Editor’s Note: This post is from our data newsletter, the Rural Index, headed by Sarah Melotte, the Daily Yonder’s data reporter. Subscribe to get a weekly map or graph straight to your inbox.
In this edition of the Rural Index, I wanted to explore a hypothesis that my colleague Julia Tilton and I have been throwing around over the last few weeks: Are data center developers targeting vulnerable and marginalized communities, where they know residents are not as likely to have the power to fight back? As is the case with most good hypotheses, I wasn’t able to come to a definitive conclusion. But I did uncover some trends that seem to confirm our suspicions.
The following map shows the nation’s largest planned and operating data centers. The symbol sizes correlate to the power capacity of the facility, measured in megawatts (MW), the amount of energy a data center can draw from the grid at any given moment. Data for this map came from Clean View, a company that tracks U.S. power infrastructure. My map includes the nine largest operating data centers and the nine largest planned data centers.
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While there are approximately 1,300 data centers in operation in the U.S., with a combined capacity of 61,148 MW, there are nearly 3,000 data centers currently being planned, with a combined capacity of 378,246 MW. That’s an estimated 126 MW per facility, compared to about 47 MW per facility among those that are already operating. In other words, many of these new data centers will be larger than we’ve ever seen before.
To put this power usage into context, a data center with a power capacity of 500 MW can use the same amount of energy per day as 420,000 U.S. homes. But 10 out of the 18 data centers on my map have a capacity of more than 1,000 MW, or 1 gigawatt (GW). Data centers with more than a gigawatt of capacity can use as much power in a day as 850,000 U.S. households. The largest data center on the map is the Delta Gigasite Expansion in rural Millard, Utah, with a capacity of 9.7 GW.
Out of the nine largest operating data centers in the nation, seven are in metropolitan counties, while two are in nonmetropolitan, or rural, counties. But an increasing number of planned data centers are headed for rural towns. Five of the nine largest planned facilities are situated in nonmetropolitan counties.
Two of the three largest planned facilities are in nonmetropolitan counties, while the third planned center – Fermi Project Matador in Carson County, Texas – is actually rural by many measures. Carson County lies within the Amarillo MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area), and therefore falls outside of the Yonder’s usual definition of rural, which is based on the Office of Management and Budget’s (OMB) list of metropolitan counties.
(I have to apologize to those of you who have been reading the Rural Index for some time, because you’ve certainly heard the spiel I’m about to present here.)
Once per decade, the OMB releases a list of metropolitan counties. At the Daily Yonder, we consider any county outside of an MSA to be nonmetropolitan, or rural, for our data-driven reporting. We typically use the OMB’s county-level categorization system because it gives us a binary rural / urban classification that is compatible with a wide range of other datasets.
But it’s not a perfect system, and Carson County is a good example of why. That’s because 100% of Carson County’s population lives outside of Census-defined Urban Areas, and therefore could be considered rural according to this alternate definition.
I’m keeping Carson County in the list of metropolitan data centers for the purposes of consistency in this data analysis. But feel free to consider the Carson County data center rural in your mind, because that’s what I’ll be doing.
With a population of about 5,800 residents, Carson County has a lot of the same vulnerabilities that any other small, rural community would face in the fight against hyperscale data centers, which are funded by some of the wealthiest companies in the world.
Although some small towns have successfully fought off data center developers, our reporting at the Yonder suggests that rural communities often have fewer resources to negotiate deals or manage the consequences of a data center closure.
To add to that, many of the largest facilities our nation has ever seen are currently being planned in communities with high poverty and uninsurance rates and lack of access to broadband, or high-speed internet.
In the counties where the largest data centers are being planned, 19% of residents live in poverty. In rural counties where these data centers are being planned, the poverty rate was 17%, according to five-year estimates from the 2018 – 2023 American Community Survey. The national poverty rate was 12%, meanwhile.
In counties with impending data centers, 15% of the population doesn’t have access to broadband internet. In nonmetropolitan counties in particular, that number was 16%. About 11% of general American households lack access to broadband, meanwhile.
A similar trend is happening with populations that don’t have access to health insurance. In counties with the largest planned data centers, 20% of residents don’t have health insurance, compared to about 8% of the American population at large. That number was 12% in nonmetropolitan counties.
This is consistent with other reporting about the health risks data centers pose to communities that can least afford them. “The risks will grow as the data center building spree continues and the federal government rolls back environmental and health protections,” wrote health reporter Fran Smith for USC Annenberg’s Center for Health Journalism. “And the toll will be heaviest in marginalized communities.” Data centers release exhaust from diesel generators that is dangerous for humans.
In 2024, researchers at UC Riverside estimated that data centers would contribute to approximately 600,000 asthma cases nationwide by 2028, resulting in 1,300 premature deaths annually. That’s because communities less than one mile from data centers have more air pollution compared to the national median, according to a 2025 report from the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. And communities of color are especially vulnerable, facing worse air pollution than other communities near data centers.
A 2025 report from the Kapor Foundation, a research and advocacy organization focused on tech equity, unearthed a troubling trend where Big Tech developers “[choose] vulnerable communities as sacrifice zones.” The data on the newest hyperscale data centers seems to bear this out.
Want to learn more about our coverage of data centers? Listen to our special episode of Yonder Radio, Power Dynamics, wherever you get your podcasts.
The post The Largest Data Centers Planned in Rural Counties appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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