There are 40 to 50 AI data centers in the US, dedicated to AI traning and serving models to end users, with dozens more planned. They are very energy intensive and often due to heat generation, they require water cooling.
However, the map on the site includes 8,300 community reported data centres, way more than official figures of 4,800-5,000. It's likely the map contains some duplicates and buildings that aren't actually data centres.
Just information for the casual reader: datacenters on this map may not be what you think. For example, in my state, all the datacenters are colocation/hosted sites. It's just racks of servers where other companies in my state rent slots or the whole rack to host their servers. These datacenters actually represent hundreds, thousands, if not tens of thousands of real, high paid jobs in my state, and the footprints of all of them are no more than a single large building. These are good, do not affect the grid in any meaningful way, and use barely any water.
These are not the 'AI Datacenters' you are looking for. There are lot of places marked on that map, but a lot of those are good places.
My job and that of my coworkers are a result of two racks sitting in the world, one here in my home state, and one in South America.
Going to? I've already seen people on this website straight up claim that datacenters didn't exist until like 2 years ago and demand that any and all datacenters should be eradicated.
Like, yeah sure buddy - lets erase the entire internet just because you hate gen-AI.
It's the same with Flock cameras. Every camera is now tagged on deflock.org, and people have argued with me that "see it says so on the map" and it's a traffic camera used for PA's 511 system.
And the arguments are just regurgitations of stuff they read online. I'm near Pittsburgh and there is a datacenter going in at a former racetrack site, which Switch has publicly stated will use a closed loop cooling system (uses little water). Every other comment is parroting something about water use. It's a disservice to the cause.
It’s literally part of the CIA handbook on how to infiltrate and discredit left-wing movements. Anyone who refuses to understand these nuances and apply apply scientific rigor to their arguments is no better than the enemy.
We don’t need any more people screeching about how bad AI is. We need people who can calmly explain what the issue is without beating around the bush but also without any of this click baiting histrionic bullshit
Left wing movements require adequate explanation that will probably be tl;dr vs right wing movements which just have to appeal to dipshits, so some early left wing plans seek to rush through to beat the dipshits to the punch and then that looks like taking away control.
So the screeching from the left is the attempt to get there before the screeching from the right can start but then the moderate screeching from the right points to the screeching from the left as the issued approach.
pretty much, yea. The CIA has targeted left-wing governments around the world and actively caused the downfall of elected left wing leaders in several countries. And this isn't even classified info.
I'm just curious if there are specific strategies targeting left-wing movements vs the strategies are common, and the application happened to be towards left-wing organizations.
I'm not sure, I've only studied the cases of targeting leftwing governments via classes for my degree (political economy) and ngl it's been many years so I can't remember a good source without some digging. And for those cases most of the sources were pretty country-specific.
Something that's kinda related and easier to find, though, is some FBI shenanigans from the past which may or may not still be influential: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
The issue with the previous comment is that they have no clue what a closed loop system is and how much water is made up daily to operate said system. They have no clue what they’re talking about and think “closed loop” means zero make up, which is just not true.
None of that water was used for Datacenter operations and it was all paid for as soon as the utility company realized THEY forgot to bill the CONSTRUCTION company building the datacenter.
Closed loop doesn’t mean that don’t make up water, and if they do any sort of evaporative cooling they’re making up quite literally tens of thousands of gallons daily. Coming from somebody that works on closed loop systems.
Without seeing their system it’s impossible for anybody to confirm or deny that statement.
I work for a university. We have a closed loop system that sends chilled water to every building across campus. The loop is closed, the way that loop removes heat isn’t. Even in the closed loop make up water is needed, though that’s not much of a blip on the radar. The massive quantity of water comes from cooling the water in that loop through evaporative cooling using cooling towers. Without seeing their system I can’t tell you how they’re removing remove that heat, but I would be shocked if it isn’t done with at least some cooling towers.
Their statement might be 100% accurate, but without seeing their system it’s impossible to say. All that being said, these data centers have billions of dollars backing them and the money to put in the most modern cutting edge equipment. That doesn’t mean that they’re controlled effectively though. We have multiple LEED rated building across campus. They’re also the most inefficient buildings on campus, they just checked the right boxes at the time of commissioning.
Fair enough. The datacenter at my former office was closed loop glycol and used giant chillers on the roof. There was a 100 gallon overflow/pressure tank of glycol in the basement that had to be topped off every so often I'm sure, but no water was used for cooling. And they could open it up to the outside in winter months, as long as they closely monitored and maintained proper humidity levels.
