Press and media

Every data center in the public record, measured to the land that belongs to everyone.

The Data Center Tracker puts 1,929 U.S. data centers on one map and measures each one to the boundary of the nearest national park, wilderness area, wildlife refuge or conservation area. Nobody else does that. It’s free, it cites its sources, and everything on this page is yours to use with credit.

What this map does that no other map does

It measures every data center to public land: Industry maps show where data centers are. This one shows what they’re next to. Every facility is measured to the real boundary of the nearest protected unit, from the federal Protected Areas Database, not to a pin at the unit’s center. That’s how a site reads 0.9 miles from Shenandoah National Park instead of 40 miles from its midpoint, and it’s why 496 facilities within 10 miles of protected land is a number you can print.
It leads with what hasn’t been built: The red lights are the 672 proposals that haven’t broken ground. Those are the decisions still open to a county board, a utility commission, a land agency or a neighbor with a comment. The industry trackers are built to sell colocation space, so they lead with what’s operating. We lead with what’s coming.
It keeps the ones communities stopped: 469 canceled, withdrawn, defeated or moratorium-blocked projects stay on the map, gray, with their pages. No other public map records the wins. Where a proposal was beaten, a reporter can see who beat it and how.
Every facility cites the public record that put it there: A company announcement, a planning or utility filing, industry reporting, a facility tracker. The source and the sentence that decided the listing sit on the facility page, with the date a person last read it back. Facilities we can’t source aren’t shown, and a listing that stops holding up comes down in the open.
It refuses the numbers it can’t back: About four in ten facilities never disclose a size, so we publish no megawatt totals, ever. Where a location is held only to about a kilometer, the page says the distance is approximate. 1,619 telco closets, carrier huts and machine rooms are on record but off the national map, so a 2 MW hut beside a refuge never becomes a headline.
It watches a place for you: Anyone can enter a ZIP code and get an email when a data center lands in the record nearby: proposed, breaking ground or stopped. We check every day.
It’s free and it’s open: No login, no paywall, a page for every facility and every state, a share card drawn from the data on every link, and a public record that anyone can correct by writing to us.

The story in one paragraph

The largest infrastructure buildout in American history is landing next to public land, and the federal government is now offering that land as a site. More Than Just Parks, a public lands advocacy organization, has traced 1,929 data centers across 49 states and D.C. to public records and measured each one to the boundary of the nearest national park, wilderness area, wildlife refuge or conservation area. 496 sit within 10 miles of one; 14 sit within a mile. 672 are still proposals, which is where the decisions haven’t been made, and 469 have already been stopped by the people who live near them. The map is free at morethanjustparks.com/data-center-tracker, with a page for every facility and every state, and alerts for any ZIP code.

Why we built it

Whether the country needs more data centers is a real argument, and it isn’t ours. 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. The map itself takes no side. Every project gets the same treatment: a named operator, a real location, a source you can open.

Our turf is public land, and we’re against data centers on it. A campus can move a county over. An aquifer under a wildlife refuge can’t. In 2025 the White House ordered federal agencies to put federally owned land to work for data centers, the Energy Department picked four of its sites for private AI campuses, the Bureau of Land Management approved the first data center ever built on BLM land, and this month Interior told BLM’s state directors to list more parcels. Nobody was keeping a public record of where all of this is landing relative to the parks, refuges and wilderness that belong to everyone. So we built one, the way we keep every other record: by working through the filings and naming the operator behind each project.

The goal is to inform. The developers already know where these sites are. The people who live next to them, and the reporters who cover them, should have the same information in time to use it.

Our position, if you’re quoting one

Four sentences, and they’re the whole of it. We don’t have a position on AI or on whether the country needs more data centers. We’re against them on public land, flat, and that’s the only blanket position we hold. Everywhere else our argument is with the deal and not the building: a project that pays for its own power, proves its own water and signs what it promised is a deal, and one that moves those costs onto the public while the profits leave with the shareholders is a swindle. And the people who bear a project’s costs should be the ones who decide it, which almost never happens, because the circle that votes is a county and the circle that pays is everyone downstream of the water and everyone on the utility bill.

Attribute to More Than Just Parks. The reporting behind it is ours: The Great Data Center Swindle, May 13, 2026. None of it changes how the map is kept. Every project on it is recorded the same way whether we like the project or not, and we don’t score companies.

Numbers you can cite

As of Sep 25, 2026. Each figure carries the rule that produced it, so the number you print is the number the map shows.

