Connected operating systems
- Capacity planning — match compute, rack space, power and cooling to the workload before demand arrives.
- SLA contracts — choose clients by demand, payout and uptime requirement instead of automatically taking every offer.
- Live load windows — push controlled or surge traffic for active rewards, then stabilize or throttle before the SLA fails.
- Incident response — handle power outages, DDoS attacks, fiber cuts and failed equipment while the floor is earning.
- Hardware lifecycle — repair, replace and upgrade equipment as health decays under use.
- Progression — grow through seven facility tiers, hire specialists, unlock research, then IPO for permanent advantages.
An operator shift
- Read the room — check compute usage, power margin, cooling headroom, equipment health and cash.
- Choose the pressure — accept a contract or trigger a timed live traffic window.
- Watch the signals — track demand and uptime while incidents can still reach the floor.
- Make the call — expand, repair, hire or throttle before a warning becomes an outage.
- Bank the shift — turn reliable operation into reputation and the next facility tier.
From garage to hyperscale
Progress through seven named tiers — The Garage, The Basement, Small Office DC, Professional Facility, Regional Data Center, Multi-Building Campus and the Hyperscale Complex (they start comparing you to AWS) — then keep prestiging into underwater, arctic, orbital and Dyson-sphere biomes with their own cooling economics.
Frequently asked questions
Is Data Center Fan free?
Yes — it is free to play in your browser, with no download or account required to start.
Can I play on mobile?
Yes. It runs in mobile browsers and installs as a Progressive Web App. An Android release is in preparation.
Is it an idle game?
It has idle and offline earnings, but it is primarily a hands-on data center management simulation.
The real engineering behind the game
The Operator Academy explains the facility systems the game abstracts, with sources and stated model boundaries. It is educational reference material, not engineering or certification advice.
- PUE and facility efficiency — what the ratio measures, and what it cannot.
- From utility to rack: the power chain — switchgear, generators, UPS, PDUs.
- Hot aisle, cold aisle and airflow — containment, bypass air and recirculation.
- CRAC, CRAH, chillers and liquid cooling — how the heat actually leaves.
- Redundancy: N, N+1 and 2N — why a spare is not automatically a path.
- SLA, availability, MTTR and fault domains.
- Data center glossary A–Z — 51 defined terms.
Free data center calculators
Eight calculators for the numbers operators look up, each printing its formula and its constants beside the result and stating what it excludes. No sign-up, and nothing is submitted anywhere.
- PUE calculator — power usage effectiveness, DCiE and the cost of the overhead.
- Uptime and downtime calculator — what 99.9% and 99.99% actually permit.
- Rack power density calculator — kW per rack, watts per U, amps per feed.
- Cooling load calculator — kW to BTU/h, tons and CFM.
- UPS runtime calculator — battery autonomy with the high-rate derate applied.
- Generator fuel and runtime calculator — burn rate, load factor and the 72-hour target.
- Carbon and water calculator — CUE, WUE and annual tonnes of CO2e.
- Colocation cost calculator — cost per kW used, and stranded capacity.
Explore
- Data center management game — full brief
- How to play — full guide
- Tiers & progression
- Operator Academy
- Interactive labs — change one assumption at a time.
- Operator calculators — PUE, downtime, density, cooling, autonomy, carbon and cost.
- Guided learning tracks
- Design Pro Playbook — 33 solution cards with honest tradeoffs.
- Design Pro — educational design sandbox.
- Devlog
- About the game
- Press kit
- Support & help