There is a photograph circulating on X that stops you mid scroll. A data centre, rendered in AI, built like a medieval fortress. Thick stone walls, battlements, the works. It looks absurd. It also looks, in a strange way, rather good.
Which probably tells you something about how we feel about the buildings actually going up.
The Box in the Field
Data centres are, as a rule, ugly. Not aggressively ugly, not interestingly ugly, just blank. Enormous grey rectangles dropped into business parks and green field sites with all the architectural ambition of a distribution warehouse. They are designed to process, not to be seen, and it shows.
The problem is that we are about to build a very large number of them. The AI boom is driving demand at a pace that has planners, communities, and power grids scrambling to keep up. These buildings are not going away. If anything, they are going to become one of the defining structures of the next twenty years, the way factories defined the nineteenth century and office towers defined the twentieth.
The question is whether we have to accept that they look like nothing at all.
52 Per Cent Said No
It turns out that more than half of Americans actively oppose having a data centre built near their home. That figure comes from research cited in a Gensler blog post, and it is not hard to understand why. A windowless concrete box that hums constantly, draws enormous amounts of power, and offers nothing to the surrounding community is a difficult sell to any neighbourhood.
The response from some architects and developers has been to take the aesthetics seriously. Not as an afterthought, but as a genuine part of the brief. There is a loose movement, sometimes called Techno Deco, that draws on Art Deco influences, textured facades, geometric ornamentation, and materials that actually engage with their surroundings, to make these buildings feel like they belong somewhere rather than nowhere.
60 Hudson Street in New York has been doing this since the 1930s, unintentionally. A landmark Art Deco tower built as a telephone exchange, it now functions as one of the most important internet hubs in the world. Nobody protests it. People photograph it. There is a lesson in there somewhere.
Stone and Thermal Mass
Here is where it gets genuinely interesting, and where the joke about medieval fortresses starts to look less like a joke.
Carl Fredrik Svenstedt Architects have proposed a concept called Stone Clouds: data centres built from structural granite, shaped like oval towers, designed to sit in European landscapes the way cathedrals and mills once did. Planning permission for the first one has been secured near Stockholm Arlanda Airport, with construction due to start this year.
The stone is not decorative. Thick granite walls have high thermal mass, meaning they absorb heat slowly and release it slowly, which provides natural, passive temperature regulation for the servers inside. This matters enormously because cooling is one of the biggest energy costs in any data centre. Spend more on the building and you spend less on the electricity bill, every single year, for as long as the building stands. Granite also has a significantly lower carbon footprint than concrete, and it lasts considerably longer.
This writer lives in a house with stone walls over three feet thick. Our Welsh summers may not be a match for Arizona, but on the hot days we do get, it stays cool without a single air conditioning unit. The building is doing the work that a machine would otherwise have to do. That principle scales.
The Mine, the Bedrock, and the Forest
Stone Clouds is not alone. Lefdal Mine Datacenter in Norway operates inside a former mineral mine, using cold fjord water for cooling. Verne Global in Finland has carved nine tunnel halls into solid bedrock. Gensler has drawn up plans for Microsoft data centres built from cross laminated timber.
These are not exercises in nostalgia. They are practical responses to a real problem. The most energy hungry buildings on the planet need to get cheaper to run, and the most durable, thermally stable materials available are often the oldest ones.
The AI castle on X was a fantasy. But it was pointing, without quite knowing it, at something that is already being built.
The Case Against
It would be dishonest not to mention the complications. Stone is expensive to work with. Skilled stonemasons are not easy to find, and Doric columns do not mill themselves. The timescales for sourcing, cutting, and assembling structural granite are longer than pouring concrete, and the data centre industry is not known for patience.
There is also the question of whether aesthetics alone change much. A beautiful building that still draws the power of a small town and generates heat that needs somewhere to go is still a significant imposition on any landscape. Good design helps. It does not solve everything.
Worth Asking For
None of that means the default has to be a grey box.
Communities have more influence over planning decisions than they often realise, and the evidence suggests that better designed data centres face less opposition, get built faster, and sit more comfortably in their surroundings for decades. The industry is beginning to understand this. Some of the more thoughtful developers are ahead of it already.
The AI image on X was absurd. But it started a conversation worth having. The buildings that house the internet are going to be with us for a very long time. It seems reasonable to ask that they be worth looking at.
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