Who we are, where we stand, and how this map works

Who we are

More Than Just Parks is a public lands advocacy organization founded by brothers Will and Jim Pattiz. We investigate threats to America’s public lands, figure out who’s behind them, and give people the information they need to do something about it.

We’ve built public tools tracking threatened public lands, wildfire, dark skies, the Roadless Rule, and how every member of Congress votes on public lands. The Data Center Tracker grew out of the same work, but the issue is much bigger than public lands. We built it because Americans deserve to know where these facilities are going, who is building them, and what they could mean for the communities around them.

Where we stand

More Than Just Parks opposes the unchecked expansion of large-scale data centers that threaten American communities and natural resources.

Too often, these projects consume enormous amounts of water and energy while shifting their costs onto the public. Communities are left with strained water supplies, higher utility bills, environmental damage, and diminished quality of life, while data center operators receive tax breaks and keep the profits.

We believe communities and their resources should come before corporate profits.

Our own reporting on what that looks like in one Georgia county can be found here.

What’s on the map, and what’s not

The map tracks the new generation of large-scale data centers: hyperscale facilities, AI campuses, and other major commercial data centers, including projects that are proposed or under construction. Projects that communities stopped stay on the map too, as lights that are off.

These are the facilities driving the current data center boom: enormous industrial projects with demands for land, water, and electricity that can affect entire communities. They are the focus of this project.

We do not map smaller data centers that have long supported telecommunications, businesses, and other services and have comparatively little impact on the grid and surrounding resources. We also don’t include a facility until we can tie it to a public record. Every site on the map is traced to a company announcement, government or utility filing, news report, or other public source that you can open from its page.

How we track it

Every data center has a source

Each one is tied to a public record we can link to: company announcements, local planning and utility filings, industry reporting and facility trackers. The source is on the facility’s page.

Size, stated or not

Where a source states a size, the page shows it and says whether that’s running today or planned. Where it doesn’t, we estimate a rough size from the operator’s other sites and label it as an estimate.

Tips and corrections

People on the ground fill in what public records miss, and we check every tip before anything changes. If a page is wrong, tell us so we can promptly correct it.

What each one sits next to

Every data center is measured to the edge of the nearest national park, wilderness area, wildlife refuge or conservation area. Anything within 10 miles gets a line on the map to that edge.

On public land

A data center is marked “on public land” only when a public document puts it there, like a BLM decision or an Energy Department site selection. Its page links that document.

The ground

The night map is NASA’s Black Marble, a composite of the country at night, so you can see where people already live. Close in, the ground is satellite imagery.

Questions people ask

Data centers, explained

How much is a megawatt?

A megawatt is a rate of power draw, the way miles per hour is a rate of speed. A data center’s megawatt figure is how much electricity it pulls at full tilt, around the clock, every day of the year. We use one conversion everywhere on this site: a megawatt of data center load draws roughly what 750 American homes draw.

The math: the U.S. Energy Information Administration puts the average American home at 10,791 kilowatt-hours a year (2022). A megawatt drawn all year is 8,760,000 kilowatt-hours, about 810 homes, and we round down to 750.

• 5 MW
  A small colocation site

  About 3,750 homes’ worth of demand. Sites this size are in our record but off the map.

• 100 MW
  One hyperscale building

  75,000 homes’ worth, drawn by a single building running around the clock.

• 1,000 MW
  One gigawatt

  The output of a large nuclear reactor, feeding roughly 750,000 homes.

• 10,000 MW+
  The announced mega-campuses

  Ten reactors’ worth. Nothing this size exists yet; every figure like this on the map is still a plan.

Announced isn’t built

A headline number rarely says which stage it came from, so the map draws every project by stage, as a light.

Proposed

A company says it intends to build. Sometimes that means permits and purchased land, sometimes a press release and a land option. The biggest numbers on the map live here, and some of them will never break ground.

Under construction

Earth is moving. Even here, the quoted figure usually describes full buildout years away, and a first phase can be a tenth of the headline.

