January to September 2026
$54.2bn
Already more than all of 2025, at $49.7bn
AI data centers
Data center construction: the biggest AI campuses, and how far along they are
Seen from orbit, pass by pass, beside what the companies claim.
US spending on data center construction reached an annual rate of $96.5 billion in September 2026, almost double a year earlier. This guide maps the biggest AI campuses, shows the construction stage each satellite pass can see, and sets every company figure beside its source and date.
AI data center map
Map of the AI data centers in this guide
Pick a number. Campuses we have checked from orbit are marked as data center campuses; announced Stargate sites are placed at the town or county named in their announcements. This is a map of named campuses, not a directory of every data center.
- Data center campus
The Stargate flagship, built by Crusoe on the Lancium Clean Campus outside Abilene for Oracle and OpenAI. Eight roofed halls in the 4 November 2026 pass. Vantage's Frontier campus, another Stargate site, is in neighbouring Shackelford County. Read the Abilene guide.
- Data center campus
Meta's Richland Parish data center near Holly Ridge, which Meta says will reach 5 GW. Roofed halls in the core and new pads to the west in the 29 October 2026 pass. Read the Hyperion guide.
- Data center campus
Colossus 1 in a former factory in South Memphis, and Colossus 2 in Whitehaven, with a newer complex across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi. Read the Colossus guide.
- Data center campus
Microsoft's AI datacenter in Mount Pleasant, which Microsoft says has been fully operational since June 2026, with a second facility due in 2028. Vantage's Lighthouse site for Oracle and OpenAI is up the lakeshore at Port Washington.
- Data center campus
Amazon Web Services' campus near New Carlisle, which Epoch AI lists first among AI data centers by IT power, at 1,037 MW. Two clusters of roofed halls in the 28 October 2026 pass.
- Announced site
OpenAI selected SB Energy, a SoftBank company, to build and operate a 1.2 GW data center here (OpenAI, 9 January 2026).
- Announced site
Four buildings on 1,400 acres, developed by STACK Infrastructure and Orion Digital Infrastructure, with an on-site gas microgrid (Oracle and OpenAI fact sheet, 23 September 2025).
- Announced site
SoftBank broke ground on a data center here that OpenAI said, on 23 September 2025, was on track to be operational the following year.
- Announced site
The Barn: three 550,000 sq ft buildings by Related Digital for Oracle and OpenAI, more than a gigawatt, with construction expected to begin in early 2026 pending the Michigan Public Service Commission (Related, 30 October 2025).
Seen from orbit
The biggest AI campuses, and the furthest stage seen
Each card shows the newest clear Sentinel-2 pass of the campus and the furthest construction stage that picture supports. The capacity line is a claim, with whose it is.
Stargate Abilene
Abilene, Texas · Crusoe for Oracle and OpenAI
1.2 GW (Crusoe, 27 Mar 2026)
Furthest stage seen: Equipment in the yardsSeen 4 NOV 2026
Eight roofed halls; a second area to the south has been under construction since spring 2026.
Meta Hyperion
Richland Parish, Louisiana · Meta, with Blue Owl funds
5 GW (Meta, 13 Jul 2026)
Furthest stage seen: Roofed hallsSeen 29 OCT 2026
Roofed halls in the core, with large new pads graded to the west.
xAI Colossus 2
Memphis and Southaven · xAI
No capacity on xAI's pages; trackers differ
Furthest stage seen: Equipment in the yardsSeen 6 OCT 2026
A warehouse fitted out since 2025, and a growing complex across the state line in Southaven.
xAI Colossus 1
South Memphis, Tennessee · xAI
200,000 GPUs (xAI's Colossus page)
Furthest stage seen: Equipment in the yardsSeen 16 SEP 2026
An existing factory building; the change from orbit is in the yards around it.
Microsoft Fairwater
Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin · Microsoft
Three buildings, 1.2m sq ft (Microsoft, Sep 2025)
Furthest stage seen: Roofed hallsSeen 21 OCT 2026
Microsoft says the first facility has been fully operational since June 2026. The pictures show roofs, which is as far as a 10-metre pixel goes here.
