Daniel Wolfram
No one knows what will happen if a tornado spins into a data center.
A powerful tornado swept through the plains of northern Texas on Tuesday night. Storm chasers captured footage of two separate twisters tearing through the dark landscape near Amarillo.
The first tornado touched down near the town of Claude. It spun past wind turbines at the Goodnight Wind Farm, missing a massive new building by just four miles.
That building is the Hoffman Data Center, a major facility currently under construction for Google under the official name Llano Project.
The wild weather blew in as moisture from Hurricane Polo pushed northeast from Mexico.
Data center meets tornado
Data centers are currently being built all over Texas. Figures from the U.S. Data Center show Texas holds the second-highest concentration of data centers in the nation, trailing only Virginia.
Located right in the heart of Tornado Alley, Texas faces an average of 133 tornadoes every year. That is the highest total of any state.
Despite that frequent danger, giant tech facilities have largely dodged catastrophe so far. “No large-scale data center campus has yet been directly hit by a tornado,” Data Center Dynamics (DCD) reported in July.
Structural limits
However, data centers are not immune to the elements. “Data centers, just like other buildings, can sustain significant damage if hit by a strong tornado,” explained Dan DePodwin, vice president of forecasting operations at AccuWeather.
“Building codes typically require structures to be built to withstand impacts from EF0-EF2 tornadoes, but these codes vary by building type and geographic region,” DePodwin added.
If a tornado gets upgraded to a severe EF3 on the Enhanced Fujita scale that rates the tornado’s intensity, the risk of permanently damaging a data center becomes significantly higher.
DCD also estimates that the cost would be 10-15% higher if a data center were built to take damage from an EF3 tornado.