Operating

Built and drawing power. The firmest numbers on the map, though operators rarely disclose exact loads.

Stopped

Proposed, then stopped: rejected by a county, pulled by the developer or blocked by a moratorium. They stay on the map as lights that are off, because a proposal that ended belongs in the record too, with the source for how it ended.

The words you’ll see

Hyperscale

A campus built by or for one giant tenant, think Microsoft or Meta. Hundreds of megawatts and up, often several buildings on one site.

Colocation (colo)

A landlord data center. The operator owns the building and rents rack space and power to many tenants. Most of the older data centers are colo.

Interconnection queue

The waiting line to plug into the grid. Every big new load files a request with the regional grid operator, and the queue is the earliest signal of what’s coming.

Large load

The grid operator’s term for a single customer big enough to matter to the whole system.

Behind the meter

Power built on site to feed the campus directly, off the public grid. Faster to build, and much harder for regulators and neighbors to see coming.

PUE

Power Usage Effectiveness: total facility power divided by computing power. A PUE of 1.5 means half again as much electricity goes to cooling and overhead as reaches the servers.

MGD

Million gallons per day, the unit for water draw. Evaporative cooling at a large campus can run to millions of gallons on a hot day, from the same aquifers nearby farms and towns depend on.

How to read the map

• Red is proposed, amber is under construction, white is operating, gray is stopped. A pulsing ring means the site is on land the public owns.
• Every light opens its record. Tap one to see who’s behind it, where it stands, how close it sits to protected land and the public record it came from.
• Green is protected land. Close in, the parks, refuges and wilderness draw as green ground, and a line runs from each data center within 10 miles to the nearest boundary, labeled with the distance.
• Start with your ZIP code. It shows every data center within 25 miles, closest first, and you can get an email when a new one lands near you.

Who pays for a data center

A data center arrives as an economic development story: jobs, tax base, a company nobody expected to come here. The costs arrive later, and they don’t land on the company.

Electricity. The largest data center campuses can demand as much electricity as entire cities. Serving that demand requires new power plants, transmission lines and substations while the sheer amount of new power being consumed raises costs across the grid. Meanwhile, data centers often negotiate special deals with utilities that the public never gets to see. The result is a remarkable arrangement. Some of the wealthiest companies in the world place large city-sized new demands on the electric grid while families and businesses are left paying more to keep the lights on.

Water. A single large data center can consume one to five million gallons of water a day (EESI: up to 5 million for the largest). Closed-loop sites are sold as water-free, but they still take enormous amounts of water to build: concrete, dust control and site preparation, then the first fill of the cooling system, and at a campus of a dozen buildings the construction goes on for years. In Fayette County, Georgia, QTS, which calls itself the global leader in water-free cooling, drew about 40.7 million gallons through meters the county either didn’t know about or hadn’t approved, while the neighborhood next door lost water pressure in a drought. And the power plants feeding every data center use water of their own, more than ten times what the data centers use on site, by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s count.

Public money. Most states exempt data center equipment from sales tax, and many counties add abatements on top. That’s money a school district or a county budget doesn’t collect, handed to some of the most profitable companies in the world for buildings that employ a few dozen people once they’re running.

The neighbors. A data center can change what it feels like to live in a place. Acres of industrial lighting can turn dark nights bright. Cooling equipment, fans, generators and substations can produce a mechanical hum that carries day and night. Transmission lines and new electrical infrastructure reshape the landscape around them. All of it lands on the people next door, who often had little say in whether it came.

Press, citations and corrections

Reporters and researchers: the press page has the figures you can cite, the share cards, story leads and how to reach us. Write to ask@morethanjustparks.com for data on your coverage area, a map embed or a briefing on a project.

More Than Just Parks. “Data Center Tracker.” morethanjustparks.com/data-center-tracker.

By state

• Virginia
• Texas
• California
• Georgia
• Arizona
• Ohio
• The whole country