Can Data Centres Ever Be Good Architecture? The Profession Weighs In

"Data centers are, in general, an example of poor design." That verdict comes from Marina Otero Verzier, the Spanish academic who won the 2022 Wheelwright Prize for her theories on data centres, speaking to Dezeen as the AI-driven construction boom forces the profession to confront a building type it has largely ignored.

Over the past two years, the huge, boxy buildings that house the servers powering cloud computing and artificial intelligence have provoked backlash across partisan lines in the United States. Plans announced across suburban and rural America have animated the population to a degree few building types ever achieve.

The numbers explain why. Nearly 70 per cent of the US population opposes data centre construction, according to a recent poll. Yet the country is set to double its data centre building to keep pace with the AI boom, and global spending on data centre infrastructure is projected to top $800 billion per year in 2026.

Sidelined architects

Architects have been largely absent from the trend. Otero Verzier argues that must change if these structures are to become positive, or at least neutral, contributors to the built environment.

"Architects should be involved in the design of the building – from the materials used to the metabolic relations it establishes with the environment and communities – as well as in thinking about their public nature as repositories of collective knowledge and their broader urban and territorial planning," she told Dezeen.

Even some developers concede the point. Daniel English, co-founder and managing partner of Legacy Investing, a real estate firm specialising in data centres, believes architects were sidelined in early designs because the buildings were treated as engineering projects.

"Architects have a ton of value to add to the data center conversation, and I think that they got left out because it was possible to build buildings just based on efficiency," he said. "Data centres are so new that we're still figuring out what they look like."

English frames the challenge pragmatically: "It's not like we're not going to have data centers. The conversation today should be how to make sure that these are thoughtfully integrated into our lives."

Facades first

At present, architect involvement often comes from corporate firms large enough to run full data centre divisions. Gensler is one design-forward firm competing for such commissions. It is designing a 7.5 GW hyperscale data centre in Utah for O'Leary Digital and a cluster of five data centres for Menlo Digital in Arizona. Renders show striated facades to match the desert mountains in Utah and Corten steel in Arizona.

"I think with good design, with proper architectural gestures, you can either make these buildings blend in or stand out, and I think that it's going to come up more and more as these buildings need to become a little bit more local," said Gensler critical facilities practice leader Rob LoBuono.

"The architecture of the building does matter," LoBuono continued. "We really do find that a well-designed building has a strong impact in the community, even if the current opinion of them is, you know, fluid."

Otero Verzier rejects the idea that facades are where the profession's contribution should end. "The idea that the most architects can do is design a facade is quite sad and says more about the lack of ambition of the profession than about the reality of data centres," she said. "If, as a profession, we want to be completely irrelevant, then we can focus on designing facades for data centres."

Urban integration

During the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, Grimshaw presented an integrated urban plan built around data centre development, informed by a real project with developer Goodman. The proposal positions the data centre as "the catalyst of a mixed-use renewal precinct – next to homes, studios, shops and even an urban farm", with waste heat pumped back into surrounding buildings.

"Close quarters aren't a liability; they're the key that lets resources circulate instead of being wasted," said Grimshaw in the brief.

The biggest developers are not paying much attention. Tom Kruger, director of data centres at Corgan, said integrating data centres within other structures and wider developments is an "exception and not the rule". Security and power concerns keep remote locations preferred. "A big part of that is aiming for security and sound isolation," he told Dezeen.

English offered a different analogy: parking infrastructure. "Parking to me is an interesting analogy because parking can be an entire building; it can be part of a building," he said. "In that way, compute can be part of a building; it can be a whole building."

Building tall, building differently

Some developers are pushing beyond the horizontal spread. SOM has designed a data centre skyscraper in Kansas City, where rural zoning laws made sprawling hyperscale centres difficult. Architects Dezeen spoke to, however, said building tall makes little sense given the cost and sensitivity of servers, the need for easy maintenance and the speed of construction.

Other approaches are emerging. Terawulf plans a data centre in a decommissioned Kentucky smelter. Microsoft has built data centres using mass timber, and the buildings' energy demands have revived talk of nuclear energy integration in the United States.

Kruger, who has worked in the field for 16 years, expects data centres to become more "elevated" architecturally, mainly through energy-efficient technologies.

Otero Verzier envisions a more radical future: distributed, public "repositories" of knowledge rather than commercial concentrations. "As long as data centres start being designed with attention to the diverse ecologies of data – cold, hot, long-lasting, and temporary, open, public or private – to the limits and rhythms of the planet and its inhabitants, we can begin to develop more relevant architectures that do not necessarily look like closed-off boxes or bunkers, but instead take the form of public institutions," she said.

With the AI boom still inflating — investors including Michael Burry have warned the bubble may burst — the building continues regardless. Whether developers concerned about their buildings' reception extend that concern to how they function remains the open question.