More than half the world’s server farms are already operating in the United States, with thousands more being planned.
The need for data centers to drive 21st century cloud computing and win the AI race with China is a matter of such national urgency that Energy Secretary Chris Wright describes it as America’s “next Manhattan Project.”
But assessing how many data centers—a ubiquitous yet vague term for “server farms,” supercomputer networks, bitcoin and crypto “mines”—exist right now in the United States is, in itself, a foray into quixotic cloudy computing.
There were a “reported” 5,426 data centers in the United States in March, according to Statista.
Meanwhile, Denmark-based Data Center Map ApS counts 3,761 listed data centers in the United States. Data Centers.com, a global technology marketplace headquartered in Colorado, maintains there are 2,483 of the centers now operating nationwide.
These and other estimates confirm the consensus that the United States has five to 10 times the number of functioning data centers as any other country in the world, including China. In fact, approximately half the planet’s data centers are in the United States, according to a ranking by Visual Capitalist.
And yet, as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum said during the April 30 Hill & Valley Forum, an annual gathering of congressional lawmakers and Silicon Valley venture capitalists, the need to build out the nation’s electric grid to power more data centers is “one of two existential threats we face as a country;” the other beingIran’s development of a nuclear weapon. If that need is not met, the nation will “lose the AI race with China.”
The projected energy demand for data centers will triple by 2028, the Department of Energy estimated last year. The North American Electric Reliability Corporation forecast the same number a year earlier.
These “load growth” assessments, coming after years of relative stagnation in electricity usage, were issued after the late-2022 advent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. That shockwave rattled utilities, regional transmission operators, and state public utility commissions, sending them scrambling to scale-up electrical grids to accommodate this projected growth in data centers.
The result was a data center building spree. CBRE, a Texas-based commercial real estate services company, in late 2024 projected that more than 4,750 data center projects would break ground in the United States in 2025, “nearly as many … as already exist” nationwide.
By John Haughey
