The U.S. data center build-out, state by state

The Department of Energy funds a research program at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory called IM3. One of its products is a public atlas of U.S. data center facilities, published in a federal data repository with a citable DOI. We track it, and we will publish an update here every time the federal dataset refreshes. The live table is at dciverify.com/data-center-growth.

Here is what the current release shows.

The concentration is extreme

The atlas tracks 1,382 facilities across 47 states. Just five states hold over half of them:

Virginia alone holds more than a fifth of every tracked facility in the country, with over 61 million square feet of reported footprint. Nothing else is close. If you run procurement for a portfolio with Northern Virginia exposure, your contractor problem is concentrated in exactly the market where everyone else's is too.

Why this matters for service contractors

A facility gets built once. It then needs licensed, certified service contractors for the next 25 years: thermal, critical power, distribution, controls. The federal data measures the installed base, and the installed base is the demand curve for emergency service work.

Set those 1,382 facilities against the supply side we documented on our home page: California licenses roughly 49,000 HVAC and electrical contractors, and fewer than 0.05 percent hold OEM certifications for mission-critical infrastructure. More than half of data center operators already report difficulty finding qualified people (Uptime Institute). The installed base grows every quarter. The qualified service pool does not keep pace.

What we will track

Each time the federal dataset updates, we will publish the state-over-state changes: where facility counts moved, which markets are adding the most, and what that implies for service coverage in those states. The directory currently covers California, Texas, Virginia, Georgia, and Illinois, which together hold 602 of the 1,382 tracked facilities. Access includes every contractor added to your states during your 12-month term.

Source: IM3 Data Center Atlas, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, U.S. Department of Energy. Retrieved June 12, 2026. Facility counts reflect what the federal dataset documents and may lag operator announcements.