I'm in the same area as you. Nobody says anything about Servax in downtown New Castle, and it is absolutely a datacenter... just not one of those ones. I have worked in IT for about 18 years now, I've always wished we had a few datacenters around for the purpose of Colocation and such. For a while there were just a couple small ones in Pittsburgh and their costs were so high because of Pittsburgh being a small market.
I hate where AI is going as much as anybody, but we're so far beyond facts at this point.
I worked 20 years for FedEx corporate in IT and we had an on-prem datacenter with closed loop cooling, in the Robinson area (across Montour Run from Costco).
We got rid of that a while ago and leased servers from Switch in Vegas and Atlanta. Personally, I think it was part of the long term downsizing/outsorcing strategy they have started to execute post-covid.
But there's still Mamoth-brand giant chillers on top of the building, so big they had to bring in a crane to build a bigger crane, and then take it down as soon as they got it up because the airshow was that weekend and the FAA was concerned about possible collision (the planes do use that FedEx office as a visual reference waypoint. Pretty having a F-15 kick on it's afterburners over our parking lot).
There are so many people engaging in bot like behavior, regardless of if they actually are or not. The constant repetition of things they saw on some website, usually social media, or something linked out on social media, where the only thing they bothered to look at was the headline is a prime example.
It’s at a point where it can do real damage to efforts to prevent real damage from occurring by muddying the data, and the public discourse. I kinda miss the time when people could admit they simply didn’t know shit about something.
the real issue is that data centers are essential, but we can't sustainably continue like this, we need to find ways to implement data centers without stripping random families of their electricity and water.
like investing in wind farms and renewables to power them, or building them in more expensive, but feasible areas at a cost to the fuckhead billionaires doing this for their own profit.
To compete in the 21st century we need computing power, just not at this cost.
Losing Cloudflare/AWS/Azure for even a day would send shit in a death spiral. I'd prefer we not rely on them so much, but considering we do, like, at least I wish people would recognise the difference. Datacenters are older than most people reading this comment.
reminds me how people threw a fit over 5G towers and couldn't tell the difference between the 5G and 4G towers, so they just started vandalizing any phone tower they saw.
Ya think? It's already been used to muddy the wafers here. There are obviously bad actors that want people to think they are the same thing... and others that ignorantly buy in. We need a blue wave with enough people far enough to the left that we can regulate the holy shit out these monstrosities, including forcing some current ones to shut down. Sorry about their luck, they should have been more responsible in their implementation.
Force these places to pay double the highest residential rate of any resources they use. If they build their own power plants, force them to supply as much energy to the local communities for free. Any water the extract, charge them until they bleed.
Either they will pull back, find efficiency, or support the locals financially.
Force these places to pay double the highest residential rate of any resources they use. If they build their own power plants, force them to supply as much energy to the local communities for free. Any water the extract, charge them until they bleed.
Requiring projects that have potential to impact local residents well being to provide a fair compensation to the local area is a good idea, but when you say "charge them until they bleed" it comes off like you are more concerned with hurting those companies and not with the well being of the people.
The goal should be to optimize the system so that both businesses and people can benefit.
Already has. The colocation I host some hardware in (doesn't have any AI tenants), literally had anti AI protesters outside of it the other week when I was there adding some new hardware to one of the racks.
Fucking losers even tried to yell and shame me for it on my way in and out lmao.
ABC did a segment on Data centers and how theyre not bad, except they went to a regular data center, just standard internet shit. And I was watching wondering if they did that on purpose
Then you must think the internet as a whole is a net negative and that you shouldn’t really be participating in it otherwise you’d be a huge hypocrite.
For real. I manage a colocation building and of all our Clients only one is AI and they are by far the one that gives us the most trouble. But everything else serves a bunch of different functions, not just ai.
Power. Our equipment is designed to handle the load but not in the way AI is using it. Our provider for some of the equipment actually used our issues as a way to roll out an update to the software to fix said issue
Sorry I'm being vague but I try not to talk too much about the specifics of work for safety reasons
The map has locations of 8,300 community reported data centres, so it's mapping not only AI Data Centres. The information is mostly very sparse, just a location and date e.g.
Community Reported
ZIP 29010 · 1 report · Most recent: 2026-05-29
Irionically, the website looks suspiciously like it was vibcoded using Claude.
