Company bringing data center to The Star’s old printing press said it could be KC’s tech hub
The company behind the data center coming to The Star’s former printing press near downtown Kansas City has announced its first tenant — alongside plans to expand the building into a tech co-working space.
Nebius, an artificial intelligence company based in Amsterdam, will be the first client at the soon-to-be data center in The Star’s former green glass building at 1601 McGee St. The company, which is expanding into other US cities, offers infrastructure for artificial intelligence and plans to invest more than $1 billion by mid-2025, according to a news release.
Software and data hosting company Patmos, which bills itself as a free speech-driven alternative to big tech companies, announced plans for the flagship data center last week. The center will provide technical resources to help power the intense computing needs of AI, which has a growing presence in technology and daily life.
Since the building was equipped to do large scale newspaper printing, it already had a lot of what is needed to support this type of data center.
In an interview with The Star, Patmos officials said the site was attractive for its existing power infrastructure and data room already on site, plus the space to house more than just a data center. They say the new data center will put Patmos on the cutting edge of a quickly-evolving industry.
“This building is unique in that it has a lot of power available to it, but it also gives us a lot of extra opportunities because we don’t need the entire building,” Chief Infrastructure Officer Joe Morgan said.
CEO John Johnson said the new site will be unlike any other data center, which he said are notoriously industrial eyesores.
Instead, he said, the data center will be only a small component of the site. Patmos will roll out a plan for a shared workspace for tech-minded businesses and entrepreneurs to collaborate once the data center is up and running.
“It’s a place for people to work in a community of like-minded peers and cross-pollinate and build things creatively together,” Johnson said. “I think Kansas City is really a fast-growing tech hub, and having a physical location for so much budding tech energy is going to be so good for the city.”
He called the data center a hidden economic engine in a building that will be put to great use for jobs in the community.
Patmos also plans to incorporate the building into community events, such as displaying real-time AI-generated art that one would have to be there to see it — or miss it.
The company will aim to preserve elements from The Star’s time in the two-block building and integrate them into the design, such as leaving up some of the old machinery and a wall of old Star headlines.
The Star’s 400,000 square-foot, $200 million glass and copper building opened in 2006 and featured four state-of-the-art printing presses in a growing downtown. The press printed The Star and other national and local papers.
Star employees consolidated into the building in 2018 ahead of a redevelopment of the paper’s historic headquarters, nearby at 1729 Grand Blvd., into a mixed-use building.
But The Star left the building in 2021 as part of its parent company’s bankruptcy reorganization. The Star’s office is now in Crown Center, and printing is done in Des Moines.
The Star sold the McGee Street building in 2019 to the Privitera family’s Ambassador Hospitality, LLC, which Jackson County records still list as the owner, for $30.1 million.
Officials have previously eyed the Star building site for a future downtown Royal baseball stadium. In April, Jackson County voters soundly rejected a tax that would have helped pay for a stadium on that site.
This story was originally published November 20, 2024 at 1:20 PM.