BY THE NUMBERS
Two kinds of number live on this page, and they are kept apart on purpose. The first kind is ours, counted from the records on this site. The second is published research, quoted with a link so you can check it.
Counted from this site’s own database. Not a count of every data center in America — a count of the ones we have found and can show you a source for.
Published figures about data centers nationally. None of these are ours; each names its publisher and links to it.
That is 176 terawatt-hours, up from 58 in 2014. The same report projects 325 to 580 terawatt-hours by 2028 — somewhere between 6.7% and 12% of the country's electricity. The width of that range is not sloppiness; nobody knows.
Virginia's own legislature estimated that a typical Dominion Energy residential customer could see generation and transmission costs rise by that much, in constant dollars, if data center growth continues unconstrained.
Berkeley Lab put direct water use at about 66 billion litres in 2023. A single building can sit anywhere from less than a house to more than a large office block: it depends almost entirely on how it is cooled.
Reported in a 2026 study of what data centers have actually done to electricity prices — which, against the prevailing expectation, found average retail rates fell between 2015 and 2024. Two of its three authors work at the power industry's own research institute, and it is not peer reviewed.
Most of what we track is a building, not a plan. Our records come largely from OpenStreetMap, which maps data centers that already exist. A county with nothing on our map may still have a proposal nobody has filed yet.
Very few projects carry a figure. Capacity, acreage and investment are recorded only where a document stated them, which is a small minority of our records. We do not estimate the rest, and the totals above count only what was actually written down somewhere.
We have no water figure backed by an official record. Not one. A national water counter is the single most requested number on a site like this, and building one from what we hold would mean inventing it.
A national total is something to read. A filing in your county is something you can turn up to.