Hunt's most obvious obstacle was finding clients. "What turns me on is when 20 of your best friends tell you it won't work," Hunt said. The cost was estimated at between $20 million and $100 million. Instead, the two warehouses, totaling about 170,000 square feet, would be converted, with the floors raised at least 2½ feet so that a constant stream of cool air could be blown beneath the servers.Ĭonverting the warehouses was not going to be easy - or cheap. The idea was not to use the tunnels for storing data - the risk of underground water was too great.
And Collider Data Center had the potential to join their ranks. There are only about a dozen such data centers in the United States today. All hardware in the highest category, Tier 4, must have dual power inputs, so the center can perform maintenance or withstand at least one unplanned power failure without affecting performance. The Uptime Institute, in Santa Fe, New Mexico, divides data centers into four tiers. Its two warehouses can support floor loads of 500 pounds per square foot, perfect for the enormous servers that Hunt intended to buy. It sits on an independent power grid capable of delivering 10 megawatts of power (and up to 100 megawatts if needed), and it has its own dedicated fiber optic line. The complex, at Waxahachie, about 40 miles south of Dallas, is accessible in case of emergency by service roads linking it with I-35.
The collider is clear of flight paths and out of hurricane, tsunami, earthquake and flood zones. To mitigate the risk of hazardous material passing nearby, it selected land 5 miles from the nearest truck route and 4 miles from the nearest rail line. You cannot build a particle accelerator just anywhere, and the Department of Energy had chosen its site carefully. And it mattered little that he knew nothing about either particle accelerators or data storage. Collider Data Center was one of the many exciting things he had to look forward to after his daily morning prayers. Hunt was juggling more than a dozen business ventures at the time - drilling for oil in Arkansas, importing tractors from South Korea, transporting containers and building homes. (Shortly before Hunt resigned as chairman of his trucking company in 1993, Forbes estimated his net worth at $415 million.) This author interviewed Hunt soon after his purchase while researching a book about America's richest people. Until the summer of 2006, when the Pinnacle Group, a development company of which Hunt was a partner, bought the site for just $6.5 million.
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There have been rumors about alternative uses for the site - a movie studio, a recording complex, even an anti-terrorism training facility - but they all came to nothing.
In the offices, a 1990 Ellis County telephone directory titled Super Collider Country can still be found on a desk, and the head-shot of a 1980s pinup girl flashes a suggestive look from a wall. Shattered glass litters the entrance to one building, while tile panels are missing from the ceiling of another. The complex was handed over to Ellis County, and a 10-year period of stagnation began. After the project was shut down the tunnel shafts were filled and the warehouses abandoned. Today, the abandoned site stands as a haunting monument to the false starts that have plagued the collider. had to give up its project in Texas after Congress yanked funding - though not before the Department of Energy had built infrastructure, warehouses and almost 15 miles of underground tunnels at a $2 billion cost to the U.S.
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