HELIOSOpen AI Infrastructure Observatory
Static snapshot. This site serves two different things: 1,853 data centres reported by OpenStreetMap contributors nationwide, and 13 sites Helios infers from Arizona parcel records, exported on July 29, 2026. The first is a map of what has been recorded; the second is an argued hypothesis with an evidence chain. This is a point-in-time export, not a live view. See meta.json or the methodology.

National infrastructure map

1,853 data centres recorded in OpenStreetMap, over the 48,132 transmission substations and 17,193 generating plants that would have to supply them.

grid loads when switched on
Facilities
1,853
all with coordinates
Mapped as buildings
81%
1,506 with a floor plate
With operator
62%
named by a contributor
Total footprint
20
km² of building
A blank patch here is not a finding. OpenStreetMap is mapped by volunteers, and coverage follows them: Northern Virginia is drawn in detail because people there have drawn it. An empty area may hold no data centres. It may equally hold no mappers. What you are looking at is the record, not the country.
45 records are mapped as under construction. They use fixed-size marks here because construction area is not building floor area, and they receive no operating-load estimate. See the construction signal.

Reading the grid layers

switched off until asked for

A large data centre needs a transmission connection, not a distribution feeder, and that is the constraint that decides where one can go at all. The substation layer is therefore cut at 69 kV — below that is local distribution, which would bury the signal under two orders of magnitude of pole-mounted yards. Substations are sized by their highest voltage and plants by rated capacity, both recorded by mappers rather than measured here.

The layers load only when switched on. Together they are 65,325 points against the facility layer's 1,853, and making every reader download them to look at data centres would be a poor trade.

Proximity is not connection. A data centre sitting beside a 500 kV substation may have no agreement to draw a single watt from it, and interconnection queues in several regions now run for years. These layers place things near each other. Read nothing further into it.