March 25, 2026 by Dan Rabb and Jon Banister

Data Center Nation: How All Of America Became Big Tech's Boomtown

Prince William County, Virginia, looked very different in 2016.

With the Manassas Civil War battlefield at its center, the county long served as a dividing line between the heavily developed D.C. suburbs of Northern Virginia and the rural communities in the central part of the state. 

A decade ago, the county’s western half was predominantly forests and farms, with its eastern half filled with bedroom communities.

Now, an explosion of data center development has changed this landscape dramatically. Vast campuses of windowless concrete buildings surrounded by generators have bubbled out along major highways and power transmission corridors, replacing homes, businesses and green space.

Photo: Courtesy of Prince William County Department of Economic Development & Tourism

A Prince William County, Virginia, data center

Although the county had a smattering of the facilities in 2016, today Prince William is home to more than 1.5 gigawatts of data center capacity — more than three times as much as exists in all of Silicon Valley. The 12M SF of data center floor space in the county is the equivalent of 67 Walmart Supercenters. And more is on the way. 

The transformation has polarized residents: Some see it as a previously unimaginable economic boom, and others view it as a money grab that has despoiled the county’s natural beauty. 

Similar stories are playing out across the United States, as a data center industry that had once been tightly clustered in just a handful of places is suddenly front and center for a growing number of communities. 

In as little as five years, cities from New Albany, Ohio, to Abilene, Texas, that were strangers to data centers are suddenly digital infrastructure hubs with dozens of million-square-foot facilities rising on campuses covering thousands of acres. 

And this trend is accelerating. At the end of last year, 64% of new data centers were being built in “frontier markets” outside of the traditional industry hubs, according to JLL.

“They’re now everywhere,” said David Irek, chief operating officer at Duos Edge AI, a firm with a portfolio of data centers in rural areas throughout Texas. “The pace of change is like nothing I’ve ever seen.”

For communities that haven't seen this type of development before, data centers present trade-offs: They generate tax revenue that some localities badly need, but they also use huge amounts of power and can create air and noise pollution. 

Growing opposition has led many counties to ban new data centers, with some states considering moratoriums. The Trump administration has also responded to the concerns over energy costs, with the White House pushing tech firms to pay for their own power generation. 

While communities debate their future role in the digital infrastructure build-out, the data center boom is happening right before their eyes. Tech giants like Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build out their artificial intelligence infrastructure and are racing to get projects under construction as fast as they can. 

Just as the 19th century’s wave of industrialization transformed bucolic communities across the U.S. into hubs of factories and infrastructure, this second industrial revolution is encroaching on areas where the scale of the industrial build-out Big Tech is pursuing was unimaginable until now. 

A Bisnow analysis of historical market data provided by JLL and Data Center Map shows how the data center boom is quickly spreading — both within industry hubs like Virginia, Texas and Georgia and throughout parts of the country like Wisconsin and Albuquerque, New Mexico, that had never seen this type of development before. 

The map below shows the growth of U.S. data center markets from 2017 to 2026, according to JLL data, with bubbles sized based on total megawatts of capacity. Zoom in to more clearly see individual markets.

“The old rules of data center geography are breaking down,” JLL Global Head of Data Center Research Andrew Batson wrote in a February op-ed. “While everyone fights over scarce capacity in Northern Virginia and Silicon Valley, the real growth is happening in places most people never considered.”

The geographic shift reflects a change in the factors driving site selection decisions for data center developers and Big Tech firms. They previously focused on areas with robust fiber infrastructure close to major population centers, but now the predominant considerations are the availability of power and the willingness of communities to accept the behemoth facilities. 

“Now, instead of the gravity of data centers being population, the gravity of data centers is power,” said Wes Cummins, CEO of Applied Digital, a developer building hyperscale campuses in North Dakota. “It can be built in places that data centers couldn’t be built before, and it can go to where it’s most efficient from a power perspective.”

