We are excited to share more about our work to maximize its reach and beneficial impact. This includes posts that highlight our thinking, resources that explain what we are building, and sharing novel datasets that we think can benefit the work of others. Please stay tuned for updates or reach out to learn more.
Part 1 of 3: Defining the needle and the haystack
Finding the right location for an infrastructure project means solving a multidimensional optimization problem where all the variables interact in complex ways. How much does grid power price matter compared to land cost? What about solar availability? How do you weigh transportation infrastructure against the regulatory environment? How do you move fast, while also meeting your critical economic and sustainability goals?
The traditional approach involves firing up GIS tools, gathering data, and trying to filter through data layers with different time periods, formats, etc. This can include factors such as electricity prices, infrastructure maps, land costs, renewable resource maps, and many, many more. Maybe you have a secret sauce, but I bet you’ll miss hidden gems - the sites that aren't obviously attractive but deliver exceptional economics when all factors are considered together.
We've been working on a different approach: searching based on the characteristics of an individual location AND how all of those factors come together into the north star for most developers, operators, and financiers - the ROI of your project (NPV, IRR, LCOE, or whatever metric means success for you).
This article will first talk about the challenges of our initial approach for modelling hydrogen production costs. We’ll then describe our new approach: allowing users to upload their own project economic models to be run on our data platform. To wrap up, we’ll outline the next two blog posts: how we execute user provided economic models on our GPU-accelerated optimizer, to find the perfect sizing and configuration for your project; and finally, how we use neural networks to run your optimized economic model over the whole globe, allowing you to find your needle-in-a-haystack with a simple search.
When we built our first tool, for hydrogen project siting, we took what seemed like a reasonable approach: we built a comprehensive LCOH (Levelized Cost of Hydrogen) model that captured all the key economic factors and allowed users to customize the variables that mattered most.
Users could adjust numerous factors including:
The system would then calculate LCOH and IRR for any site using our hardcoded model structure. It worked well for standard projects, but we kept hitting the same wall: users wanted to modify the model itself, not just the inputs. We also wanted to expand our platform to projects other than hydrogen production, such as data centers.
We realized we were solving the wrong problem. Instead of building increasingly complex configuration options for our hardcoded model, we needed to let users bring their own economic models entirely.
The solution turned out to be surprisingly straightforward: let users upload their own Excel models.
We created an Excel template that defines the interface between user models and our geographic data. Users can either customize one of our provided models or build their own from scratch. The template handles the data injection - our system knows how to feed location-specific data into the designated cells, and the model handles everything else.
This approach preserves the sophistication of user models while enabling them to run anywhere in the world using our data platform. Your carefully crafted depreciation schedules, custom financing structures, and cost models all work exactly as designed - dynamically fed with real-world data.
The process is simple:
Behind the scenes, when you click on a site in, say, Wyoming, or Bavaria, our system instantly injects our rich datasets for that location, including:
Your Excel model processes this data exactly as it would with any other inputs, but now it's using real-world, location-specific information saving you the trouble of finding the data or the dangers of generic assumptions. The power of this is also in the comparative view, so rather than just evaluating one site to see if it clears your viability hurdles, you can evaluate any site to find the strongest option. Choose exceptional, rather than just acceptable.
You can export your model with these values injected, or browse the data within our Explorer tool. (You can also click to run our GPU-accelerated optimizer, but that’s for the next blog post.)
The complexity multiplies when you consider that you're not just searching for locations—you're searching for the optimal combination of location, project configuration, and operational parameters.
For hydrogen production, you might be evaluating:
For data centers:
Each combination creates a different economic profile, and the optimal choice varies by location. A site that's perfect for a GPU-intensive data center with solar power might be terrible for a CPU-focused facility relying on grid electricity.
Our Excel template lets you easily define these various options and, on choosing a particular site, our tool will run your model for every such option for you to then browse within our tool - or export back as an Excel file.
This Excel integration solves the flexibility problem—users can now bring their own sophisticated models and run them anywhere. But it doesn't solve the search problem.
