Data centers have become essential infrastructure, powering everything from cloud services and artificial intelligence to military and government operations. They are described by JLL as “foundational to how modern society functions” and as vital to national security. A January 2025 executive order emphasized AI’s central role in shaping the economy and defense, underscoring why the U.S. is building at a record pace.
Already, the United States is home to the world’s hyperscale capacity. Projections are that the country will have around 40% of worldwide data-center investment by 2030. Nowhere is this dominance more pronounced than Northern Virginia—”Data Center Alley”—which alone represents around 13% of capacity. Other key markets are Dallas–Fort Worth, Phoenix, Atlanta, Chicago, and Silicon Valley.
Current Market Size and Demand
America’s data center footprint is expanding at breakneck speed. By the end of 2024, the country’s key U.S. markets contained close to 6.9 GW of live capacity—a 34% jump in just one year, according to CBRE (world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm). The total colocation inventory in the nation was quantified at about 12 GW as of mid-2024, double that in 2020.
Northern Virginia is still in the lead, responsible for nearly half of new capacity in the last four years. Competition is building, though. Atlanta edged past Virginia temporarily in leasing activity during 2024, with more than 700 MW to Virginia’s 452 MW. Overall across the country, vacancy rates in late 2024 were a record-low 1.9%. Net absorption in the first six months of 2024 alone reached 2.8 GW—nine times 2020’s total.
Demand is so high that new construction is often pre-leased before it’s even complete, pushing up rates and causing developers to accelerate timelines.
The Scale of U.S. Data Centers: Investments
Hyperscale cloud providers are powering the largest spend wave. Amazon Web Services has announced more than $30 billion in US projects, including a $20 billion Pennsylvania AI hub and a $10 billion expansion in North Carolina. Microsoft logged $30 billion of capital expenditures in the first quarter of 2025 alone, almost all going toward AI-capable Azure data centers. Google last month added a further $10 billion to the size of its U.S. data-center budget, while Meta continues to expand throughout the country. All four industry giants together are likely to spend around $180 billion in 2025.
Private equity and real estate investment trusts remain acquisitive players. Equinix, Digital Realty, and CyrusOne have posted record levels of leasing. Prominent deals include a $1.2 billion buyout of QTS Virginia facilities and a $15 billion partnership for hyperscale campus development. Industry estimates put U.S. data-center deals at $6.5 billion for 2024, with several single-asset transactions exceeding $100 million.
Mega-Projects to Watch: Among the most ambitious U.S. campuses in the works or on the drawing board today are:
Tract Data Center Campus — Buckeye, Arizona. The project is envisioned as a massive $20 billion development, with plans to build up to 20 million square feet of data center space across as many as 40 individual facilities. Will be one of the largest in world when complete.
Project Sail (Coweta County, Georgia) — proposed. A $17 billion 13-building campus on 832 acres and 4.9 million sq ft. As of mid-2025, the project remained in the entitlement stage and wasn’t approved or under way.
Homer City Redevelopment (Pennsylvania) — planned. A ~$10 billion proposal to repurpose a retired coal power plant into a natural-gas-fueled data-center campus with multi-gigawatt power capacity; in feasibility/planning with local stakeholders.
Galaxy Digital’s Helios Campus, Texas – originally crypto-mining facility, being repurposed as an $8 billion AI-ready data center campus with 800 MW of approved capacity and potential expansion to 1.7 GW.
Meta Richland Parish Campus (Monroe, LA) — under construction. Meta is dedicating $10 billion, ~4 million sq ft in an AI-ready campus; site preparation and initial construction activity started in early 2025.
Stargate (OpenAI / Oracle / partners) — under way. Multi-site, multi-year AI compute program largely projected at $100B+ globally. U.S. efforts consist of stand-up of very large-scale campuses and procurement of specialized hardware (e.g., SoftBank/Foxconn manufacturing for Stargate in Ohio). Oracle separately announced a 4.5 GW global expansion of AI infrastructure behind those efforts. (Individual site specifics, like reported ~1.2 GW at Abilene, Texas, to be determined.)