AWS New Carlisle
New Carlisle, Indiana · Amazon Web Services
1,037 MW of IT power (Epoch AI, Nov 2026)
Furthest stage seen: Equipment in the yardsSeen 28 OCT 2026
Two clusters of roofed halls with equipment rows, and more under construction to the south.
Stages are read by eye from 10-metre Sentinel-2 true colour. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2026.
Status checkChecked
How many data centers are being built?
It depends who is counting, and what they count: buildings, facilities or megawatts. These are the latest figures, each with its unit. Added together, as some search answers do, they give a number nobody measured.
- Cleanview
- 571 data center buildings under construction, on 276 campusesCounts buildings, not rooms; tracks 4,592 in all, 1,419 of them operating. Read 6 Nov 2026.Cleanview
- Pew Research Center
- More than 1,500 data centers in development in the USIncludes planned and land-banked sites, from Data Center Map. Published 13 Apr 2026.Pew Research Center
- CBRE
- 7,481 MW under construction in primary North American marketsA record, up 24.8% in the first half of 2026, with 80.4% already leased. Published 27 Aug 2026.CBRE
- US Census Bureau
- $96.5 billion annual rate of data center construction spendingSeptember 2026, preliminary, up 90.3% on September 2025. Released 2 Nov 2026.US Census Bureau
- Epoch AI
- 96 AI data centers worldwide, online from 2024, with 15.1 GW of IT powerAI sites only, an estimated 45% of global AI compute. Read 6 Nov 2026.Epoch AI
- Aureum satellite passes
- Six of the biggest campuses checked, 16 Sep to 4 Nov 2026The furthest stage seen at each is in the cards above.
This panel is the only part of the page tied to a date. Everything below it is background, with the period stated on every figure.
What does under construction mean on this page?
On this page, a campus is under construction when a satellite picture shows it: cleared ground, foundations, walls, roofs or equipment, at a named place on a named date. We read each campus from Sentinel-2, the European Union's free Copernicus imaging satellites, at 10 metres per pixel (ESA). That is enough to see the five stages below, and nothing smaller.
Cleared ground
Vegetation stripped and soil graded flat. At Abilene this was the first sign, in the 5 June 2024 pass.
Foundations and pads
Flat, pale pads and the outlines of buildings, often with laydown yards and haul roads around them.
Frames and walls
Building outlines with walls going up, and roofs open or partly covered.
Roofed halls
Long, flat roofs over finished building shells. AI data halls often show a repeating pattern of rooftop equipment.
Equipment in the yards
Rows of cooling and electrical equipment beside the halls, and substations nearby. This is as far as a 10-metre picture goes.
How much is being spent on data center construction?
In September 2026, US spending on data center construction ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $96.5 billion, up 90.3% on September 2025, according to the US Census Bureau. The Bureau has counted data centers as their own category of private construction since 2014; before that they were part of general office.
2025: Data center construction spending 49.7
Show the numbers
| $ billion a year, current dollars | Data center construction spending |
|---|---|
| 2014 | 1.8 |
| 2015 | 2.7 |
| 2016 | 4.1 |
| 2017 | 4.7 |
| 2018 | 6.9 |
| 2019 | 8.5 |
| 2020 | 9.2 |
| 2021 | 9.9 |
| 2022 | 12.6 |
| 2023 | 20.0 |
| 2024 | 34.8 |
| 2025 | 49.7 |
Annual rate, September 2026
$96.5bn
Seasonally adjusted, preliminary
Change on September 2025
+90.3%
From an annual rate of $50.7bn
Spending is one measure; capacity is another. CBRE counted a record 7,481 MW under construction across the primary North American markets it tracks in the first half of 2026. Atlanta, at 2,882 MW, overtook Northern Virginia, at 2,420 MW, as the biggest construction market, and 80.4% of the capacity under construction was already leased (CBRE, 27 August 2026).
