México: ServerDomes plans dome-shaped data facilities across Mexican fiber line

US university subsidiary  ServerDomes will build aluminum dome data centers along a new Mexican fiber route. ServerDomes, a 2017 geodesic design from Portland, has partnered with Mexican infrastructure provider Fermaca Infraestructura.

Fermaca will have exclusive rights to create ServerDomes-designed data centers for customers. The Mexican company's affiliate, Fermaca Networks, is building a 1,950km dark fiber network from the US-Mexico border to the west and central areas of Mexico for Q4 2025. Fermaca Infraestructura will build ServerDomes-designed Edge data centers along the new fiber line, although it has not said how many or where.

ServerDomes was spun off from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU), which built a geodesic dome-covered aluminum facility in Hillsboro, Oregon, in 2014 that used ecological convection to cool servers with no air conditioning, exhaust fans, dehumidifiers, chillers, or CRACs. ServerDomes says this saves 27% of a similar facility's power and 92% of its water.

The original 8,000-square-foot, 4MW data center spent 0.2MW on non-IT equipment. The Tier III module supports 168 52u racks. The dome's air intakes are at the bottom, and vents are at the top. An airfoil improves emissions, like Yahoo's ‘chicken coop,’ and a ‘vegetative bio-swale’ around the building adds cooling and airflow.

The business says liquid cooling can improve rack densities to 40kW in a 52u layout and accommodate 25kW of hardware. The “lights out” facility has a yearly PUE of 1.13 and an average WUE of 0.1 L/Kwh.

The initial project cost $22 million, according to a previous report from the Portland Business Journal.