In our next post, I'll walk through how we run your Excel models on our cloud-based GPU-accelerated optimizer. Rather than spend thousands of developer hours converting models for linear optimizers, take your Excel-based non-linear model and just throw powerful GPUs at it. Our technology is able to combine gradient descent with particle swarm optimization over millions of particles for truly exceptional results - out of the box.
The third post will cover something even more ambitious: training custom neural networks to approximate your optimized models. This is how users of our hydrogen product are able to search the globe based on factors including pre-optimized LCOH, and what we are now enabling on a fully custom basis. Once we have a neural network that can mimic your Excel model's optimized behavior, we can run it at every potential site worldwide, across all possible configurations, in a matter of minutes. This creates a true global search capability - the ability to find exceptional opportunities in a sea of merely acceptable options.
What we've built is a fundamental shift in how infrastructure projects get sited. Instead of searching based on individual factors and hoping they combine favorably, you can search based on actual economic performance. Instead of evaluating a handful of obvious sites, you can systematically explore millions of possibilities.
Your Excel model represents deep domain expertise about your specific project economics. Our platform just helps that expertise engage with the full complexity of global geography and energy markets. The results can be surprising - sometimes the best location for your project is one you never would have thought to evaluate.
In today’s post, our CTO Will Sonnex introduces the first of his 3-part series unpacking the shift from searching the globe to modeling the globe, and what that means for the future of infrastructure development.
Hi, I’m Jules Carney! As a front-end engineer at Othersphere, I’ve had the chance to work on features that would have felt impossible to bring to the web even a few years ago. We bring together detailed, accurate data from across the globe, and use it to paint a picture with graphs, maps and other visualizations. It brings insights on potential sites that tell meaningful stories for any audience. Needless to say, working on these features is a web developer’s dream come true!
Today I’ll walk through one of my favourite feature sets, because it imparts so much info about a potential site that users looking for a site could feel like they’re on the ground with their measuring tapes.
For a full video of the walkthrough below, please click here!
Let’s say a team wants to build a data center near Boulder, Colorado, but is worried about how the landscape will fit in with their building designs.
First, we’ll make a stop at the main map, where we can filter based on attributes we want the site to have, like average slope, land cost, distance to roads or power sources, and many other crucial factors. In the picture below, we’ve filtered to return sites with only 0-5% built area, and are colouring our heat map based on topography. Less populated areas tend to have steeper slopes, but with just this three second search we see some pale yellow hexes which are nice flat sites with few built-up areas. We could also do another search including our slope requirement filters if we wanted to just get back the hexes with lower slopes.
After we’ve picked a site, we can jump into site analysis. Looking at the left-hand tabs, we can see many ways to evaluate our location, including factors relating to economics, emissions, and fit with local human and environmental factors. These factors are then rolled into detailed project modeling, to bring the whole story together.
But let’s assume that the fundamentals look good, and so we want to move to the footprint tab as concern becomes fitting our data center to a given site.
First we check out a site, and we have a good sized potential footprint to work with, close to high voltage powerlines and data transmission cables.
Let’s assume we want to build a site about 1km square, so we check out an area with our Measure area tool.
It looks decent, and not built up, but let’s dig into the elevation and landscape a little more. We draw a line to measure the distance of our potential site, and we also get an elevation profile, which reveals a pretty significant variation of over 20 metres.
This area looks more promising! We see less variation in the elevation profile.
When we check out the area, it looks like there will be ample space here.
As a project developer I’d likely now loop back to iterate on the project model, using this area analysis and all of our other data to fine tune potential cost, emissions, and planning for aspects of local fit such as protected areas. From there I would likely review details on the land parcels and owners, to get ready for external engagement.
By bringing all of this together in one place, we can pick a great site with no surprises and everything we need for our data center to succeed!
Hi, I’m Jules Carney. a front-end engineer at Othersphere! Today I’ll walk through one of my favourite feature sets, because it imparts so much info about a potential site that users looking for a site could feel like they’re on the ground with their measuring tapes.