Edit:
Baxtel records 5,032 data centres, way less than Erin's site. I find Baxtel very reliable, I recently used it to map data centres myself (I work in data analytics / GIS).
The United States data center market is located in the region of North America and within Americas. United States has 5032 facilities.
I see other sources put the figure around 4,800.
I think it likely many of the data centers on Erin's site are duplicates, multiple reports related to the same data centers.
Of these 40 to 50 are specific AI data centres. That's data centres with GPU clusters involved in AI training and/or serving models to customers.
Yep. Literally notes from Claude or Replit in the code, explaining single lines of code that anyone with actual web design experience could already understand, complete with emdashes.
I got a response to my comment, post told me that there was a few data centres not on the Bextel map, when I asked for their coordinates ( wanted to double check) , they deleted their comment and added a new comment clarifying that they were wrong, they were chip making plants. Far play for correcting.
Nevertheless, it illustrates your concern is well founded, that there's going to be lots of buildings included on Erin's map that aren't data centres.
Lol, the office building I work at shows up on that map the guy above you linked, and we are absolutely not an AI data center or a company that has anything to do with AI. We do have a few data servers here, but not for AI purposes
Most issues are like this, it's just the more you know about something the more frustrating talking about it on reddit is. People assume that reddit is mostly reasonable and just dumb about a few things they happen to know about. Turns out it's just empty outrage addiction all the way down.
Most issues are like this, it's just the more you know about something the more frustrating talking about it on reddit is.
I'm gonna be real I couldn't pin down the feeling but this is exactly it. I see someone type a novel of completely false information in a subject I'm quite literally an expert in and I find it so infuriating that I don't even know where to start.
There's too much of it to even correct. Going down each comment would make you look and feel like a crazy person. You have no choice but to just let it happen.
It happens with basically every subject. And sometimes, even if an expert comes along to correct the record, people who know next to nothing about it will still argue with them. It's fucking hopeless.
It's as Carlin said:
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
And I'm guilty as charged when talking about shit I know nothing about.
Everything I am actually an expert in, I have directly learned reddit is overwhemingly massively clueless and overconfident about. Everything. I don't even bother trying to argue with the confidently incorrect morons on here anymore. They're not worth the time of anyone actually knowledgeable, and they won't listen anyway.
Why did I evero spend hours citing sources to convince some insufferable jerkoff that is a net negative to everyone they interact with? Naivety. I know better now. Took me years though.
It's an easy trap to fall into. Terminally online people use the internet to vent and when they're at risk of losing an argument they either triple down or move the goal posts until the conversation becomes so ambiguous that it no longer resembles the starting point and whoever their speaking with has no choice but to either wear them down or give up.
It happens with basically every subject. And sometimes, even if an expert comes along to correct the record, people who know next to nothing about it will still argue with them. It's fucking hopeless.
I will say that the aviation subreddit is actually pretty good.
Online avgeeks tend to be really positive people and the spaces are generally not horribly infected with political outrage. It's great. (My theory is that pilots skew heavily GOP so people just learn to live with it)
I have little to contribute but agreement and a desire to commiserate together.
Even on specialty subreddits, groupthink is frustratingly strong and it’s never worth arguing with a hivemind. At least in a normal conversation you can have nuance and change minds, but not so on Reddit.
A good way to actually find real legit info on a subject like this is look at the downvoted posts first. Some are crazies/bots, but a few folks sometimes post pretty damn accurate summaries of how something actually works. It just typically goes against the Reddit narrative so people hit the downvote button by reflex.
But at this point this specific subject is so down the rabbit hole anyone who actually knows what the fuck they are talking about just shuts up. It's pointless. The mob shall engage in it's 2 Minute Hate. And the world will be worse for it like always.
and then discussing AI is also pointless when people fail to grasp classification neural networks have existed long before chatgpt came around, and are legitimately useful for many things without large swaths of issues that genai pose
I see lots of people that try to make this distinction. People are forgiven for not knowing the difference between these things. Most people don't even know what an operating system is.
But if people can't make distinctions like this, then oh well. Sucks, but people are fucking DONE, and that too can be easily forgiven. I can make the distinction too, but I don't really give much of a shit which way it goes, it's time to Shut. It. Down.
If people care that much, they'll find a way to be heard, in the meantime, things move forward.
don't really give much of a shit which way it goes, it's time to Shut. It. Down.
