Cleveland has rejected — for now — a 150-megawatt data center in the Slavic Village neighborhood, and City Council is considering a moratorium on new data centers.
That doesn’t mean the city is data center-free, however. Downtown Cleveland is home to several smaller data centers known as “carrier hotels” or “colocation centers.” They’re tucked away in office buildings and a former factory.
In Cleveland, they don’t require as much electricity as do the hyperscale facilities that are powering the artificial intelligence boom. Think of them as a cross between self-storage companies for data and telephone switchboards for the internet.
“Your internet connection at home, the apps that you use, how you make phone calls, how you interact with any app, it’s generally going through a carrier hotel,” said David Dunn, the chief operating officer of H5 Data Centers, which operates a carrier hotel in Cleveland.
These data centers lease space for business and government servers, offering a secure place for clients to host networks and back up data in case of disasters.
They also serve as way stations in the web of fiber cables and hardware that make up the internet. Carrier hotels link long-distance fiber to local fiber networks, bringing internet service providers together.
Signal Cleveland spoke with the operators of three local data centers and toured one for a look at these facilities, which are lesser known but more established than their hyperscale counterparts.
H5: a nondescript presence in Cleveland with plans to grow
There’s only one eye-catching feature at H5’s Cleveland data center on Rockwell Avenue: a large red Rock and Roll Hall of Fame mural that quotes Bob Marley’s “One Love” above the parking lot.
Otherwise, the gray building — once home to a manufacturer — is almost anonymous. Opaque windows face townhomes across Rockwell. An H5 sign on a locked gate tells visitors to use a call box to enter. Another sign near a door warns, “Absolutely no loitering.” A faint hum, at times drowned out by traffic, can be heard from the street.
Dunn likens carrier hotels to airports, where local travelers come on buses, trains and cars to hop on flights that take them across the country and the world.
“Let’s say you’re emailing with a friend and they’re in Thailand,” he said. “Your email is going to get aggregated to a carrier hotel, go to another carrier hotel, hop skip and a jump, go over subsea cables that are laid down across the ocean.”
H5’s website lists such companies as Verizon and Charter Communications, also known as Spectrum, among the internet carriers at the Cleveland site. Amazon and Akamai Technologies — which delivers video for streaming services — also have a presence there, according to the user-maintained database PeeringDB.
The center in Cleveland does not host AI computing power, but an AI company is setting up a network there to connect with users, Dunn said. H5 offers space for businesses to maintain servers of their own.
The center’s air conditioning system uses a closed loop of chilled water to keep the space cool, Dunn said.
One way that data centers measure electricity usage is known as critical power or IT load. That’s the power needed to run the information technology systems, but not other functions such as lighting or cooling, according to H5.
H5 is hooked up to FirstEnergy power. Dunn said the company doesn’t necessarily disclose its critical capacity, but estimated that it was around 8 megawatts, including infrastructure built out by tenants.
Comparisons between data center wattage and home electricity use can vary. On average, an Ohio home uses almost 1.6 kilowatts of energy at any given time in July, the highest month for usage, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration shows. A kilowatt is one thousandth of a megawatt.
That would mean 625 homes use a megawatt of power at a given time, generally speaking. But home energy use can fluctuate higher, bringing down the number of houses that megawatt could theoretically power. By Dunn’s back-of-the-envelope estimate, H5’s roughly 8 megawatts equates to 1,000 to 2,500 homes.
Expansion planned at a longtime node on the internet
Once known as the Cleveland Technology Center, the building on Rockwell has long served as a telecommunications hub. Cleveland sits on an important internet thoroughfare between Chicago and New York, Dunn said.
More than 25 years ago, Miami-based Terremark bought the property to turn it into a center for internet service providers, The Plain Dealer reported in 2000. Data center company ByteGrid bought the building on Rockwell in 2013 and sold it to H5 in 2017.
H5 received a 15-year sales tax break from the state valued at about $20 million, News 5 Cleveland reported. The company pays more than $1.1 million in property taxes on its main building each year, records show. It has about 20 to 25 employees, plus another 15 or so who work for tenants, Dunn said.