1,929
data centers on the map
campus, large and mid-size sites plus every proposal or build with no published size; small sites are on record but not counted
672
proposed
announced or filed, not yet building
389
under construction
868
operating
496
within 10 miles of protected public land
measured to the boundary of a national park, wilderness area, wildlife refuge, national conservation or recreation area, BLM area of critical environmental concern or research natural area
14
within a mile
precise coordinates only; sites held to about a kilometer never count under five miles
469
stopped
canceled, withdrawn, defeated or under moratorium, and kept on the map as the record of what communities have done
3,548
facilities and projects on record
every one citing a public source

We don’t publish a megawatt total, for a state or for the country, and we’d ask you not to build one from our listings: about four in ten facilities never disclose a figure, so any sum reads as a census and isn’t one. Each facility page shows the figure its own source states, with the basis.

Story leads: the fight over public land

Reported as of September 22, 2026, with what our record shows about each. Every claim below links to the facility page or names its source. The running record, with the latest headlines and the full timeline, is the public lands page.

The first data center on BLM land is stalled, and it’s the template: On June 26 the Bureau of Land Management approved the Townsite data center on 88.5 acres of federal land in Boulder City, Nevada, the first data center ever approved on BLM land, citing the White House order to accelerate data center permitting. The developer, Townsite Solar 2, had pulled the same project out of the city’s own land process after residents objected, and BLM cleared the federal parcel without a new environmental review by treating a data center as a swap for the solar project already permitted there. On September 1 the Interior Board of Land Appeals stayed the approval, finding the challengers likely to prevail. On September 21 BLM asked the board to set aside its own approval so it can review the application again; the developer agreed, Boulder City objected, and the city’s response is due October 5. Rep. Titus filed H.R. 10465 on September 16 to bar this kind of right-of-way conversion without its own review. Boulder City residents vote on the zoning in November. Our record puts the site 1.6 miles from Lake Mead National Recreation Area. The lead: a solar right-of-way converted into a data center with no new review is the move the agency is now trying to take back, and the move the BLM list below would repeat across the West.
Interior gave BLM three days to list public land for data centers: The Salt Lake Tribune reported on September 13 that Interior leadership told BLM state directors to identify tracts that could take data centers and return their lists within three days, as a top priority. No parcel list is public. On September 18 The Washington Sun read BLM’s own right-of-way records and found at least 12 data center proposals on 17,600 acres across Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming, most never reported and several unknown to the local officials the paper called. The lead: our map already shows which protected units sit beside the places the buildout is heading. Among proposals within 10 miles of protected land, the states with the most are Arizona (10), Virginia (10), California (10), Pennsylvania (6) and Idaho (6).
The biggest one yet is 3,200 acres of BLM land south of Boise: Rhea Data, a subsidiary of Arevia Power of Las Vegas, has applied to build a four million square foot data center campus with its own natural gas plant beside Blacks Creek Reservoir, south of Boise, on about 3,200 acres of BLM land plus 550 acres of transmission corridor. BLM’s Four Rivers Field Office confirmed the application to the Idaho Statesman on September 21. It first arrived in August 2025, and the office plans a notice of intent in the Federal Register before the end of the year. It’s about 5.5 times the size of Meta’s Kuna data center a short drive west, and BLM is still asking how much water it needs and how it would be cooled. The lead: the reservoir beside the site is a bird reserve that Audubon volunteers spent six years cleaning up, and the project surfaced only because a reporter read BLM’s right-of-way records.
The Energy Department is the quiet half of the story: No county vote, no zoning hearing. DOE picked Idaho National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, the Paducah site and the Savannah River Site for private AI campuses on federal land, and on July 29 it handed Paducah to Brookfield and NextEra Energy: a 1.8 GW computing campus, 2 GW of new gas generation, more than $100 billion, construction through 2031. On DOE’s Portsmouth site in Ohio, SoftBank’s PORTS campus is already under construction at a stated 10 GW, the largest figure in our record. The lead: the federal sites are Cold War nuclear reservations with their own transmission, which is the argument for them, and each one sits on land that never went through a public planning process for this use.
Congress tried to give away a national forest for Google’s water: H.R. 655 would hand 150 acres of the Mount Hood National Forest to The Dalles, Oregon, so the city can serve its data centers’ water demand from the Dog River watershed. It passed the House on December 9, 2025. On September 9 Senator Wyden came out against it, calling it a fast track to selling off public land, and it’s stalled in the Senate. The data centers in question are Google’s: our record holds the company’s campus in The Dalles as eight listings on the boundary of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area, including a 600 MW build under construction. The lead: the first bill to move public land for a data center wasn’t for the building, it was for the water.
A developer is suing a town of 2,500 to build beside Mammoth Cave: Kentucky Industrial Alliance filed plans for a 600-acre, 1.2 GW campus north of Cave City, Kentucky; the council passed a twelve-month moratorium days later; the developer sued the city twice. Our record puts Cave Point Commerce Center 3.5 miles from Mammoth Cave National Park, on karst, where the residents’ objection is the groundwater. The lead: the moratorium is the tool that’s working, and it’s now the tool being litigated.
It’s a midterm issue: Penn State researchers wrote on September 9 that data centers are becoming a defining issue of the 2026 midterms, with dozens of projects frozen this year and politicians in both parties backing away. In July Rep. Tlaib introduced the No AI Data Centers on Federal Lands Act with five cosponsors. On September 16 the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417 to 3, and the Senate blocked a fast track for it the next day. The lead: 469 stopped projects on our map, 72 of them within 10 miles of protected land, are the local record behind the national mood. The states where communities have stopped the most: North Carolina (32), Michigan (25), Virginia (24), Indiana (23) and Georgia (22).