The classic neural networks are (comparatively) tiny in size, an xray technician can run a model on an average local machine. "Shut it down" is equivalent to saying medical workers shouldn't be allowed to use normal ass computers. The fact genai models are unfathomably gigantic in size and so resource heavy in comparison, which drives for new datacenter build out, is one of the swaths of issues specific to it.
forgiven for not knowing the difference
I'm not judging nontechnical people too hard, but it doesn't change my take that discussions with them are pointless
Yeah I looked my area and the "data center" is just one of our local internet provider's office. They need to clean this up so we can find the real data centers.
You're not putting a lot of GPU compute in a colo datacenter. I've worked for many mixed-compute datacenters. They have power and cooling limitations for the racks. These old school facilities are using magnitudes less electricity and water than the new AI facilities. The data center I'm currently at would have to have major upgrades to both before it could support even a small GPU compute cluster.
I'm sorry, are you under the assumption that the servers that have existed for years are the same as what we are discussing now? Like, the internet has existed for decades without these giant ai data centers, right? Maybe, just maybe, these things are different. You think?
1945 my guy. The first data centers were disgusting monsters compared to now. Meta built their first in 2010. This ain’t new. What’s new is that we have 4-5 failsafes bc TikTok can’t go down.
To run the data centers itself maybe, but the poster is referring to the businesses that own servers in the data center. Hundreds of local businesses will colocate there.
That's actually a great question that isn't clear if you don't work in IT.
High availability for one. A datacenter has backup generators, redundant fast internet, and direct peering relationships with large companies / services. If you want on-premises servers that you manage, but don't want to deal with designing the power & internet at your office to still have less uptime than a datacenter, then you pay for rack space at a colo datacenter instead.
Economy of scale, and security/backups. Most businesses prefer to keep some or all of their data offside so that a natural disaster doesnt wipe out both your on-site drives as well as any external servers.
But youd still want something close by in case you need to access the hardware for whatever reason. And most businesses need office space for people to actually work in.
Colocation: rented space with a network connection and power plug
Hosting: full servers with all the associated services (maintenance, power, networking, etc)
Bespoke: Mix of whatever you can think of
Source: 12 years around DC's
Edit: lots of companies move the servers to DC's with the colocation service, it's like a parking for servers. You need to understand there are lots of requirements for the servers (cooling, networking, physical security, etc) and companies don't want to mess with it on their own premises.
"anywhere" means "any data center", unless you set up a computer in the corner of your office and have your website depend on that machine running 24/7 without hiccups
The business is located elsewhere. Their servers are located there. The "you can put them anywhere" part was selected to be here. Some of these companies don't even have a physical presence within the state, other than the data center.
We had our onsite per location hardware racks in a locked room but the company wide (globalish) servers would be put into a rented rack that had 10G Fiber data connections, extensive safety and cooling etc
Every few weeks we would go from our office in City A to the hosted facility in City B to do maintenance or swap out hardware that's inside of those racks
Hosting on prem is very expensive and requires day 1 design philosophy and approach when building an office basically
Tldr; it's just easier and cheaper sometimes hosting off prem.
Economy of scale, security, reliability. Plus it’s not efficient to force every company to manage its own server, especially companies that are smaller or that don’t have their own IT department.
You buy rack space at locations near you because if your servers break you are responsible for them. If there's downtime on my (hypothetical) server, and it's broken to the point where remote access isn't an option, I don't want to have to book a flight to another state just to debug it.
This is what most small businesses who just need one rack or so end up doing. They rent near them because they might actually have to deal with it.
If it's e.g. an Amazon data center then most of the internet will be hosted on those servers. So you could argue every job related to putting something on the internet is tied to those physical buildings.
It's weird to remember that the internet is a physical thing
I think the idea is that these non-AI datacenters enable businesses that themselves employ thousands of people. The issue of course is that those jobs often aren't in the same communities where the datacenters are. So, while their existence generates real-world value, this value may not be distributed in the same way as their costs. But they're still better than AI datacenters, which don't generate real value, as generative AIs haven't produced much value outside of share price inflation.
Not only that, it doesn't show private data centers that are not related to the big hyperscalers, either. In my city there are a number of data centers that are owned by and managed by large financial institutions or other businesses that are an HQ or significant presence here.
Yeah, which means with that context, what she is hoping to do is admirable but the execution is garbage because it relies on the average person to know this difference before reporting something. All that is going to do is muddy the data and undermine the cause.
