What this map is, and where we stand

Who we are

More Than Just Parks is a public lands advocacy organization founded by the Pattiz brothers, Will and Jim. We track what happens to America’s public lands and who’s behind it, and we publish what we find so the people who live next to those lands can act on it. Data centers are the newest pressure on that ground, and the fastest moving one, so we started keeping this record the way we keep every other: by working through the public filings and naming the operator behind each project.

Where we stand

Whether the country needs more data centers is a real argument. It isn’t ours, and you won’t find us making it here in either direction. We don’t have a position on AI. We have one wherever a public resource is on the table, and this buildout puts four of them there: land, water, money and the grid.

On public land we’re against them. Not on BLM land, not in a national forest, not on a wildlife refuge, not beside a monument, a wilderness study area or a wild and scenic river. That’s the one position that shapes this map: every project is measured to the boundary of the nearest national park, wilderness area, wildlife refuge, national conservation or recreation area, BLM area of critical environmental concern or research natural area. 496 sit within 10 miles of one, and 14 within a single mile. The parks and refuges on this map belong to everyone, and they’re the one category of land no check can replace. A campus can move a county over. An aquifer under a wildlife refuge can’t. It’s the only blanket position on this site.

Everywhere else, our argument is with the deal and not the building. A data center that pays for its own power, proves its own water, signs what it promised and lets the county vote is a deal. One that raises everyone’s rates, draws an aquifer down in a drought, takes public money to hand back a quarter on the dollar and calls thirteen industrial buildings a campus is a swindle. The costs land on the public and the profits leave with the shareholders. We’ll say which one we’re looking at, and we’ll show the record that says so.

The people who bear the costs should be the ones who decide. They almost never are. A county commission votes on a project whose water comes from an aquifer four counties share, whose transmission lines cross neighborhoods that got no vote, and whose rate increase lands on everyone the utility serves. A small circle decides and a big circle pays, and that gap isn’t a flaw in the process, it’s how the cost gets moved onto the public in the first place. We’re for a public vote on any project above a real size, every term on the table before that vote with no code names and no NDAs, and commitments signed and enforceable before approval rather than promised after. Where the costs cross a county line, the decision should cross it too.

That last one is why public land is different rather than an exception to it. Public land isn’t a county’s to give. It belongs to everyone, so the circle that has to agree is the whole country, and no commission speaks for that.

None of this touches the map. Every project here gets the same treatment whether we like it or not: a real operator, a real location and a real source you can open. We don’t score companies. We run campaigns on two things only, data centers on public land and the right of the people paying for a project to vote on it, and never against a company. The goal of the map itself is to inform: to give the people who live near these projects the same information the developers already have, in time to use it.

The reporting behind this position is our own: The Great Data Center Swindle, on what one company did to one Georgia county, and what the same playbook wants with your public lands next.

This isn’t every data center in America

As of September 2026 the record holds 3,548 facilities and projects, and the map draws 1,929 of them. Commercial directories list roughly 5,400 operating U.S. facilities. We hold about half of the older colocation and carrier sites, and nearly all of the new campuses and filings that make the news.

The gap is deliberate. A facility goes on this map only when it cites a public record we can link to: industry reporting, a company announcement, a planning or utility filing, a facility tracker. Entries we can’t tie to a source aren’t shown, and a listing whose cited page turns out to describe a different facility comes down when we find it. Older colocation sites are the ones most often missing, because many of them were never filed or reported anywhere we can cite. New filings were last swept on Sep 25, 2026.

About a third of facilities publish a capacity figure. The rest read “not disclosed” or carry a size class inferred from the operator’s own disclosed sites, and that inference is always labeled. Where we hold a location only to about a kilometer, the page says the distance is approximate instead of printing a false precision.

