Loudoun County, Virginia, is considered the world's densest data center hub

View data center electrical demand and fiber optic cable connections across the US

Data center hub construction has prioritized locations with affordable electricity and fiber internet for data transmission, including Loudoun and Prince William Counties in Virginia and Maricopa County in Arizona. As of 2025, Northern Virginia's robust data center infrastructure is estimated to handle about 70% of global internet traffic.

Data center companies are worsening housing undersupply in some regional markets

With large capital to spend, technology giants have disrupted the real estate market, driving up prices by outbidding commercial and residential developers and intensifying competition for available land. A property purchased over several years for $50M in Prince William County, Virginia, was sold to Amazon for $700M in 2025.

From 2014-25, US private sector data center investments have increased more than 25-fold

The annualized rate of US data center construction has ballooned from $1.6B to $41.1B, creating a market for data centers whose infrastructure costs and land, power, and transmission capacity demands rival those of offices and industrial facilities.

By 2028, data center power consumption may equal 22% of US households

Date from 2023 suggests that data centers accounted for around 4.4% of US electricity consumption, with new facilities supporting the AI boom consuming more power than the state of New Hampshire annually. However, the energy impact of individual use varies widely depending on the prompt and AI model. (Some readers may experience a paywall.)

Explore a map of data centers worldwide, numbering over 12,250 as of August 2026, with over 4,500 in the US.

Noise from data centers may disrupt wildlife and local residents

Individuals living where local ordinances have allowed data centers to be built next to residential areas have reported that the constant humming and vibrations from cooling systems have prevented them from sleeping and exposed them to chronic noise, which the American Public Health Association says can lead to cardiovascular disease and increased stress.

Cryptocurrency and data center growth are expected to increase greenhouse gas emissions

An analysis from the Open Energy Outlook Initiative estimates a 30% increase in emissions through 2030, as growing energy demands in regions where data centers are being built (20%-30%) far exceed the traditional growth rate of utilities in those areas (1%-2%). The emissions spike is expected to equal France's annual carbon output.

View a map of US data center infrastructure in 2025

Thousands of data centers across the country have already been built, with more under construction or planned. Facilities are connected via transmission and fiber optic lines, with the latter spanning an estimated length of 160 million miles.

AI is estimated to drive most data center power demand growth through 2030

According to a report from the International Energy Agency, a typical AI data center in 2025 consumes as much electricity as 100,000 households, but the largest under construction are expected to consume 20 times as much. Global data center electricity consumption is expected to surpass Japan's total consumption by 2030.

Research suggests AI data centers may be creating microclimate heat islands

An analysis of satellite data from 2004 to 2024 showed that land surface temperatures in the areas surrounding AI data centers typically increase by an average of 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) after they begin running. Across the 6,000 global data centers analyzed by the study, temperatures increased by as much as 9.1 degrees Celsius (16.4 degrees Fahrenheit).

Data center power demands have delayed the retirement of coal plants

US data center power consumption is expected to triple by 2035 to meet the growing infrastructure needs of AI platforms. Longer construction times and higher startup costs for renewable energy systems such as wind and solar have led to at least 15 coal power plant closures being postponed.

Most of the critical mineral supply needed for US data centers is imported

The country with the most data centers relies on other nations for about 80% of the rare earth elements needed for magnetic materials in storage drives, 64% of the silver and 85% of the platinum it uses for electrical circuitry, and about half the aluminum and copper used in heat sinks that dissipate thermal energy from electronic components.

Fracking rates may increase with the construction of new data centers

In Pennsylvania, plans to build at least five new facilities supported by gas-fired power plants are expected to escalate public health risks through surges in air and water pollution. Data center water demands are expected to further strain local resources.

Despite accounting for less than 1% of the country's water consumption in 2023, US data centers' water use for cooling and electricity generation can increase water stress in drought-affected areas.

Carbon-neutral data centers may be possible if built within wind turbines

Wind turbine towers are typically hollow, housing only cables and a ladder for maintenance access. The excess electricity a wind turbine collects could power a stack of server racks more than 100 meters (328 feet) high within its tower.

Since 2022, two-thirds of data centers have been built in water-stressed areas

In residential evaporative cooling systems, 10% of consumed water is lost to evaporation compared to 80% in data centers. Although some companies have pledged to become water-positive—replenishing more freshwater than they consume—by 2030 through a transition to air cooling, only 10% of data center operators track water use across all their facilities.

Roughly 12.5% of US households earn more than $200K annually

More than 1 in 4 households earn $200K or more annually in Washington, DC. However, in West Virginia, which isn't far from DC, only 5.9% of households earn more than $200K.

DC has the highest share of low-income renters on housing assistance in the country

Seventy-two per every 1,000 residents in the nation's capital were low-income residents on housing assistance as of the year 2024.