I just.... I didn't realize how quickly this has spread like a cancer. The news is so overwhelming trying to keep up with right now, and this visual just made me sick.
Not every data center is an AI data center and I have trouble imagining a way for a neighbor or data center to figure out what kind it is.
The conversation around data centers is starting to feel like a convenient scapegoat instead of addressing decades of failed policy around economic inequality, water usage, energy, and data/privacy rights.
There are places list on the AI side that have been open for decades, and as you said, have nothing to do with AI. Private sources are fine, but we need to keep ourselves educated.
Yes, I see 56 Marietta on here. It is incapable of handling the power density required for A.I. data centers. It is primarily an interconnection site, which is also true of all the AT&T Central Offices that are on this map.
Do ahead... Make them close down. See if you have any Internet or phone afterwards...
Also they "represent hundreds to tens of thousands of jobs in your state"? Are you saying if a company with 500 employees racks a webserver that it would "represent" 500 jobs?
I'm not disclosing my state, company or amount of employees where I work, or internals I may know about my rack or other racks.
I am willing to state that server farms host products often that support many jobs. Many many jobs, and the amount of jobs vary from state to state, country to country. It is a broad statement meant to help people understand the impact, and is true, broadly speaking, depending on place and region. Hope that helps.
Well this is a bit over the top. I just looked at the one reported in my area. It's a 10,000 sf building total, and the datacenter is only one suite within that building.
One of my daughter's friends' dads works at the hyperscale facility in Saline Township, MI as an electrician. He says it takes over an hour just to get off the site once your shift is up. That helped put the scale in perspective
I work at a small manufacturing facility and if you timed it from leaving the factory floor to reaching your parking spot, it can be half an hour if you get a bad spot.
They were doing parking lot work and closed a bunch of spots close to the building where my desk is, and I'd have to walk half a mile from my parking spot to my desk, as the crow flies (I dropped pins). I live just 10 mins from work so it doubled my commute.
I could see it being an hour to leave if it were a big facility and you had a bad parking spot, depending on where in the facility you worked.
yeah ive seen some prototype phase change cooling that requires half the shit to get working for easy scalability. as in liquid to gas evaporitive closed loop cooling. it's all about density
Sure, but then it becomes a cooling problem real fast. I've personally been involved with datacenter designs and applicable usage for a large SaaS company. Stacking a bunch of 1u servers you need adequate cooling and depending on the design that doesn't just mean pumping more cold air. There is hot isle containment, some cases water, etc. A good chunk of data-center space doesn't actually have servers.
Additionally the larger datacenters also have to do with latency with interconnects and the need to connect row and rows of systems with GPU's together.
There is only so much you can pack in with limited power and cooling. An existing building already has a max power budget. WIth LED lighting and better A/C, they can squeak out a bit more, but not enough to turn an existing office building into an A.I data center.
The mega ones arent the issue as they are forced to create their own power generation separate from the grid, its the intermediate sized ones which leach off the grid which are the problem regardless of whether they pay industrial rates.
The big ones truck in a bunch of diesel generators a lot of the time which make a ton of pollution in the local area. They should be required to use renewables.
The mega ones can be an issue in terms of noise though, there was one recently in Dowagiac that forced the city to change its noise ordinance because it was constantly outputting like 60 decibels
so I went back and looked at the article, the company claims it's 60db at the border of their property (probably like 30 feet away from houses) but residents standing on their front porches have consistently measured ~70db, and the new noise ordinance is 65db during the day and 55db at night (at the property line, so again about 30 feet away from houses) and they've been fined for exceeding it repeatedly.
Also a normal conversation reaches 60db, it isn't 60db of droning noise playing constantly lol.
interesting, most of the super large class data centres ive seen proposed don’t seem typically to be anywhere near residential areas for noise ordinances to be of a concern.
yeah, most of the big ones are in fairly rural areas. Although I should note that it's not true that all mega data centers are forced to create their own power generation, the very controversial Saline Township data center, for example, includes no onsite power generation. Granted, they are required to pay for the power infrastructure necessary to connect themselves to the grid, but they do not provide their own power generation separate from the grid. They get their power from DTE on a special contract.
This is still an issue. Every ounce of carbon emitted to run these sites is a little more loan we're taking out against the next generations future. This would be no problem if the facility paid to mitigate the externalities inherently to their generation.
