eBay Names Winner of Utah Design Contest

The team of Winterstreet Architects & AHA Consulting Engineers has won a competition to design Phase II of a major eBay data center near Salt Lake City, Utah, beating out 20 other design teams that submitted plans for the modular facility, known as Project Quicksilver. The outcome of the competition was announced today on the Data Center Pulse blog.

The new facility will be a “greenfield” construction project optimized for modular (containerized) data centers, and will build upon the designs being implemented in eBay’s first modular project in Phoenix, Arizona.

Winterstreet and AHA previously teamed with EDI on the winning entry in the design contest for eBay's Phoenix project. Other finalists in the Quicksilver competition included Advanced Design Consultants; the team of Deerns & Gensler; KlingStubbins; and M+W Group, which each received a design fee for their efforts in reaching the final round.

"We had really cool designs come in," said Dean Nelson, Senior Director of Global Foundation Services at eBay. "In my personal opinion, the public RFP design process has been extremely successful in driving creativity and innovation from a gamut of talented companies and individuals in the industry. The big ideas and design stretching requirements have given birth to entirely new ways to approach data center design in alignment with IT workload efficiencies."