What’s on the map, and what’s held back

The record holds every facility we can trace to a public source. The national map draws the ones that change a place: campus-scale and large sites, mid-size facilities, and every proposal or build with no published size. 1,619 facilities are held off it: telco closets and network sites, single-building colocation, university and company machine rooms, and measured sites under 10 MW. Each has its own page, each appears on its state page, and none counts in anything that says “on this map.”

The rule is about credibility. A cable landing station beside a wildlife refuge is a real facility and a bad headline. The map answers what’s being built near the land, and a 2 MW carrier hut isn’t that.

Methodology

Every project is sourced

Each facility cites a public record we can link to: industry reporting (Data Center Dynamics, Data Center Frontier), the interconnection.fyi and Baxtel facility trackers, OpenStreetMap, company announcements, and local planning and utility filings. The source sits on the facility page with the sentence that decided the listing.

What we exclude

Power plants seeking a grid connection (gas, solar, wind, storage) are generators, not data centers, and stay out even at large capacity. Only data center loads are shown.

Distance is measured to the boundary

Every project is checked against the Protected Areas Database (PAD-US) and measured to the real boundary of the nearest protected unit, never to a point at its center. A unit’s boundary is the union of its mapped parts. The lines on the map, in a place search, run from each site within 10 miles to that nearest boundary point.

On public land

A site carries the words “on public land” (or “on state land”) only when a public document places it there: a BLM decision or right-of-way case, an Energy Department site selection, a state land office action, county minutes. The record names the office that holds the case and links the document. Where BLM’s public case record lists the surveyed sections, the pin sits at their center. A line that only crosses public land, a pipeline or a transmission tie, says “crosses” instead and isn’t counted. A government lab’s own computing on a federal reservation isn’t flagged; the flag is for a data center a private party would build on ground the public owns. Nothing is inferred from a map overlay.

Size, with and without a published figure

Where a source states a capacity, the figure is shown and marked measured, with the basis (operating, announced phase, announced buildout). Where it doesn’t, the facility carries a footprint class inferred from what the record holds, above all the operator’s own disclosed sites, and that class is labeled as an inference and never becomes a megawatt anywhere on this site. No totals are published: about four in ten facilities never disclose, so a sum would be a false census.

Verification

Four facilities in five have been read back against their own cited source since August 2026, and the badge on each facility says which and when. In a blind re-read of a hundred random facilities in September 2026, about one facility in six had a field its source didn’t fully support; those listings were corrected and the pattern went into the next pass.

Community intelligence

Tips from people on the ground fill the gaps public records leave: behind-the-meter power deals, co-location arrangements, land bought before anything is filed. Every tip is reviewed against the record before it changes a listing. Opposition levels come from local reporting and public comment records.

The ground

The night map is NASA’s Black Marble, a 2016 composite of the country at night, so you can see where people already are. It’s context, not data; nothing is counted from it. Close in, the ground is Esri imagery, treated for the night.

Corrections

If a facility page is wrong, tell us and we correct it in the open. A listing we withdraw keeps a page that says they were withdrawn and why.

The buildout is bigger than the map

Individual data center filings in utility interconnection queues are mostly confidential, so a per-project map can’t show every request. The grid operators publish the totals, and the queue is the earliest signal of what’s coming.

• 233 GW
  ERCOT large-load queue (end 2025)

  Up about 300% in a year. Roughly 73% of it is data centers.

  Source: Utility Dive / ERCOT
• 55 GW
  New PJM large load by 2030

  Utilities forecast about 100 GW by 2037, mostly hyperscale data centers. PJM capacity prices rose roughly tenfold.

  Source: Data Center Dynamics / Wood Mackenzie
• 4.5% to 12%
  Data center share of U.S. electricity by 2030

  EPRI puts it at 4.6 to 9.1%. Berkeley Lab projects 325 to 580 TWh a year, up to 12% by 2028.

  Source: EPRI / LBNL

Press, citations and corrections

Reporters and researchers: the press page has the figures you can cite, the share cards, story leads by state and by protected unit, 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
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• The whole country