Gensler designs 60-building data center in Utah

May 15. Gensler has released the first images of the Stratos Hyperscale Data Center in Box Elder County, Utah. The project: 60 buildings across a 7.5-gigawatt campus, designed for infrastructure firm O'Leary Digital. The scale puts it among the largest data centers globally.

The renders show low-slung volumes in desert context. No decorative gestures. The architecture reads as pure logistics: cooling infrastructure, backup power arrays, repetition across the site. Gensler's role here is not design-as-statement but design-as-system. The question is whether the firm can make logistics legible at this scale without defaulting to generic shed typology.

Data centers have become architecture's quietest megaprojects. They don't announce themselves the way stadiums or airports do, but the operational demands are comparable. Stratos will require cooling, power distribution, and redundancy systems designed for continuous operation. The renders suggest a modular approach, each building a variation on a template rather than a standalone object.

Box Elder County is an unusual choice. The site is two hours north of Salt Lake City, in open terrain with access to power infrastructure but not much else. The location logic is operational, not urban: low land cost, proximity to transmission lines, climate favorable to cooling. The architecture follows that logic. No context to respond to, so the buildings respond to themselves.

The project timeline has not been disclosed. O'Leary Digital released the images without a construction start date or phasing plan. For now, this is speculative infrastructure, rendered but not yet real.