Google’s Pryor & Stillwater, Oklahoma campuses – an investment of billions of dollars, with Pryor already among the largest buildings in the country and Stillwater to boost capacity in the region.
Altogether, these projects illustrate the manner in which capital is piling up into mega-campus-style spaces designed for AI-era workloads.
Construction Pipeline
By mid-2025, about 7 GW of capacity was under construction across North America—the same installed base six years before. Almost all of this capacity is pre-leased to the big cloud providers already. Unless trends continue, U.S. data-center capacity will double by 2030.
Construction remains to concentrate in recognized hubs: Northern Virginia, Texas, and Phoenix lead the way, followed by Atlanta, Chicago, Salt Lake City, and Des Moines. But growth is spreading. Indiana, Missouri, and North Carolina are attracting billion-dollar campuses courtesy of incentives, low land costs, and availability of power.
Projections indicate data-center electricity demand could rise from 4.4% of the U.S. electric load in 2023 to 6.7% to 12% by 2028—another 20 GW of load at decade’s end.
Policy Shifts on U.S. Data Centers
Biden Administration (2021–2024): Policy linked AI infrastructure to clean energy and national security. An executive order in January 2025 directed federal agencies to expedite approvals, promote facilities fueled by renewables, and require chips made in America. The Department of Energy focused on growing energy use and began projects to make the grid more resilient. The administration also released permitting reforms to cut federal review to below two years.
Trump Administration (2025 and beyond): In July 2025, President Trump signed an executive order with a deregulation focus. It reversed climate and diversity requirements, directed agencies to expedite approvals further, and made loans, grants, and tax incentives for qualifying projects. It also encouraged developers to recycle federal and industrial land. This approach can accelerate new buildings, though zoning and approvals remain disproportionately dominated by cities and states.
The new rules bring uncertainty: streamlined permitting can unshackle projects quickly, but scaling incentives and grid readiness will determine how fast investment can actually translate into operating capacity.
Constraints and Challenges
Electricity: Meeting projected demand will require enormous new generating and transmission capacity. Texas’s grid manager estimates peak load having the potential to more than double by 2031 if all planned projects come to fruition. Federal policy focuses on extending the life of old plants, adding flexible generation, and adding storage.
Land and Water: Large campuses occupy hundreds of acres and significant amounts of cooling water. A 100 MW facility can consume up to 2 million liters a day—about the demand of some 6,500 households. Local resistance has grown in drought-susceptible areas, with reports of tens of billions’ value of projects shelved or canceled during 2023-2025. State governments in states like Maine, Arizona, and Florida are even debating moratoria.
Supply Chains: The speed of the build-out is testing hardware and infrastructure supply. Lead times for gear such as transformers and cooling are longer, and growing reliance on high-end AI chips exposes the company further to global semiconductor shortages.
Global Context
US remains the world leader, with Virginia’s nearly 6 GW being the largest-single data-center market globally. The region will attract approximately 40% of global investment through 2030.
Asia-Pacific is in hot pursuit, with China, India, Japan, and Australia leading the charge, with operating capacity over 12 GW in 2024. Europe lags, with more stringent regulations and the cost keeping capacity at the 3–5 GW level, although Northern Europe is coming along with renewable-energy-fueled plants. The Middle East and Latin America are smaller but steadily increasing.
America’s data-center sector is entering a record era of expansion, spurred by AI demand, all-time-high capital investment, and policy currents. With billions invested in mega-campuses and unprecedented pipelines of development in the pipeline, America is solidifying its role as backbone to the digital economy. Power, water, land, and supply chain difficulties are looming large, and the policy landscape is shifting. The coming few years will determine not only how much capacity is built but how wisely and sustainably the U.S. can power the digital age.
