buildings here we have a bunch of different compute devices that are processing transactions," Nick Phillips, EVP of operations and public affairs for Applied Digital, said. "In this case it’s for the bitcoin network for the vast majority that is here.”
Phillips says those transactions make their facilities different.
“A traditional data center requires very controlled environments," Phillips said. "It has to be exactly the right temperature, exactly the right humidity, exactly the right everything. What we do instead is we build these facilities to operate with ambient air temperatures outside, so we use the natural environment that we’re in.”
That includes our West Texas wind.
“The facilities, for example, are built in such a way that the prevailing wind goes this direction, and the buildings are lined up in the same direction so that the prevailing wind can carry away heat from the buildings," Phillips said.
Air flow is essential for the data centers to function.
“These buildings are designed to be able to take cool air in from one side of the building, bring it across filters to catch dust and debris in the air, have it go through the computer devices that I was talking about earlier and then it’s exhausted on the other side," Phillips said. "So, it’s all about cooling the equipment that’s running inside of the buildings.”
The equipment that validates transactions on the blockchain network for bitcoin are powered by the grid and another regional benefit.
“We noticed that this area here had a lot of excess energy that’s being produced by the wind turbines that were free and ready to use, or freely ready to use, I should say," said Martin Vega, site manager for Applied Digital's Garden City site.
Vega says that reality is mutually beneficial.
“What we did is we built data centers and substations that were overloaded with electricity being produced by these wind farms, and we were actually able to allow for our data center to almost be utilized as a second storage facility," Vega said. "So, with our data centers consuming this excess electricity, we actually help monitor and stabilize the grid by allowing for that energy to be diverted into this data center.”
With this multi-million-dollar project now completed, the local workforce has been helped as well.
“We [sought] to look for individuals strictly in Garden City to start our job search, and we had found an amazing result of 12-15 operators that were willing to come in and get that internal training and are now an important part of what Applied Digital is today," Vega said.
Vega mentioned that community is important to them, so they look for opportunities to contribute to it through scholarships and education funds. Vega added that they are grateful for the support they received to locate in Garden City, and as they work toward fully energizing, they are expanding job opportunities.