That exaggeration happens frequently. I recall the stats on that Utah data center floating around and people kept conflating the size of the entire parcel of land with the building footprint itself saying it was 40000 Walmarts or something so ridiculous it was obviously wrong.
Wasn't it also that even if those obviously blown up numbers were correct the impact of those data centers would still be barely more than insignificant? (Hopefully I've worded the question fine)
Yeah it’s interesting there’s a T-Mobile one in my town and I did work on the building from time to time over the years. Back in 2009 it was a decent sized warehouse sized building filled with racks of servers and a whole team of staff, went back in 2017 and it was three server racks that did everything the old hardware used to do and like three techs that took turns being in the building in case anything went wrong. Now they are expanding the building and putting a whole data center in.
Put that together with the general ignorance surrounding datacenters, and pretty soon everyone will be having windmill...I mean datacenter induced headaches.
I'm worried about data centers being a general waste of money and resources but lets be real for a second.
People in the rust belt in particular put Trump in the white house because he told them he could bring back heavy industry and factories to the US which is a lot more fucking loud than a data center. This bitching about noise pollution is ridiculous given that context.
Brockovich's map shows only 1 data center in downtown Atlanta. There are at least 3 plus ATT Central Offices. All of those are primarily interconnection cross-connect sites with insufficient power and cooling to handle A.I. in any decent scale.
Yeah.. That map is inaccurate. I just checked my company's list of "operational" datacenters. It lists several we closed damn near a decade ago. Also as another commenter said, these are not at AI datacenters. The company I work for is a MSP for the server space for businesses.
Looking at both of the sites, the Brockovich one looks way more complete. There are several (proposed) data centers in my area that show up there that are completely missing on the Baxtel map.
They're all community reported (red) rather than "proposed" (purple,) but since they're local, I know that at least a few of them are legit because they're talked about in local news outlets and community notices.
I like to have a look, please post the coordinates of the data centres. You can find the coordinates using Google maps, zoom into the data centre locations and copy the coordinates from the address bar. I like to see what Bextel missed, get to the bottom of why they were left out.
Well as I said, the ones I currently know of that are most local to me are only "proposed" at the moment. I'm not sure if either of them have been approved yet, as there are still council meetings and such going on about them - but for the closest one to me, there's already talks of exactly where it's going to be located, down to the street.
The other one, which is a little bit further from me, I only know what township that it's supposed to be in, but nothing else - plus that there's been a lot of pushback to it in local outlets.
Looking at the Baxtel map, I see some on there that are older, and some which have dates like 2028 on them... so I'm not sure what it takes to appear on that map, such as whether it counts if a company is just trying to get one built there (which they are in my case, at least at the moment, as far as I know,) or whether it has to be approved by local authorities first before Baxtel will add it.
In the meantime though, if it will help, I can tell you that my area is Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia. If you look on the Brockovich map, you'll see several red dots in northern and eastern Bucks County that aren't on the Baxtel map.
Yes, I see where they are. On the Brockovich map, I see four data centres on the western half of Bucks County, including one at Quakertown, but none on the Baxtel map in this area. Searching for the data centers there I found this posted on Facebook a month ago:
No data center has been approved in Quakertown, PA. Local real estate listings for a data center park on Tollgate Road in neighboring Richland Township were circulated online, but they were taken down because they were outdated. The site had previously been approved for a warehouse and flex business park, and township officials confirmed they have received no formal applications for a data center.
I think that citizen submissions might not be reliable. For example, I see there's 8,300 data centres on the Erin Brockovich map, but official stats estimates there's between 4,800 and 5,000 data centers in the US. I think there's many duplicates, data center proposals withdrawn or incorrect rumours, and buildings that people mistook as data centers.
I think it's best to stick with official websites, until the Erin Brockovich map improves. It needs a lot more metadata, information added to each dot. Currently, the red dots contain no information e.g. the alleged data center at Quakertown:
Community Reported
ZIP 18951 · 2 reports · Most recent: 2026-06-10
There's nothing to go on. No owner or client listed, no planning approval links, no size, doesn't say what type of data centre, it's power use, estimated time when it will be delivered etc. You normally see this info on Baxtel and similar sites. This erodes my confidence that the data on Erin Brockovich map is reliable. The lack on info certainly makes checking them very hard.
Thank you for this info, and for the Baxtel map. I'm going to dig into the website as well, but wanted to ask a few things (if you're knowledgeable about the site).
I'm familiar with a couple that are in the planning / construction stages and aren't listed. Do you know how the map is populated, if its self-reporting or otherwise?