Now H5 is looking to grow its Cleveland footprint. As first reported by NEOTrans, H5 is seeking a city permit to demolish storefronts it owns on St. Clair Avenue to expand its generator yard. The firm also plans a $30 million expansion within its current footprint, according to a project application filed with the city this month.
Dunn defends his industry as talk of data center bans grows.
“If the U.S. said, every city was like, ‘No more data centers,’ well, they’d go to Canada, they’d go to Mexico, they’d go God knows where, and we wouldn’t have it,” he said. “That would be a shame.”
BlueBridge: home to Cuyahoga County government servers and more
Rows of servers whir loudly from racks locked inside blue cages at BlueBridge’s downtown data center. A crisscross of trays overhead carries copper and fiber wires throughout the facility.
BlueBridge offers its clients cloud storage, space for customer-owned servers, cybersecurity and connections to internet providers and other web services. It’s a 2.1 megawatt center, according to Kevin Goodman, the company’s managing director and partner.
Large air conditioning units cool the room and keep the servers from overheating. In a corner of the room, wide tubes wrapped in black plastic deliver air to the units. The units use glycol, not water, to dispel heat.
Founded in 2004, the company occupies nearly two floors of the Sterling Building at East 13th Street and Euclid Avenue in Playhouse Square. It also runs data centers in Mayfield Heights and Columbus.
Goodman said he is “listening loud and clear to the protesters” of data centers and tries to be conscious of his facility’s environmental impact. As for the tax breaks that the state awarded to data centers, Goodman said his industry will still build centers without them.
“This is money that the government should receive for the common good,” he said.
BlueBridge counts private companies and governments among its customers. Cuyahoga County, the county prosecutor’s office and the State of Ohio house servers with BlueBridge. When the Cleveland Museum of Art launched the interactive ArtLens exhibit, it looked to BlueBridge and another data center in Columbus to store its digital collection.
“Overarching reality is we live in a web and data-centered world, and data is the lifeblood of companies, firms, institutions, law enforcement, government, etc.,” Goodman said. “The necessity of data and the safe, secure, compliant operation of that is a must.”
The data center sits behind layers of locked doors. Cameras monitor the rows of server racks. Like other data centers, BlueBridge maintains backup generators to keep power flowing in the case of a FirstEnergy outage.
Cuyahoga County relies on BlueBridge for connections, cooling, security and fire suppression that county government couldn’t provide on its own for in-house servers, county Chief Information Officer Andy Johnson said.
The county connects to its internet providers AT&T and Verizon at BlueBridge. County servers at the data center host internal applications, such as one used for property appraisals. Even the county website is partially hosted at BlueBridge, although there are plans to move to cloud servers, Johnson said.
BlueBridge is doing AI computing at its Cleveland and Columbus centers, Goodman said. He also plans to rearrange his offices in the Sterling Building in Cleveland to more room for BlueBridge’s cloud computing service.
“Physically we’re going to be out of space real soon,” he said.
Northeast Ohio prepares for a new era of data centers
A few floors down from BlueBridge is DataBank, another data center company with a carrier hotel in Cleveland. DataBank’s toehold in Cleveland is relatively small. It has an IT load of 0.4 megawatts.
“That facility does not have anywhere near the capabilities that would be able to support AI environments,” said Shawn Barth, DataBank’s vice president of sales. “That’s more of your traditional data center from 20, 30 years ago.”
If that represents the past, Northeast Ohio officials are now bracing for what’s to come. Data centers and tech companies have rapidly expanded elsewhere in the state.
Cuyahoga County released guidelines this month to help the county’s 59 municipalities manage the arrival of new data centers. The county recommends confirming that the developer will pay for electrical grid upgrades and evaluating the project’s expected water use.
“Communities are just not prepared to manage the growth of data centers,” county Sustainability Chief Jenita McGowan said. “They’re either outright refusing to allow them when they have that choice or they’re just taking whatever they can get. And so we really think there’s maybe more of a middle way.”
