(Washington Post) See how data centers are changing the American landscape

America’s landscape is undergoing one of the largest transformations in decades. The country houses nearly 100 hyperscale data centers, which consume at least 100 megawatts of power at peak operation — enough to power about 80,000 homes.

There are another 120 under construction, according to Cleanview, a market intelligence company tracking data center development. Four hundred and sixty more are planned. Roughly 40 percent of today’s hyperscale data centers were built on previously developed land. The rest took over farmland, shrubland and forest.

Data centers have existed for years but have never been quite this large. “Traditionally it’s just one building situated in an urban area,” Adams said. Now, hyperscalers start with one building and then expand to “two, three, four, five, six buildings.” Meta is constructing a data center campus called Hyperion on a tract of land in rural Louisiana that will dwarf Manhattan’s Central Park. The project is huge but may soon be overtaken. If all the data centers currently planned are built on schedule, according to Cleanview’s data, by 2030 the Hyperion campus will rank only at No. 5 in the U.S. by square footage.

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America’s landscape is undergoing one of the largest transformations in decades.

To meet the insatiable demand for computer processing to power AI, tech companies and their developers nationwide are building ever-larger data centers. https://t.co/dGFucHTl8D

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost) September 28, 2026