Why the counts of data centers under construction disagree
There is no single answer, because the people counting count different things. A data center can be one building on a campus of ten, a facility in a directory, or a share of a megawatt figure in a market report.
| Count | What is counted | |
|---|---|---|
| Cleanview, read 6 Nov 2026 | 571 under construction, on 276 campuses | Buildings, not rooms; 4,592 tracked in all |
| Pew Research Center, 13 Apr 2026 | More than 1,500 in development | Facilities from Data Center Map, including planned and land-banked sites |
| CBRE, first half of 2026 | 7,481 MW under construction | Capacity in the primary North American markets it covers |
| Epoch AI, read 6 Nov 2026 | 96 AI sites, worldwide | AI data centers online from 2024, with 15.1 GW of IT power |
| USDataMap, read 6 Nov 2026 | 1,202 facilities | A directory; the page does not split built from under construction |
Each of these is right on its own terms. Added together they are wrong, which is what happens when a search answer quotes a range of 400 to 567 data centers under construction without saying which tracker counted what (Cleanview; Pew; Epoch AI).
Why state counts are not construction counts
Pew's state totals, from Data Center Map, add operating and planned data centers: Virginia 685 (398 operating, 287 planned), Texas 466 (296 and 170), California 331 (277 and 54), Illinois 262 (139 and 123) and Georgia 235 (94 and 141). The planned column includes land that has not been built on. Pew also found that 67% of planned data centers are in rural areas, while 87% of existing ones are urban.
What are the biggest AI data centers?
There is no single largest data center, because the lists measure different things: the power a campus draws today, the power it will draw when finished, or the share that reaches its servers. Here are the leading campuses on two of the most careful lists, side by side.
| Cleanview, operating | Cleanview, full build-out | Epoch AI, IT power | |
|---|---|---|---|
| xAI Colossus 2, Memphis area | 1,836 MW | 2,844 MW | 946 MW |
| AWS New Carlisle, Indiana | 1,101 MW | 2,202 MW | 1,037 MW |
| Meta Hyperion, Louisiana | Outside top ten | 6,500 MW | Outside top ten |
| Stargate Abilene, Texas | Outside top ten | Outside top ten | 824 MW |
| Microsoft Fairwater, Wisconsin | Outside top ten | 2,401 MW | Outside top ten |
| Fairwater Atlanta (QTS), Georgia | 859 MW | Outside top ten | 636 MW |
"Outside top ten" means the campus was not in that list's published top ten when we read it on 6 November 2026. Cleanview counts the power of buildings operating today and, separately, everything planned. Epoch AI counts IT power, the share that reaches servers, and puts facility power 20% to 50% above it; it covers only AI sites coming online from 2024 (Cleanview; Epoch AI).
What the companies themselves say
- Meta Hyperion: 5 GW of compute capacity, in Meta's July 2026 announcement. Meta's own campus page also says "over two gigawatts" further down. Hyperion guide.
- Stargate Abilene: 1.2 GW for the eight-building campus, in Crusoe's March 2026 release, plus a separate 900 MW campus for Microsoft next door. Abilene guide.
- xAI Colossus: xAI's own pages give GPU counts, not megawatts. Colossus guide.
- By floor area: IBM cites China Telecom's campus at Hohhot, at roughly 10.7 million square feet, a different measure again (IBM).
How long does it take to build an AI data center?
About a year for the first building on a prepared site, and several years for a whole campus. These are the timelines the companies have stated.
| Started | First building | Source | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stargate Abilene | June 2024 | Two buildings energised within a year | Crusoe, 30 Sep 2025 |
| xAI Colossus 1 | In an existing building | Facility and supercomputer in 122 days | NVIDIA, 28 Oct 2024 |
| Microsoft Fairwater | Announced May 2024 | Fully operational June 2026 | Microsoft, 23 Jun 2026 |
| Meta Hyperion | Ground broken December 2024 | Operational by 2030 | Meta, Dec 2025; DPR |
| Lighthouse, Port Washington | Announced October 2025 | Completion scheduled for 2028 | Vantage, 22 Oct 2025 |
From orbit the timelines look like this. At Abilene the first cleared ground appears in the 5 June 2024 pass, the first two roofs in the 29 December 2024 pass, and all eight halls are roofed by 26 March 2026: just under 22 months from first clearing to a roofed campus. At Hyperion the first graded block appears on 30 December 2024 and large roofed halls by 28 February 2026. Each campus guide has the full sequence of passes.