Data center types vary based on location and the workloads they manage

Enterprise data centers are built on-premises and afford businesses greater control over the management and security of their data. Cloud data centers are built off-site and share their resources with millions of users through an internet connection, with the largest—hyperscale data centers—spanning millions of square feet. Managed data centers offer off-site hardware that companies can lease.

According to the International Energy Agency, hyperscale data centers consume about as much electricity annually as 400,000 electric vehicles to provide 24/7 access to online applications, services, and information.

See Silicon Valley's real estate, employment, population, and innovation statistics

As a leader in the global economy, Silicon Valley's growth is closely watched around the world. In 2025, companies in the region posted $92B in venture capital deals and created 23,000 new patents. The average wage in the region is $189K, which is much higher than the national average, but the median home price sits around $2.25M—which calls the sustainability of the region's living standards into question.

Watch a time-lapse of the construction of a data center

After the external structure of a data center is built, cooling systems are installed, followed by interior offices and other rooms. Before installing racks of servers and other equipment, floors are raised beneath where they will be installed to create space for cold fluid to be pumped into the hardware and to facilitate cable management.

View the layout and components that make up a typical data center

Alongside server rooms for the storage, processing, and transmission of data, data centers include climate control systems to manage the heat generated by microchips, backup systems to ensure systems can run during power outages, offices for on-site personnel, and monitoring and security stations to provide continuous protection against physical threats.

Electrical grids worldwide must double their power delivery capacity by 2050 to meet surging demand from AI and electric vehicles.

See the average income in every US state

DC residents make an average of $108K a year, but residents of nearby state West Virginia earn the country's lowest average annual income of just $55K.

Worth more than $14T, Silicon Valley may be getting too expensive for future founders.

Explore this database to discover Lyme disease incidence in your county.

The Worldwide LHC Computing Grid—a distributed system of 2 billion gigabytes of storage across over 40 countries—manages data produced by the Large Hadron Collider.

Thermodynamics makes building data centers in space to cool equipment impractical

Rather than cooling via interactions with flowing cold air or water, data centers in space would dissipate energy primarily by radiation, in which an object at any temperature above absolute zero emits light. This method is much less efficient at cooling and would require hyperscale data centers to have radiator panels thousands of times larger than those on the International Space Station.

Dollar Tree was increasingly targeting higher-income shoppers in 2026

Dollar Tree stores have been opening in wealthier areas in recent months, with its 9,000th store opening in 2025 within a few miles of a Louis Vuitton store and a Porsche dealership. A recent survey found that 19% of the money spent at dollar stores came from households with annual income exceeding $100,000.

Since 2025, AI data center growth has created shortages and price hikes in graphics processing units and their supporting hardware, including high-speed memory.

Modular data centers can be transported on a truck for rapid deployment

Bypassing the complications involved in building larger facilities over the course of several years, such as construction costs and permits, these pre-fabricated, self-contained pods, roughly the size of shipping containers, can carry thousands of graphics processing units for small- and medium-scale AI-related tasks.

How Elon Musk's businesses have shaped Texas' Bastrop County

After deadly wildfires in 2011 burned a significant portion of the county, the tech boom in Austin pushed development eastward. Elon Musk has since made the region a key hub of his businesses, including a Tesla gigafactory considered one of the largest factories in the world by volume. Watch this reporter visit the town to hear the pros and cons of the transformation.

The Bomb-proof, Cold War-era New York data center inspiring spy movies

At 33 Thomas Street in Lower Manhattan, New York City, a 45-story concrete tower with no windows stands imperiously over the city. Inside, 18 floors of telecommunications technology have hummed for decades. The building's purpose—to protect US comms from nuclear fallout—and its design have played into spy movie plotlines. Dive into the building's curious role in pop culture with this long read.

One in seven US tax dollars is collected by local governments

Local governments collect about $886B each year to support education, infrastructure, and public health. Roughly three-quarters of this funding comes from property taxes, with the rest sourced from sales, excise, and income taxes.

Today's massive data centers evolved from single-room mainframes

Punch card computers from the late 1940s were used to store and process a company's data locally before the advent of desktop computers. As the amount of data and company sizes increased alongside the miniaturization of technology, mainframes were replaced by local server rooms and external facilities with interconnected servers running cloud-based and AI software.

Before Silicon Valley became the largest tech hub in the world, it was an agricultural area known for its flowers and fruit

It was called the “Valley of Heart’s Delight.” This video by Vox explains how the area went from growing prunes to producing computer chips. It also explains how Stanford University had a big impact on the area’s development.

States with the highest (and lowest) tax rates

WalletHub researchers evaluated not just income taxes but real estate, sales, and other levies in order to rank every state by its total effective local and state tax rate (not including federal). Alaska scored the lowest total tax rate and Illinois...