In the heart of Oklahoma City, ValorC3 Data Centers has created what CEO Jim Buie half-jokingly calls a “fortified castle” — a facility so robust it’s been engineered to withstand an EF5 tornado.
It’s not just a metaphor, either. With 12-inch-thick concrete walls, underground power lines, and a set of hydraulic louvres that automatically seal the building against extreme weather, this battle-ready data centre is more resilient than a prairie storm shelter with generations of grit baked into the concrete.
The logic is simple but often overlooked: infrastructure only matters if it works when you need it most. For the folks at ValorC3, that means planning for worst-case scenarios, not just the theoretical ones.
“Everything’s designed for 100% uptime,” Buie said. “If you’re a hospital with mission-critical applications or a manufacturer whose production lines depend on ERP systems, downtime isn’t an option. We’ve engineered this site for the realities of Oklahoma, tornadoes, yes, but also heat, storms, and everything in between.”
Much of the mechanical infrastructure is kept inside the structure, reversing the common approach of placing generators and cooling units in exposed yards.
Power is delivered through buried lines, removing another key vulnerability. And in the event of extreme barometric pressure or wind speed, those hydraulic louvres automatically shut the facility down tight.
The whole concept is like something out of Thunderbirds, with Buie adding: “You might as well have a moat around it.”
ValorC3 picked up the Oklahoma site through its 2023 acquisition of EdgeX Data Centers. It fits neatly into the company’s strategy of targeting underserved secondary markets, the places with growing enterprise demand but few modern, purpose-built facilities.
“It may not be New York or LA, but Oklahoma City is a major regional hub with big employers in aerospace, energy, healthcare, and manufacturing,” Buie said.”There’s real demand here, and a real gap in resilient digital infrastructure.”
Among ValorC3’s current clients is a hospital system still running critical workloads out of a 38-year-old building. Another is an enterprise customer considering a greenfield build in the Pacific Northwest, a move that would trigger ValorC3’s expansion there.
Buie said the company’s roadmap is client-driven, but he’s also eyeing the Midwest and Southeast as potential growth zones, provided there’s power and a willing local partner.
Built beyond hyperscale
What makes ValorC3’s approach stand out is its commitment to localised design. Instead of reusing blueprints from other markets, the company works with architects and engineers native to the region, people who know the environmental risks firsthand.
“In Oklahoma, we worked with firms that have built structures specifically to withstand tornadoes,” Buie explained. “If we were in California, we’d be talking about earthquakes. If we were building in Florida, we’d be designing for hurricanes.”
That mix of local expertise and enterprise-grade redundancy is part of what Buie calls “the art and science” of data centre development, and it’s at the core of ValorC3’s value proposition.
While much of the media attention on data centres focuses on hyperscale demand, ValorC3 is betting on a different driver: the evolving needs of enterprise IT.
From AI-enabled manufacturing simulations to patient data platforms in healthcare, enterprise workloads are becoming more sophisticated and more dependent on resilient, local compute infrastructure.
“These companies aren’t just after cloud capacity,” Buie says. “They need modern infrastructure that can handle complex workloads and keep running no matter what the weather throws at it.”
It’s a mission that’s equal parts pragmatic and forward-thinking. And in a market where environmental extremes are no longer exceptions but expectations, ValorC3’s Oklahoma fortress might just be a disaster-proof model for what comes next.
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