Markets are currently fixated on energy access as the near-term bottleneck for data centers... but strong underlying fundamentals are still the key to long-term asset performance.
Water access is one of those fundamental factors, and this MIT Technology Review article on data centers and water constraints in Nevada is well worth a read.
Elements that caught my eye:
- Direct cooling demand could reach 0.9–5.7 billion gal / yr and electricity generation could indirectly add ~15 billion, but actual figures general remain proprietary
- Tribal and local experts are working to highlight the risks of additional pressure on local systems
- Closed‑loop, water‑free air and immersion cooling could lead to meaningful demand reductionsHow does the rest of the world stack up?
Our Othersphere platform includes over 10,000 existing data centers, with World Resources Institute Aqueduct 4.0 basin‑level water stress (0‑5 scale) included as one search attribute.
Today nearly 15 % of data centers operate in the most water stressed locations (4.75 to 5), and the general distribution of data centers implies that water hasn't really mattered to siting... at least to date.
But that may be changing as:
1️⃣ Leading operators raise the bar
2️⃣ Public scrutiny climbs
3️⃣ Cooling tech continues to improve
Reach out if you want to learn more, or see how your site or company portfolio fits in into all of this.
Markets are currently fixated on energy access as the near-term bottleneck for data centers... but strong underlying fundamentals are still the key to long-term asset performance.
OpenAI is looking for new sites around the world for the next Stargate facilities. Is your jurisdiction a good fit?
The ability to rapid search the globe for ideal infrastructure locations based on the characteristics of a site or asset is just one of the user powers made possible by the Othersphere platform.
See here for a short video walkthrough of the Stargate 1 site in our Explorer tool.
In this quick example we instantly find the locations that are a close match with the initial Stargate 1 site in Abilene, Texas—characterized by excellent access to critical infrastructure, low power and gas prices, and a business-friendly operating environment, relative to middle-of-the-pack metrics on factors such as regional water scarcity, grid carbon intensity, and proximity to end users.
But is this the only type of location that can serve the future of AI? Absolutely not.
Are there locations that are even better than Stargate 1? Absolutely, especially as ‘better’ is all in the eye of the beholder.
Each developer, operator, utility, and government will take a different approach to building out the future of compute, and our global search engine for infrastructure enables you to test your own strategies quickly and efficiently.
Want to understand if you have a location that Stargate 1 stakeholders such as OpenAI, Crusoe, Oracle, Microsoft, Blue Owl Capital, J.P. Morgan, SoftBank, MGX, Newmark, or Primary Digital Infrastructure may be interested in?
Want to understand the types of locations that might be appealing to others?
Want to blaze a new trail entirely?
If you want to move fast but not break things, reach out to learn more.
OpenAI is looking for new sites around the world for the next Stargate facilities. Is your jurisdiction a good fit? The ability to rapid search the globe for ideal infrastructure locations based on the characteristics of a site or asset is just one of the user powers made possible by the Othersphere platform.
It’s no coincidence data centers skew toward temperate regions—less heat means lower cooling costs and simpler design. But as our analysis based on Berkeley Earth temperature data shows, this is an evolving factor.
First, not all data centers are the same. AI training and crypto mining facilities—less sensitive to user latency—are venturing into colder, more remote frontiers to pursue thermal advantage (and often, pockets of under-utilized energy). Deployment of data centers focused on general compute are more tethered to their ability to serve end users.
The challenge? Virtually every location where data centers exist today has warmed since 1980—and this trend isn’t stopping. Future-ready designs must consider internal factors such as thermal limits and soaring rack power density, but also changing external environmental factors.Our Explorer solution is focused on this challenge, indexing temperature, humidity, land, power, fiber, and more—across millions of global locations—so you can build, fund, or utilize the best compute assets possible.
