The design
The store stays open. The new building rides above it.
Orion's Way retrofits existing large-format buildings, starting with grocery stores, by building over them on an independent frame with its own foundation. The store keeps operating below. On top, we add high-density compute and data center capacity, cooled by passive wind-catchers and paired with waste heat recovery, instead of new construction on farmland.
Across Wisconsin, county and town boards are passing moratoriums on new data center construction. The conventional model clears farmland, asks a community to sign an NDA before it even sees a site plan, and cycles enormous volumes of water through cooling towers. Orion's Way is built around what communities have actually said they object to.
A separate steel frame with its own foundation runs to the ground around the existing building. It doesn't pass through the building or rest on it. The store keeps operating underneath, and no farmland is converted.
A Badgir-derived passive cooling system moves air without the water-intensive cooling towers conventional facilities depend on.
Heat that would otherwise be exhausted is captured and routed back into community energy use — heating, greenhouses, district loops.
Every material fact about a site — power draw, water use, noise, jobs, tax contribution, ownership — is published before a shovel goes in the ground.
The conventional model asks a community to sign an NDA before it even sees a site plan. Orion's Way publishes this instead — before construction begins, and for as long as the facility runs.