What is a hyperscale data center?
A hyperscale data center is one built by a company that runs internet services and platforms at massive scale. That is the category Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory uses in its 2024 report on US data center energy, which also notes that hyperscale facilities average 30,000 square feet per module, not per campus (LBNL, December 2024).
Other definitions set a floor. IBM quotes the research firm IDC: at least 5,000 servers and at least 10,000 square feet (IBM). CBRE counts 119 hyperscale campuses purpose-built for a single cloud or AI operator, usually on large parcels at the edge of cities near bulk transmission lines (CBRE, 26 October 2026).
So hyperscale describes the builder and the scale, not a ranking. A single hyperscale hall and a multi-gigawatt AI campus are both hyperscale; the campuses in this guide are the largest of them.
Stargate: the sites, as announced
Stargate is the AI infrastructure venture that OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank announced at the White House in January 2025: a $500 billion, 10-gigawatt commitment, in OpenAI's words (OpenAI, 23 September 2025). By 30 October 2025, OpenAI said its US sites added up to more than 8 GW of planned capacity (OpenAI).
| Developer | Stated size | Latest status, as stated | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abilene, Texas (flagship) | Crusoe, for Oracle | 1.2 GW, eight buildings | Eight roofed halls in our 4 Nov 2026 pass |
| Shackelford County, Texas | Vantage, with VoltaGrid | 10 buildings, 700 acres, 3.7m sq ft | First building due in the second half of 2026 (Sep 2025) |
| Milam County, Texas | SB Energy | 1.2 GW | SB Energy to build and operate it (OpenAI, Jan 2026) |
| Doña Ana County, New Mexico | STACK and Orion | Four buildings, 1,400 acres | Industrial revenue bond approved (Sep 2025) |
| Lordstown, Ohio | SoftBank | With Milam County, up to 1.5 GW | Ground broken, due to run in 2026 (Sep 2025) |
| Port Washington, Wisconsin | Vantage | Close to 1 GW, four buildings | Completion scheduled for 2028 (Oct 2025) |
| Saline Township, Michigan | Related Digital | More than 1 GW, three buildings | Construction expected early 2026, pending approval (Oct 2025) |
Sources: the Oracle and OpenAI fact sheet of 23 September 2025, OpenAI on SB Energy, Vantage and Related. The flagship has the full satellite record: see the Abilene guide.
How to follow data center construction yourself
No one source tells you how far a campus has got. Each measures something different, on its own clock. Read them together.
| What it shows | How often | Watch out for | |
|---|---|---|---|
| US Census Bureau | National construction spending, data centers included | Monthly | Dollars, not buildings; recent months are revised |
| CBRE market reports | Megawatts under construction and leased | Twice a year | Primary markets only |
| Cleanview and Epoch AI | Campus-by-campus trackers | Ongoing | Different units: facility power against IT power |
| Company newsrooms | Announcements, capacities and dates | When issued | Claims, often restated as plans change |
| Utility and county filings | Power plants, substations, permits | When filed | Slow, and scattered across agencies |
| Sentinel-2 pictures | Ground, walls, roofs and yards | Every few days, in clear weather | 10-metre detail; no view inside |
Worth bookmarking: Census construction spending, CBRE's data center reports, Cleanview, Epoch AI and the Copernicus Browser for Sentinel-2 pictures.
Or let Aureum do the reading
Follow the AI data center board on Track
A hand-built board on the biggest AI campuses, with a satellite-backed reading after each clear pass and the history kept in one place.
Ask Query a plain-English question
Ask whether a named campus has new roofs since spring, and get a satellite-backed answer with the evidence attached.
AI data center construction: questions and answers
Follow AI data center construction on Track
A hand-built board on the biggest AI campuses, with a satellite-backed reading after each clear pass and the history in one place. Free while Aureum is in beta.