👉 Want to discuss? If you will be attending SF Climate Week please join us at Berkeley Earth’s “From Data to Decisions: Designing Resilient AI Infrastructure for a Changing Climate” event: https://lu.ma/nrm5b7o9 where Kristen Sissener, Elizabeth Muller, and Beth Rattner will be joined by Robert Murphy to discuss this fascinating question.
🛰️ Want to dive deeper? This is post #5 in our ideal data center series, which we’re gathering into an upcoming ebook: a practical, data-driven guide to scaling world-class data centers. Reach out to request a copy on release.
It’s no coincidence data centers skew toward temperate regions—less heat means lower cooling costs and simpler design. But as our analysis based on Berkeley Earth temperature data shows, this is an evolving factor.
The global energy transition faces a fundamental challenge: meeting growing demand while reducing environmental impact. Renewable energy adoption must first overcome challenges with scaling and infrastructure to grow worldwide.
Robert Murphy, CEO of Othersphere, believes solving this puzzle requires location-specific, data-driven insights that make new energy projects financially viable. “If it’s not cheap enough to compete in the market, it won’t grow,” Murphy explains.
Othersphere equips developers with advanced analytics to identify optimal locations for sustainable infrastructure. By modeling millions of locations around the world in parallel, they’re solving the energy demand challenge, providing insights that help users soundly and profitably scale their projects.
Growing up in Calgary and the Middle East, Murphy has always been around the oil and gas industry, giving him a deep appreciation for energy’s complexity. “Energy underpins everything we do in a way a lot of people appreciate and a lot of people don’t sometimes understand,” Murphy notes. “It’s economics, science, geopolitics, social factors all at once.”
His career path through Washington DC policy circles, renewable energy consulting, and corporations like Chevron provided crucial perspective. Each experience reinforced the importance of financial viability in scaling sustainable solutions.
“Seeing the reality that these lower carbon, climate-compatible solutions have to make financial sense to be sustainable in the broader sense of the word was critical,” Murphy reflects on an early career setback during the 2008 financial crisis.
Seeking to strike a balance between profitability and sustainability, Murphy took his understanding of the industry, policy, and data to the startup private sector. By leveraging his previous experience, he built Othersphere, unlocking the economic power of accessible data insights for infrastructure development.
Throughout his career, Murphy noticed a persistent problem: energy infrastructure development relied on outdated tools and processes. “At Enbridge, for example, building renewable energy assets or pipeline systems and analyzing where they would go, we were doing it in quite an archaic way,” he explains.
Traditional methods involved “a mix of Excel and maybe bringing in some GIS tools at some point, but in a pretty ad hoc way.” Worse, industrial planners often use top-down models that assume gradual linear change in technology, missing the changes that are actually occurring on the ground. These inefficiencies sparked the idea for a more data-driven approach to infrastructure planning.
Leveraging previous startup experience and securing initial funding from Breakthrough Energy, Murphy founded Othersphere to systematically identify optimal locations for energy infrastructure. He put together a fresh team to take on the industry’s fundamental challenge: supporting climate goals while also making sustainable infrastructure financially viable.
Othersphere created a spatial economics platform that analyzes millions of potential project locations simultaneously. “We make the ideal location searchable and easy to find,” Murphy explains.
To help project developers and hardware OEMs find sustainable long-term infrastructure, the system evaluates sites based on three criteria: economics, emissions, and fit with local surroundings. This helps them plan in a way that is both climate-compatible and economically sustainable and scalable—seeking opportunities to build high-performance, low/zero GHG projects that minimize any ‘green premium. ’
For commercial developers, this approach revolutionizes the way they identify opportunities. Rather than relying on relationship-driven prospects or limited high-level evaluations, the platform indexes the whole world for infrastructure, providing comprehensive analysis that identifies financially viable locations for development.
The company’s Explorer tool delivers these insights through an accessible interface that serves various stakeholders. “We’ve tried to make it so that anyone in an organization can come in and start to understand and digest these insights,” Murphy notes. This accessibility helps align financial, technical, and community teams around optimal project locations.