Story leads from the record

These come straight from the map and update as it does. Click any line for the facility or state page, with its source.

The biggest proposals next to protected land

95 proposals sit within 10 miles of a protected unit, on precise coordinates. The largest with a stated size is Wonder Valley / Stratos Project at 9 GW, 5.9 miles from Salt Wells Wildlife Habitat Area of Critical Environmental Concern. A figure that size is an announced buildout, not a load, and the facility page says so.

Closest to protected land

One line per operator and unit: eight Google buildings on the Columbia Gorge are one story, not eight. A distance of 0.0 means the facility is on the boundary.

States with the most proposed

Virginia leads with 91 proposals, and these 6 states hold 311 of the 672 nationwide. A state page lists every facility by county, so the local angle is one click in.

Protected units with the most data centers nearby

Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge has 45 within 10 miles, 7 of them still proposals. Click a unit to see its sites on the map with the measured lines.

How the record is built

Every facility cites a public record we can link to: industry reporting, company announcements, planning and utility filings, facility trackers, and tips from people on the ground that we check against the record before anything changes. Power plants seeking a grid connection are generators, not data centers, and stay out. Distance is measured from the facility to the real boundary of the nearest protected unit in the federal Protected Areas Database, and a unit is the union of its mapped parts. Where a source states a size, the figure is shown with its basis: operating, announced phase or announced buildout. Where it doesn’t, the facility carries a size class inferred from the operator’s own disclosed sites, labeled as an inference, and it never becomes a megawatt anywhere on this site.

Four facilities in five have been read back against their own cited source since August 2026, and each facility page says when. In a blind re-read of a hundred random facilities in September, about one in six had a detail its source didn’t fully support; those were corrected and the pattern went into the next pass. We say that on the record because the number a reporter should trust is the one that comes with its own error rate. The full methodology

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. Our other public tools cover the roadless rule, threatened public lands, wildfire, dark skies and the congressional record on public lands, and all of them run on the same principle as this one: name the operator, cite the record, measure to the boundary.

Share cards and images

Every page on the tracker carries its own share card, drawn from the data: the country at night with every light, a state’s lights, a place, or one facility with its distance to protected land. Paste any tracker link into a text, a post or a story and the card comes with it. The cards below are free to use with credit to More Than Just Parks.

Any state’s card is its state page address with /opengraph-image on the end, and the same goes for a ZIP code page or a facility page. Need a map at print resolution, a crop of your coverage area, or an embed? Write to us and say the outlet and the deadline.

Share the map

How to cite

More Than Just Parks. “Data Center Tracker.” morethanjustparks.com/data-center-tracker. Accessed Sep 25, 2026.

For a single facility, cite its page; the URL is stable and the page records when the listing was last read against its source.

Corrections

If a facility page is wrong, we want to know, and we correct it in the open. Email ask@morethanjustparks.com with the facility page and what you know. A listing we withdraw keeps a page that says so, and why.

Contact

ask@morethanjustparks.com. Interviews, background on a project or a region, and data for a coverage area are all on the table.

About the tracker and its methodology