United States · OpenStreetMap · Lawrence Berkeley Lab
Where data centres are, and how fast they are arriving
Helios tracks 1,853 data centres across the United States, each at a real coordinate and each traceable to the public record it came from. It plots how that number has grown, county by county, against the electricity and water the country is reported to spend on them.
Data centres on the map, 2012 to today
Full series and national energy →telecom=data_center was not yet in common use — the near-zero readings there describe the tag, not the country. This is a count of what has been mapped, and OpenStreetMap carries no construction dates.Where they concentrate
All 323 regions →| County | Mapped | Floor area km² | Share MW |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loudoun County, VA | 239 | 2.77 | 3,034 |
| Maricopa County, AZ | 76 | 0.96 | 1,050 |
| Santa Clara County, CA | 75 | 0.47 | 512 |
| Bexar County, TX | 67 | 0.47 | 518 |
| Prince William County, VA | 66 | 0.92 | 1,005 |
| Grant County, WA | 41 | 0.41 | 450 |
| Taylor County, TX | 40 | 0.36 | 394 |
| Morrow County, OR | 38 | 0.55 | 598 |
The densest county here holds more mapped data centres than most states. Megawatt figures are inferred shares of a reported national total, not meter readings.
What changed lately
Full feed →- 2026-06-19 appearedLumen Minneapolis 3 · Hennepin County, MN
- 2026-06-18 appearedDC Blox Data Center · Jefferson County, AL
- 2026-06-16 appearedDataBank SLC3 · Salt Lake County, UT
- 2026-06-16 appearedNTT · Dallas County, TX
- 2026-06-16 appearedDataBank SLC2 · Salt Lake County, UT
- 2026-06-16 appearedDataBank SLC4 · Salt Lake County, UT
A removal means the element stopped matching the data-centre filter in OpenStreetMap. That is not the same as a demolition, and this site never claims it is.
The national picture these counts sit inside
Every published figure →US data centres consumed 192 TWh in 2024 — 3.3× the 58 TWh they used in 2014. For scale, that is a few per cent of all the electricity consumed in the country.
Cooling them consumed 17.4 billion gallons directly in 2023, before counting the water spent generating the electricity itself.
LBNL's reference case puts 2030 at 649 TWh. That is a Predicted figure: a scenario, not a measurement. LBNL publishes it as a range, and so does this site.
Start here
what each part of the site answersThe basics
What a data centre actually contains, why electricity is the constraint that decides where one gets built, why cooling spends water, and what every unit on this site means.
Growth over time
How many data centres the map has recorded each month since 2012, beside the national electricity and water totals — and why the two series must never be divided into each other.
Regions
Every county and state holding at least one mapped facility, sortable by count, floor area or allocated load. Each has its own page and its own curve.
Mapped construction
The 45 records contributors currently mark as under construction — a forward signal kept separate from operating power and water estimates.
Large-load filings
Site-specific utility-regulator decisions that report a contracted electricity load, kept separate from operating consumption and mapped only at the precision the filing supports.
The national map
All 1,853 facilities at their mapped coordinates. Building circles scale by floor plate; campus boundaries and construction records stay fixed-size so land area cannot masquerade as building area.
Changes
What appeared on the map and what came off it, newest first, every row linking to the OpenStreetMap element so you can check the edit yourself.
How it was built
The pipeline end to end — where each figure comes from, how the power allocation works, and the list of things this dataset cannot see.
A second, deeper dataset: the Arizona study
Browse the site register →Everything above is a map of what has already been recorded. It cannot see a project before someone maps it, and in practice nobody maps a data centre until the building is standing. The Arizona study is the opposite experiment. In one valley in Maricopa County, Helios reads parcel transfers, permits, assessor classifications and utility filings, clusters them into candidate sites, and argues a confidence score for each with the evidence chain attached.
It currently tracks 13 candidate sites. Every point of every score links back to the document that produced it, and an operator is never named without a direct filing. The highest-confidence site is AZ-CHANDLER-006, at operational.