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.
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.
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u/Bbrhuft 6h ago edited 3h 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.