From Printing Press to Technology Campus

Patmos' landmark building at 1601 McGee St

A landmark with a story

The Kansas City Star has been part of the city since 1880. A young Ernest Hemingway learned to write in its newsroom and a young Harry Truman once worked in its mailroom. Over more than a century the paper won eight Pulitzer Prizes. In 2006, the Star opened a striking glass press pavilion at 1601 McGee, a two-block-long plant that cost about $199 million and once held four 60-foot presses. Printing left the building in 2011, and one of downtown's most recognizable structures sat empty for the next thirteen years.

Patmos assumed operations in November 2024 and gave the building a new purpose. Rather than strip it of its past, the retrofit keeps its industrial character, showing the enormous original ink containers, the ink pipes that thread through the building, and the conveyor system that once carried newspapers across the floors all remain as reminders of what this place was.

Compute delivered fast, with community support

The challenge wasn't simply finding space for thousands of GPUs. It was finding a way to bring that capacity online quickly without asking Kansas City to sacrifice more land, power, or water to make it happen. Space for GPU and AI clusters can take 24 to 36 months to reach the open market, and gigawatt-scale mega-projects that promise to fill the gap often draw heavy local pushback. Nationally, 7/10 voters oppose a new data center in their own area, mainly over energy and water use, and mega-projects have a track record of competing with communities for power and water while creating few lasting jobs once construction ends. A leading AI cloud provider expanding into the United States needed a US home that could stand up thousands of NVIDIA GPUs on an aggressive timeline and grow with demand, and Patmos found a way to deliver in a way a city would welcome.

A landmark press hall, revitalized for GPUs in record time

The solution was already there. Rather than starting with an empty site and years of new construction, Patmos saw an opportunity to transform the 436,000 sq ft press building into a modern, high-density Technology Campus. The industrial site already had critical pieces of infrastructure in place, including dual utility feeds, a circular chilled-water system and industrial-grade power.

Instead of building that foundation from scratch, focus stayed on strategically adapting it around the needs of customers and a new generation of infrastructure.

That meant upgrading and configuring the campus for high-density AI and compute workloads while working in parallel with customers on the requirements specific to their deployments. Power distribution, cooling, rack density, cluster fabric and other customer-specific needs were addressed while the broader campus development was already underway.

The result: customer environments that would typically take six months or more to prepare could be fit out to exact specifications and made rack-ready in about 90 days. Patmos was able to move quickly because we started with the right foundation, solved critical infrastructure problems early, and focused customization where it mattered.

The campus runs at 25 MW today, with plans to expand to 50 MW, designed for the hundreds of kilowatts per cabinet that modern GPU and AI hardware demands. It uses recycled water and glycol cooling in a closed loop meaning the same water and glycol mix circulates continuously rather than drawing in thousands of fresh gallons a day. In January 2026 Patmos secured a $100 million green-energy C-PACE loan, proposed as the first financing of its kind for a campus like this. Throughout, the campus stayed 100% Patmos-owned and US-operated, built with no municipal or state subsidies.

Patmos supply / Patmos return

"It's also a profitable operation, so there's no fiscal speculation going on, which really puts the community at rest that we're not going to leave them high and dry after we bulldoze a bunch of stuff. And the great thing is we didn't have to bulldoze anything. The building is here, it's beautiful, and it always was, and now it's kind of revitalized and the whole community is revitalized with it."

John Johnson, CEO, Patmos (Fox Business, Mornings with Maria / Big Money Show)

A US AI campus, and an economic engine for Kansas City

The anchor tenant, Nebius, went live as the campus's first customer, bringing thousands of state-of-the-art GPUs online on an aggressive timeline. But the data center is only one part of what Patmos is building at the Kansas City Star.

The campus now employs roughly 25 people on-site and growing, with coworking space already open and expanded coworking, rental, and event spaces planned. By building around the data center, Patmos is creating a mixed-use technology environment designed to attract businesses, entrepreneurs, and people back to a landmark that had sat largely unused.

"We don’t build data centers in the traditional sense. Our data centers power mixed-use Technology Campuses that create job-dense tech ecosystems and new opportunities for communities. We also retrofit existing buildings, so we’re not destroying local farmland."

John Johnson, CEO, Patmos (the Brian Kilmeade Show; a Fox News podcast)

The Patmos model, proven in the real world

The Kansas City Star proved that high-performance data center infrastructure can be developed at a meaningful scale while revitalizing existing property and creating economic opportunity around it.

Now, the model is expanding. Patmos is in contract on three additional Technology Campus properties across the Midwest, with the next announced campus just down the road in Independence, Missouri.

"As soon as we completed proof of concept here in Kansas City, our phone started ringing off the hook from local mayors and city councils who wanted us to bring that magic to their towns. We're in contract on three additional properties across America's heartland right now — the next big deal we're doing is just down the street, actually, in Independence, Missouri."

John Johnson, CEO, Patmos (Fox Business, Varney & Co.)