How many data centers are in the US: the counts by status, state and operator, and where to get the list

This page is for anyone who needs the number of data centers in the US, and for companies that sell to them: electrical and mechanical contractors, power and cooling equipment makers, commissioning and testing firms, security, cleaning and facilities services, and network and IT vendors. It sets the main counts side by side and explains why they differ, breaks them down by status, state and operator, shows where to get a list, and explains who buys.

How many data centers there are in the US

The government has no register of data centers. The closest federal figure, County Business Patterns, counts business establishments by activity rather than buildings with servers in them. It includes web hosts and data processing offices, and it can miss a data center that a bank or retailer runs for itself, since that site is counted under its owner's industry.

Why the counts differ

• Buildings or campuses. A hyperscale campus can hold a dozen data halls. Cleanview's 1,406 operating buildings sit on 557 campuses, so the same sites give two very different totals.
• Operating or pipeline. dcmap.us lists 5,098 sites in all, but only 3,172 are operating; the rest are under construction, planned, paused or closed. Check whether a total you see quoted includes the pipeline.
• Size. Trackers built for energy and real estate follow large sites. Counts that include enterprise server rooms, edge sites and small colocation suites run much higher.
• Disclosure. Operators don't publish every site, and private enterprise data centers are undercounted in every dataset.

Data centers by status and size

Power figures come from what operators and filings report, so they're incomplete; dcmap.us bases them on 1,810 published figures. The point for a seller is the scale of what's coming: the sites under construction report more power than everything operating today.

Large sites are growing fastest. Cleanview counts 340 large data center buildings online in 2016 and 1,233 in 2026 (of the 1,406 operating buildings with a known opening year), with 540 more under construction.

Data centers by state

dcmap.us, October 2026. The 50 states, DC and Puerto Rico together have 3,172 operational sites.

California has nearly as many operating sites as Virginia but few new ones, while Virginia, Texas and Georgia have the biggest pipelines. Northern Virginia is the largest data center market in the world, with 13% of reported operational capacity globally, according to Virginia's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission (JLARC).

The Census Bureau's 2023 count of NAICS 518210 establishments ranks the states differently, because it counts companies' locations rather than data halls: California (2,698), Texas (1,412), Florida (1,266), New York (1,013), Pennsylvania (937) and Virginia (641).

Who owns and runs them

Publicly listed operators disclose their portfolios in their annual reports:

The cloud companies that run most hyperscale capacity don't publish a site count in their filings. In dcmap.us's records, the names with the most US facilities and projects are Amazon (263), Lumen (222), Digital Realty (131), Microsoft (117), Google (103), QTS (99), DataBank (81), Cogent (76), Equinix (75) and CyrusOne (70). Those counts include planned projects and name whoever is reported as operator, owner, developer or tenant, so they won't match a company's own filing.

How much power data centers use

A December 2024 report by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory for the Department of Energy estimated that data centers used 176 TWh in 2023, about 4.4% of US electricity, up from 58 TWh in 2014. It projected 325 to 580 TWh by 2028, or 6.7% to 12% of the total. JLARC names access to power and large, flat sites as the key requirements for new data centers, which helps explain why so much of the pipeline is in Texas, Georgia, Ohio and Pennsylvania.

How to get a list of data centers

No single list is complete. A practical list joins PeeringDB (for colocation sites and their operators) with dcmap.us (for hyperscale and pipeline projects), then adds county records in your territory.

Who buys inside a data center

As general guidance, the buyer depends on the stage and on what you sell:

Data centers employ few people once they open. JLARC reports that a typical 250,000-square-foot data center has about 50 full-time workers, roughly half of them contractors, while construction takes 12 to 18 months with about 1,500 workers on site at the peak. Most of the spending happens before opening day, so contractors and equipment sellers should follow the pipeline, while service firms should follow sites as they open.

Worked example: a commissioning firm in Ohio

Illustrative example. The company and its rates are invented; the site counts come from dcmap.us in October 2026.

The seller: Buckeye Commissioning (buckeye-cx.example), a 25-person firm that tests electrical and cooling systems before a data center goes live. The territory: Ohio, with 154 operating sites, 27 under construction and 57 planned.

1. Start with the 27 under construction. These are the sites that need commissioning in the next year. Pull each one's developer, location and reported power from dcmap.us.
2. Add the 57 planned sites. Check county permit records for each to see which have filed site plans; those are next year's work.
3. Find the buyer. For each project, find the developer's construction manager and the general contractor's project executive, and whether a commissioning agent is already named.
4. Do the arithmetic. If an illustrative half of the 27 projects haven't chosen a commissioning firm and Buckeye wins one in four of those it bids on, that's 3 projects. At an illustrative $400,000 each, that's $1.2 million of work from one state's current pipeline.

Finding the right people at each developer and contractor, and what's changed on each project, is the slow part; Bebop finds the contacts and researches each account in a list.

Next step: see how to turn project lists into named accounts in our guide to construction leads.