Their first target was the hydrogen market, which has extreme potential but faces serious economic realities. “When you look at the green premium for most kinds of low-carbon hydrogen production around the world, there’s not many places where it’s outright just competitive without policy support.”
Using Explorer, developers can search the world for potential project sites, assessing financial fits down to the individual location. There, they’ll find a scatter plot of the levelized cost of hydrogen and carbon intensity of dozens of production pathways for hydrogen at that site.
Developers can then take this accessible, exportable data back to their teams to kickstart the project financing process with greater confidence. “We’re basically running billions of project models in parallel,” Murphy explains. “You can pull them out as Excel files, and they are basically in the form you could take off to the project finance firm.” This holistic data means reduced perceived risk from any potential investor.
The result is quicker movement through the financial stage and shorter project timelines. “The idea is to help the downstream stakeholders understand project risks and get more comfortable with them more quickly because a lot of resistance to fund projects is driven by the perception of risk as much as the actual risk,” Murphy says.
Othersphere’s next target is the more complex market of data centers. With the boom in AI and the vast amounts of energy required to sustain the industry’s growth, development requires extensive commercial modeling and GIS work.
For these more complex use cases, Explorer streamlines the project analysis to provide insights into today’s energy economy—and tomorrow’s. Murphy says, “We’re showing them how to identify all the right criteria for location selection—not just where is a good place to build today, but where it will be a good place to build tomorrow.”
For data centers, factors such as energy availability, cost, and carbon intensity are well-known factors in project viability. But projects are also dependent on lower-profile factors such as temperature variability. Even a minor 1-2 degree change over the long term will have a meaningful impact on operations and how developers plan for cooling costs. These factors also determine the cooling systems they install at the outset.
This foresight could save project developers millions in costs, all through Othersphere’s platform. “We’re trying to give these organizations planning superpowers just without having to invest a huge amount of time, people, and data expenses in the process,” Murphy explains.
Looking toward the future of clean tech, Murphy sees Othersphere as empowering developers to build a profitable and sustainable future. “Our role is supportive,” Murphy emphasizes. “We’re trying to shape the tools industry uses and the lens they look at in terms of what success looks like.”
As technology improves and development evolves, Murphy sees two potential paths for infrastructure growth in the 22nd century. The optimistic scenario involves solving clean tech’s fundamental problem, efficiently providing material prosperity globally while minimizing environmental impact: “How much omelet can we make while breaking the fewest amount of eggs?”
The alternative resembles business as usual, where development proceeds inefficiently and many areas miss opportunities for advancement. Without widespread access to data, developers remain stuck to ad hoc models, leading to inefficiencies and missed opportunities
Murphy believes Othersphere can help steer toward a better outcome by providing tools for large-scale optimization, ultimately leaving a positive mark on local communities. He notes, “I feel that a project should benefit the local community as much as its end users. “
Beyond economic considerations and global trends, Othersphere creates meaningful positive change that transforms the planet for the better. “What kind of world do we want to live in—and leave for our kids and their kids going forward? A lot of that goes back to the tools and the priorities we set today,” Murphy reflects.
Robert Murphy’s experience across the energy sector has crystallized into a clear vision: data-driven decisions are essential for addressing global energy challenges. Through Othersphere’s spatial economics platform, developers can identify locations where industrial and energy infrastructure makes financial sense while meeting environmental and community needs.
Whether a global developer or a commercial property owner, taking a data-driven approach to energy infrastructure is the way to effectively evaluate opportunities. The most successful projects align economic viability with strategic site selection, using comprehensive data to support long-term success.
As Murphy puts it: “We want to provide well-being to everyone, and we need to do it in the lowest-footprint way possible.” By focusing on where projects make financial sense, the energy transition becomes both sustainable and scalable.
The global energy transition faces a fundamental challenge: meeting growing demand while reducing environmental impact. Othersphere CEO, Robert Murphy, and King Energy CRO, Brian Clausen, to discuss how to meet this challenge.
Please reach out if you would like to learn more about Othersphere, our products, and opportunities to partner in accelerating global industrial decarbonization.
