The American landscape is undergoing one of the biggest transformations in decades.
To meet the insatiable demand for computer processing to power AI, tech companies and their developers across the country are building ever-larger data centers filled with power-hungry equipment.
Source: Satellite imagery via Google Earth
The country is home to nearly 100 hyperscale data centers, which consume at least 100 megawatts of energy at peak times, enough to power about 80,000 homes. There are 120 more under construction, according to Cleanview, a market information company that tracks data center development. Four hundred and sixty more are planned.
About 40% of today’s hyperscale data centers were built on already developed land. The rest took over farmland, scrub and forests.
Data centers currently in operation are generally in relatively wealthy metropolitan and urban areas, said David Adams, an associate professor at California State University at Fullerton who studies public infrastructure. This is likely because when building facilities, companies look for locations with reliable power and fast internet access.
But data centers currently built to power AI require much more electricity because of the powerful chips they contain. That pushes construction into rural areas, where costs are cheaper but still close to fiber optic internet lines, he said.
Because data centers strain the capacity of the power grid, some are also built with their own power generation, in part to ease local criticism that such operations raise the cost of electricity for consumers. This may require data center sites to be larger.
Musk’s SpaceX, which he merged with xAI this year, built its Colossus 2 data center in the Memphis area, next to an existing gas-fired power plant. Rows of giant batteries help stabilize power supply during peak demand, the company said.
While construction continues, Colossus 2 is powered by temporary gas turbines, which can be far more polluting than grid electricity. Residents who live across town near SpaceX’s former Colossus data center have protested emissions from its on-site generators. SpaceX did not respond to a request for comment.
Data centers have been around for years but have never been bigger.
“Traditionally, it’s a single building in an urban area,” Adams said. Now, hyperscalers start with one building, then scale to “two, three, four, five, six buildings.”
Meta is building a data center campus called Hyperion on land in rural Louisiana that will dwarf Colossus 2 – and Central Park in Manhattan. The company did not respond to a request for comment.
The project is huge but could soon be overwhelmed. If all currently planned data centers are built on schedule, according to Cleanview data, by 2030 the Hyperion campus will rank only fifth in the United States in terms of square footage.
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