The Data Center Atlas

There is no public register of the world's data centers. Operators option land through shell companies, sign non-disclosure agreements with the towns courting them, and pour the foundation before anyone names the operator. Ask a chatbot to fill the gap and it will — fluently and often wrongly, naming a project that was scrapped two years ago or dropping one in the wrong state.

We wanted a map you could trust instead. The Data Center Atlas plots 2,353 facilities, and behind each one is a public record you can open yourself: a building permit, a rezoning vote, a news report. The residents and council members in The Data Center Gold Rush are fighting over these same sites. This is the ground they are fighting over.

The base layer comes from OpenStreetMap, where volunteers tag the buildings they can see, plus a smaller set from Wikidata — a few thousand locations between them. These are the data centers that already exist and that someone has actually seen.

That layer is a starting point, not a finish. It only knows what is built, and it gets things wrong: a Purdue University classroom sat on the map as a data center until we caught it. Open maps give us the floor. The rest of the work is everything they leave out.

A data center is a public act long before it is a building. It applies for a rezoning, pulls a construction permit, lands on a council agenda, draws a write-up when it breaks ground. We read those records — building permits, local legislative filings, and trade news — to find the sites going up now and the ones still in planning. They are the same kinds of records Hamlet indexes across more than 3,000 city halls.

This is where the map sees ahead: the 82 sites under construction and the dozens more in planning that a satellite would miss, because there is nothing on the ground to photograph yet.

Turning a permit description or a news story into a clean record is something a language model is good at, and we use one. We do not trust what it tells us. Every claim it pulls — who is building, where, how large — has to be backed by the source it came from before it reaches the map. If the record does not say it, it does not count, and the misreads get logged rather than published.

Place names lie. There is a Wilmington in Ohio and a Wilmington in Delaware, a Madison County in Mississippi and one in New York. Rather than risk a pin in the wrong state, we confirm a location against the record that named it — and when we cannot, the site stays off the map until we can.

About a fifth of the not-yet-built sites are known only to a city or a county. Those appear as soft halos instead of sharp points, so the map never claims an address it does not have.

Construction is moving faster than the open layers can track, so we went looking. A sweep through trade press and local news surfaced dozens of sites breaking ground, each confirmed against its source before it earned a dot. That roughly quadrupled the under-construction count, from 22 to 82 — Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and a run of newer names building across Texas, Ohio, Virginia, and the Southeast.

We went back through a few hundred facilities against their original sources to count how many we had gotten wrong. The pass turned up the usual share of small errors — and one telling one. A site described as being in "Northwest Louisiana" had landed on a street in Oregon that happened to be named Louisiana Avenue. Another meant for Indiana had been placed in India.

We found the pattern behind those mistakes, fixed it, and checked again. On a control set, the locations held up more than 99.2% of the time. That is why we call it a map and not an estimate.

What is left is 2,353 facilities you can click through — 2,191 running, 82 under construction, 70 planned. Amazon has the most, 206, then Equinix and Digital Realty. Every visible site has a named operator: the clearest sign that a building tagged a data center is the real thing, and not a phone exchange or a university server room.

The fights we covered in The Data Center Gold Rush play out over these exact dots. That story is the argument. This one is the map.