While the data center boom is most associated with AI in the public consciousness, the enormous processing needs of the technology threw kerosene on what was already a growing fire. Even before ChatGPT kicked off the AI arms race in late 2022, the demand for computing power was skyrocketing due to the increased use of videoconferencing tools like Zoom, streaming services like Netflix, and many other online applications that Americans rely on every day. 

At the start of 2020, Northern Virginia accounted for more than half of all built and planned data center capacity in the country.

Back then, no developer or major tech firm would have considered placing a data center in Abilene, Texas. Now, the amount of data center capacity under development in the West Texas town is triple what exists today in all of Northern Virginia. 

The points on the maps below each represent one data center, showing their geographic spread over time but not sized based on capacity. Zoom in to see their specific locations within markets.  

Jackson, Mississippi, had no operational data centers until the second half of 2025, according to JLL’s data. Yet the market now has more capacity than Silicon Valley did in 2020, and hundreds more megawatts of development are expected in the months ahead as Amazon and third-party developer Compass Datacenters move forward with large-scale projects.

“Now we're at a point where there's just been this rapid expansion of the sector really across most of the U.S.,” Batson said in an interview. 

While new data center hot spots are sprouting up across the country, existing digital infrastructure hubs — once contained to tight clusters largely in commercial or industrial areas — have jumped their banks and spilled into surrounding communities. 

Prince William County was the canary in the coal mine in this regard, one of the first areas to be inundated as data centers spread outward from Loudoun. But the flood across Virginia hasn’t stopped there.

Data center campuses are springing up all along the Interstate 95 corridor connecting D.C. and Richmond. Massive projects are rising in small communities where nothing of this scale has ever been built before — places like rural Louisa County, where Amazon is developing $11B worth of data centers on nearly 2,000 acres.   

A similar spread is happening in Dallas, traditionally one of the sector’s largest markets. While data centers were once exclusively clustered close to the downtown core, development has sprawled outward. At the same time, the smaller Austin and San Antonio data center markets have also grown and spread, merging what were three isolated clusters into a digital infrastructure beltway spread across a thick swath of central Texas. 

“Dallas is a microcosm of everything that’s happening. … Up until about two years ago, every single data center deal had been done inside a 30-mile radius,” said CBRE Senior Vice President Brant Bernet, one of the heads of the firm’s DFW data center practice. “Ten years from now, Dallas is going to be touching Austin, and Austin is touching San Antonio. The I-35 corridor is just going to be a technology corridor.”

By far, the predominant force pushing data centers into more and more communities across the U.S. is the need for power. 

Just a few years ago, a data center drawing 12 MW to 30 MW was considered large. Today, a single building typically houses 60 MW to 100 MW of computing capacity. And rather than standalone facilities, developers now construct multibuilding campuses, requiring sites capable of supporting hundreds of megawatts of power. 

These massive blocks of power — and the large tracts of land needed for campuses — are no longer available in the industry’s traditional homes. 

Utilities that long served the industry were caught off guard by its skyrocketing growth and hadn’t developed the grid infrastructure necessary to support the subsequent surge in electricity demand. 

Virginia’s Dominion Energy represented one of the first dominoes to fall on this front, telling developers in July 2022 that it wouldn’t be able to deliver power to some new projects. Builders then raced to emerging data center markets with more power availability, from the Pacific Northwest to Texas. But then those regions would suffer their own power shortages in subsequent years. 

As power constraints across the country triggered yearslong waits for grid connections, data center development became a search for electricity wherever it could be found — a stark change from past site selection considerations. 

The data center sector’s surge in the years leading up to the pandemic was driven largely by demand for content delivery for social media and streaming services like Instagram, Netflix and YouTube. To maintain performance, facilities needed to be close to end users and dense fiber networks capable of handling growing volumes of data. This dynamic kept the industry tightly clustered in core markets.

But that model has shifted. While content demand continues to rise, power constraints in those core hubs forced tech companies to reconsider how much of their computing truly needs to be in such latency-sensitive locations. At the same time, the rise of AI — and Big Tech’s trillion-dollar push to build large-scale facilities to train AI models — has led to the rise of a new kind of data center with very different siting requirements. 

Such “AI factories” are significantly less dependent on proximity to population centers and dense fiber networks, allowing developers like Applied Digital to pursue projects in locations like North Dakota where power is cheaper and more abundant. And even when better fiber networks are needed, fiber can be deployed faster and at lower cost than new power transmission infrastructure. 

“When we started doing this almost 30 years ago, we were really chasing fiber, literally getting in our car and driving and trying to find where the little orange flags were that said this is AT&T,” CBRE’s Bernet said. “Fast-forward 25 years, it's all about power. Can you get power?”

Power constraints in Silicon Valley helped drive the rise of a major data center cluster in Hillsboro, Oregon, where developers tapped abundant hydroelectric power from the Columbia River. As that capacity filled, development spread to newer markets such as Reno and Las Vegas. 

A similar pattern has played out in the Midwest. Columbus, Ohio, emerged as a major hub, thanks to surplus electricity originally built for manufacturing that never materialized, while constraints in Chicago pushed developers into neighboring states — first Indiana, then Wisconsin and Minnesota.

Within existing markets, new development has traced the pathway of power infrastructure. In Virginia, new projects are appearing along I-95 because of the major transmission corridor that runs beside it. In Georgia, new data centers are emerging in towns far from Atlanta like Lithia Springs and Union City because of recently completed power infrastructure projects there. 

“We're following the highest-capacity power lines. That's where you're seeing most of the activity,” said CBRE’s Chris Hermann, who co-heads the firm’s DFW data center practice. 

Yet as data center campuses get bigger and large blocks of utility power become harder to find, developers and tech giants are increasingly pursuing campuses where at least some of the power is generated on-site, largely from natural gas. These include some of the highest-profile AI data center campuses, like OpenAI’s Stargate development in Abilene, Texas, and Meta’s Hyperion project in northeast Louisiana. Microsoft even struck a deal in 2024 to reopen a Three Mile Island reactor and buy nuclear energy directly from the source.

Just five years ago, tech firms and other major tenants would have refused to locate their servers close to pipelines or other oil and gas infrastructure for fear of explosions. Any loss of power or other outage can cost data center users millions of dollars per hour, so it was considered an unacceptable environmental risk. 

Today, major oil and gas production regions like West Texas and rural Pennsylvania have gone from having no data centers at all to having some of the largest digital development pipelines in the world.

“We had transactions a few years ago that would be completely nixed because of the presence of the natural gas pipeline on a site,” Hermann said. “Now a site wouldn’t be chosen unless it has it.”

As data centers rise in more communities across the U.S. and the sector goes from obscurity to a major economic force underpinning the global economy, it has become the subject of daily headlines and a policy concern at the local, state and federal levels. 

Prince William County also served as a pioneer in that regard. Local opposition to a 2,000-acre development proposal became a key issue in county elections after lawmakers approved it in late 2023. The new slate of supervisors was less supportive of the plan, which has since been blocked in court. 

Data centers have now become a prominent issue in local and state elections across the country, and lawmakers from Georgia to Utah to Minnesota have advanced proposals to restrict the industry’s growth. 

As the fast-growing industry hunts for friendly territory, developers increasingly find themselves unwelcome in ever wider swaths of the country. 

“The industry is experiencing more resistance in aggregate, and in some respects, it's kind of a numbers game: Now, if you're pursuing 10 sites, maybe seven of them or maybe five of them actually get approved and you can get all the way to shovels in the ground,” Batson said. “And I can understand community concerns. It's basic human nature to fear the unknown.”

Tract supported the production of this feature but was not involved in its reporting and was granted no review or approval.