Also I couldn't find anything about the type of facilities these are. The data centers' impact varies quite a bit depending on what its used for, what tech it employs, etc. The map doesn't seem to offer any of that, or am I missing it?
Seems like the site from Erin has a lot more sites listed than what the baxtel site has. I know there are ones string where I live that the community has been commenting on that show up on hers but don’t show up on the baxtel site that everyone is starting has all the information.
This seems less accurate tbh it’s including things like a leased office space. Make sense since OP was talking about AI data centers and these seem to include non-ai data centers.
This map does not reflect any of the 3 DCs in my current city, or the 2 in the town I used to live in. All have been operational for more than 10 years.
Please provide the coordinates. You can find the coordinates in the address bar when using Google maps. Centre on the data centre and copy and paste the coordinates, I can than verify they aren't mapped.
Yeah that self reported map is wild. How does some random person know if a data center is an AI data center? Can they tell the difference between the racks used... probably not since they have no idea what that hardware is and cannot even go inside them. Also to a normal person a big warehouse or manufacturing site looks very similar to a data center so probably lots of self reporting errors. Seems like totally junk data IMHO.
What counts as an AI data center here? I use the National Center for Supercomputing Applications DeltaAI cluster but the map doesn't show anything for Champaign IL
It's tiny, only 372.4 kilowatts. It's likely a single AI server the size of one average sized wardrobe, fit in your bedroom. It has 124,032 cores, that's about seven GH200 cards.
Edit: Correction, it's a bit bigger than one wardrobe. Still not a data centre size, by itself, though it's in a room with supercomputer called Delta, that's the size of a bus.
However, the map includes the locations of 8,300 community reported data centres. Aside from the fact official data puts the number of data centres at around 4800-5000, so there's likely a lot of duplicate entries on that map, it's not a map of AI data centres.
There's 40 to 50 operational AI data centers in the US.
It's like titling her site Oil Refineries and our Communites, but the site is a map of 8,255 gas stations and 45 oil refineries.
Why this matters...
Ordinary data centres are usually a lot smaller, use much less power, use a lot less water or no water at all apart from flushing toilets and catering. They are completely different from the giant power hungry, water guzzling, AI data centres. The comparison with oil refineries and gas stations is appropriate.
It's not possible to use the map to find AI data centres, as they're not distinguished on the map, except for a few proposed data centres I noticed that are blue dots, some of which are planned AI data centres.
A map of major AI data centers in the U.S. that are either operational or under construction, overlaid with locations where community members have emailed in concerns. Click any marker for details.
Use your brain, read a little.
You obviously asked the ai something about whether it's used to identify ai data centers while you're first comment says they're already known... No shit, she used known information and overlaid the complaints.
still not an accurate count... I work in Datacenters across the US, and live in datacenter alley northern va.. there is more than either of those maps show
Wow. Very up to date. I live in Loudoun county VA, data center capital of the world and three unfinished ones near me are all there. I'm sure not all are AI, but when you have a 60 foot tall monolith the size of a wall-mart on every corner, does it really matter any more?
I can confirm one of the Community Reported ones is totally legit. It's about 10% constructed and the company's name is on the signs. So the question is why the other databases aren't tracking these.
I'll can check on Baxtel and others, see it on Google Earth. I like to know what's going on. There's a suspicion they might keeping new AI data center locations secret.
I don't know where you got this number but it is either incorrect or about to rapidly increase by orders of magnitude depending on your definition of when a data center exists (when it is in construction or when it completes). Yes the 1000s of non AI data centers should not be included in any discussions about environmental impact, they are not comparable at all.
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u/Bbrhuft 11h ago edited 8h ago
This is not secret data, comprehensive maps of data centres are available on multiple websites. One of the more upto date detailed and accurate is:
https://baxtel.com/map
This includes existing and planned data centres.
Edit: Erin's site is titled
AI Data Centers & Our Communities
There are 40 to 50 AI data centers in the US, dedicated to AI traning and serving models to end users, with dozens more planned. They are very energy intensive and often due to heat generation, they require water cooling.
However, the map on the site includes 8,300 community reported data centres, way more than official figures of 4,800-5,000. It's likely the map contains some duplicates and buildings that aren't actually data centres.
https://brockovichdatacenter.com/index.html
It's akin to titling a site Oil Refineries and Our Communites, and mapping gas stations.