Data centers
A new geography of displacement
Hyperscale data-center construction is the next wave of displacement in the United States. The atlas covers it with the same archival method the historical cases use: named blocks, named families where the record permits, named organizing groups, and a map that shows what the fence line alone cannot.
Eight regions, four version-four anchors
The eight regions where hyperscale data-center construction is reshaping land, water, and power in the United States. Pins mark the four version-four anchor campuses, each linked from the list below.
The map shows Eight US regions the atlas's data-center section covers and Version four anchor campuses.
- Eight US regions the atlas's data-center section covers
- Version four anchor campuses
Approximate regional boundaries drawn by the atlas to group grid-interconnect and utility siting patterns. Not a cartographic authority.; Coordinates approximate. See individual campus pages for parcel-accurate footprints..
The regional polygons group grid-interconnect and utility siting patterns, not state lines. Every campus page carries four map layers: the facility footprint, the adjacent residential area, the electric utility service territory, and the water source (aquifer or surface-water reach).
Version four anchor places
Four places open the data-center section. Each carries a long essay, a four-layer map, and the full bibliography.
Pacific Northwest
Crook and Morrow Counties
Meta and Apple campuses cost Crook County schools more than 16 million dollars in 2024. Amazon's Boardman campuses drove nitrate contamination to eight times the federal limit in 45,000 wells; a class action settled for 20.5 million dollars in March 2026.
1 campus
Midwest
Licking County
Meta, Intel, AWS, Google, and QTS have assembled more than 4,000 acres around New Albany and Johnstown since 2022, pressing Hoover Reservoir and the Alum Creek aquifer while township trustees and Ohio Citizen Action organized a village-scale defense.
1 campus
Southwest
Maricopa West Valley
The Phoenix West Valley hyperscale cluster converted Hassayampa sub-basin acres to industrial cooling load. A 2023 ADWR moratorium froze roughly 40,000 planned homes while data-center operations continued drawing groundwater under industrial zoning exemptions.
1 campus
Mid-Atlantic
Prince William County
The Prince William Digital Gateway was a 2,100-acre private assemblage of Pageland Lane farmland meant to become the largest data-center corridor on earth until the Virginia Court of Appeals voided the rezoning in March 2025.
1 campus
Great Plains
Sarpy County
Meta and Google built hyperscale campuses on Papio Creek row-crop land starting in 2019; Google's proposed LB 1261 carve-out would add a privatized gas plant whose grid upgrades fall on South Omaha and North Omaha ratepayers through OPPD.
1 campus
Southeast
South Memphis
xAI's Colossus and Colossus 2 supercomputers on former industrial ground in Boxtown and Whitehaven, two freedmen's settlements that Memphis annexed and then denied services for a century.
2 campuses
Texas
Taylor County
Stargate Abilene converted 1,100 acres of Taylor County pasture into a 1.2-gigawatt AI campus under an 85-percent tax abatement, while a 360 MW on-site gas plant drew on an ERCOT grid and reservoirs serving a region already in intermittent drought.
1 campus
Mountain West
Utah Cedar Valley
Meta, Google, QTS, and Tract assembled nearly 2,000 acres of Cedar Valley dryland farm in Utah County. Withdrawals draw from a basin the Utah Geological Survey models as stressed, reducing Jordan River inflow and accelerating the Great Salt Lake's decline to historic lows.
1 campus
The eight regions
Mid-Atlantic
Version four
Data Center Alley; Dominion rate pass-through.
Southeast
Version four
TVA and Southern Company territory; xAI in Memphis.
Texas
Version five
ERCOT; Stargate Abilene; Permian flare-gas.
Great Plains
Version four
Meta and Google in Sarpy County; LB 1261 carve-out.
Midwest
Version four
Licking County cluster; AEP Ohio and the PUCO tariff order.
Southwest
Version five
Phoenix West Valley under the ADWR moratorium.
Mountain West
Version five
Cedar Valley Utah; High Plains Wyoming.
Pacific Northwest
Version five
Prineville and The Dalles; Morrow County nitrate settlement.
See /roadmap/data-centers for the full candidate list and the research briefs behind it.
Method
The historical atlas treats each displacement as a specific act against specific people on a specific block in a specific year. The data-center section holds to that standard. Each essay names the operator, the acreage, the megawatts, the gallons, the utility, the ratepayer base that carries the grid upgrade, the aquifer or surface reach that carries the water, the displaced neighborhood, and the organizing coalition that is fighting. Historical cases in the atlas are linked at the end of each essay so that present organizers can borrow the tools the earlier fights built.