Technology History | The Spheres — A Cloud Forest Heated by Somebody Else's Servers

Amazon's indoor cloud forest is warmed by the exhaust of a data centre it does not own.

The Spheres opened on 30 January 2018: three linked glass domes on Lenora Street, 2,643 panes carried on a steel frame, the largest dome about 130 feet across.

Inside are roughly 40,000 plants, more than 400 species gathered from over 30 countries, kept in cloud-forest conditions by full-time horticulturists.

Heating that through a Seattle winter would normally mean burning gas.

Instead, water runs under the street from the Westin Building Exchange, the 34-storey carrier hotel across the way that houses the Seattle Internet Exchange and the equipment of several hundred networks.

By Amazon's own account the water arrives at about 65°F, too cool to heat anything, so five heat-reclaim chillers concentrate it to roughly 130°F before it enters the campus loop.

The Seattle Times reported in 2015 that the arrangement would serve just over four million square feet of Amazon buildings and save around four million kilowatt-hours a year.

Waste-heat reuse is not new. What is unusual here is the property line: the servers belong to another company, so the heat is bought from a neighbour rather than recycled inside one owner's walls.

An engineer on the project put it plainly enough — to Amazon the carrier hotel works as a boiler, and to the carrier hotel Amazon's campus works as a cooling tower.

There is a straight line from that pipe back to the business. The company that rents computing by the hour is heated by the by-product of computing, sold by the building where much of Seattle's internet traffic changes hands.

Most of the interior is employee workspace, not a public conservatory, and it is worth knowing that before you travel.

Understory, the free exhibit at the base on 7th Avenue, needs no reservation. Entry to the domes themselves is limited to booked slots on a couple of Saturdays each month, so check the current schedule before you build a day around it.

Photo: Steven Pavlov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons