UVA Finance Committee briefed on need for data center

The University of Virginia is planning on building its own data center to support research across a wide range of fields. The Finance Committee of the Board of Visitors got a deep dive on the needs at their meeting on the morning of March 7.

“The bottom line up front here is that we have our current data center at near maximum capacity,” said Kelly Doney, the chief information officer at UVA. “The unfortunate news is that we really are limited in our ability to expand both in terms of the physical location as well as the cooling and the power limitations that are with that current facility.”

Doney said this means delays for researchers who require computational resources. She said UVA might have difficulty attracting new talent if the issue is not addressed. The need for more data is evident as UVA keeps expanding and adding new departments and obtaining new research grants.

“We certainly have people from the School of Data Science, the National Security Data and Policy Institute, the BioComplexity Institute in Medical Engineering,” Doney said.

A new data center is planned for the Fontaine Research Park next to the Fontaine Energy Plant that is under construction. Doney said the cost estimate for construction is $72 million.

“We’re going to start with a 4 megawatt facility, but expandable out to 16 megawatts as our research needs grow,” Doney said. “We really need to start this construction by 2026. We need to be online by early 2029 in order to support the needed upgrades to keep pace with the research needs.”

Staff recommends building a facility solely for UVA’s needs rather than colocating in a commercial facility or relying on the cloud. They argue that will be cheaper in the long run and more secure.

“This has become core research infrastructure for many researchers,” said Douglas Baller, UVA’s Associate Vice President for Research Computing. “More and more fields of inquiry are becoming data intensive.”

The Finance Committee took no action but will do so at their next meeting in June when the item is expected to be added to the Major Capital Plan.

Before you go: Where do stories come from? This one comes from a meeting of a committee of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors. In any given week, I record about a dozen hours of meetings to sift through for stories. For this time around, I’m determined to get to the end of the March 2025 meeting. This is the sixth story from that meeting to be posted here. This story was originally published in the March 13, 2025 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement.