10 Biggest Data Center Locations in the U.S. in 2026

Tamzid | Technical Writer

October 5, 2026

Table of Contents

Every time we stream a movie, scroll through social media or back up files to the cloud, we’re using servers inside a data center. The largest of those campuses now cover millions of square feet, and they’re built where power, land and fiber connectivity come together at scale.

In this post, we rank the 10 largest data centers in the United States, from Meta’s hyperscale campuses to Switch’s Citadel Campus in Nevada. For each one, we take you through who operates it, where it sits, how big it is and what it took to build.

For those of you who’ve wondered where “the cloud” actually lives, this is your behind-the-scenes look at the buildings that power it.

Key Takeaways

Switch’s Citadel Campus near Reno, Nevada, is the largest U.S. data center campus, bigger than the next three on the list combined.
QTS Fayetteville ranks second and houses Microsoft’s Fairwater Atlanta AI facility.
Meta owns seven of the 10 largest campuses, all LEED Gold certified.
Stargate Abilene went from groundbreaking to live AI workloads in about 15 months.
Stargate Abilene and QTS Fayetteville run closed-loop cooling, and Meta’s next Eagle Mountain buildings will add dry cooling with zero cooling-water consumption.

Where Is the Largest Data Center in the US?

Switch’s Citadel Campus at the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center near Reno, Nevada, is the largest data center campus in the United States. The 2,000-acre site is planned for 17.4 million square feet of data center space and more than 2 GW of power capacity at full buildout.

Tahoe Reno 1 opened in February 2017 as the campus’s first building, with 1.3 million square feet and up to 130 MW of design capacity. That building holds under 8% of the planned floor space, so most of the Citadel Campus is still to be built.

Where Is the Biggest AI Data Center in the USA?

Meta’s Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, near Holly Ridge, is the biggest planned AI data center campus in the United States. The campus is under construction and planned for 5 GW of compute capacity, the most of any confirmed U.S. AI campus.

xAI’s Colossus 2 near Memphis, Tennessee, is the largest AI data center in operation, drawing 946 MW of IT power for about 1.1 million H100-equivalents of compute. That load is under a fifth of Hyperion’s planned capacity, which shows how far the next generation of AI campuses outgrows today’s largest AI data centers in the world.

What U.S. Cities Have the Most Data Centers?

Ashburn and the rest of Northern Virginia, known as Data Center Alley, hold the largest concentration of data centers in the United States. Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Chicago, Atlanta, San Jose and Santa Clara in Silicon Valley, the New York and Northern New Jersey area, and Hillsboro near Portland, Oregon, round out the major data center metros.

Market rankings track metro regions, since most facilities sit in suburbs with cheaper land and easier access to power. The largest campuses go further out still. Only QTS Fayetteville in metro Atlanta and Meta Fort Worth sit inside those major metros, and the other eight chose sites like Prineville, Oregon, and Altoona, Iowa, where large parcels and power were easier to secure.

How Many Data Centers Are in the United States?

The United States has 4,530 listed data centers as of July 2026, the most of any country, and that count runs from single-suite colocation sites to the hyperscale campuses ranked below.

What Are the Largest Data Centers Under Construction in the USA?

Fermi America’s Project Matador near Amarillo, Texas, is the largest U.S. data center project under active site development, planned for up to 11 GW of capacity. Its later phases depend on new power plants and signed tenants, so the first buildings will arrive well ahead of the full buildout.

Meta’s Hyperion campus is the largest confirmed AI campus under construction. Amazon’s Northern Indiana expansion will add 2.4 GW across multiple campuses. Vantage Data Centers’ Frontier campus in Shackelford County, Texas, is planned for 1.4 GW across 3.7 million square feet in 10 single-story buildings, and its first building is under construction. Once that building goes live, Frontier enters this ranking at No. 8.

10 Largest Data Centers in the US

Each campus below has at least one building in service, and together the 10 span nine states, with Texas as the only state holding two entries. All seven Meta campuses carry LEED Gold certification on their operational buildings, match their electricity use with clean and renewable energy, and reuse water and capture rainwater on site. The ranking counts down from Meta’s Henrico campus in Virginia to Switch’s Citadel Campus in Nevada, covering who runs each campus, how big it is and what sets it apart.

Top 10 Data Center Locations in the US

10. Meta Henrico Data Center

Operator: Meta Platforms
Location: Sandston, Henrico County, Virginia
Building Area: 2.5 million sq. ft. at full buildout
Buildings: 5
Investment: More than $1 billion
Building Certification: LEED Gold
Status: Operational since 2020

Every building on the Henrico campus doubles as an air handler. Each upper floor works as one large air-handling unit, pushing conditioned air down to the servers below, and the full mechanical system moves more than 30 million cubic feet of air per minute.

That system sits on a 130-acre site in White Oak Technology Park, where construction started in October 2017 on five buildings laid out in an H shape. DPR Construction led the build, ColonialWebb delivered mechanical systems for the first buildings, and the first phase began serving Facebook and Instagram traffic in 2020.

Henrico employs more than 200 people. Its power comes from Dominion Energy, and eight Virginia projects backed by Meta add 700 MW of generation to the grid.

9. Meta Fort Worth Data Center

Operator: Meta Platforms
Location: Fort Worth, Texas
Building Area: More than 2.6 million sq. ft.
Buildings: 5 main data center buildings, plus cold storage
Investment: More than $1.5 billion
Building Certification: LEED Gold
Status: Operational since 2017

Old Facebook posts and photos end up in Fort Worth. A 170,000-square-foot cold-storage building, announced in December 2020, keeps that rarely opened content on servers that power on only when a user requests a file, and the addition pushed the campus past 2.6 million square feet.

Meta’s first Texas data center sits on 170 acres in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex. Construction started in 2015, the first phase opened in 2017, and DPR Construction finished the full campus in 2023, mostly in an H-shaped layout with rooftop air handlers, outdoor standby diesel generators and a dedicated electrical substation.

More than 200 operations staff run the site today, down from roughly 1,200 trade workers at the construction peak.

8. Meta Huntsville Data Center

Operator: Meta Platforms
Location: Huntsville, Alabama
Building Area: Nearly 3.5 million sq. ft. at full buildout
Investment: More than $1.5 billion
Building Certification: LEED Gold
Status: Operational since 2021

By June 2021, crews in Huntsville had raised nearly 24,000 tons of steel, poured 500,000 cubic yards of concrete and logged more than 5 million labor hours. Three months later, the campus opened as Meta’s first data center in Alabama.

Construction began in 2018 on 340 acres in North Huntsville Industrial Park. A June 2022 expansion added two buildings to the plan, lifting the total to nearly 3.5 million square feet and Meta’s local investment above $1.5 billion.

Once that expansion is finished, the campus will employ more than 300 people, with power from the Tennessee Valley Authority and 487 MW of new generation from three Meta-backed Alabama projects.

7. Stargate Abilene Data Center

Developer: Crusoe
Cloud Operator: Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, serving OpenAI
Location: Abilene, Texas
Building Area: Approximately 4 million sq. ft. at full buildout
Buildings: 8 at full buildout
Power Capacity: 1.2 GW planned
Project Financing: $15 billion joint venture
Status: Partially operational since 2025; remaining buildings under construction

Stargate Abilene is the flagship campus of the Stargate AI infrastructure initiative. Crusoe developed the facilities at the Lancium Clean Campus, with Oracle providing cloud infrastructure for OpenAI’s training and inference workloads.

Construction began in June 2024, and the first two buildings were energized within a year. This initial phase covers 980,000 square feet and provides more than 200 MW of capacity.

The second phase adds six buildings, bringing the campus plan to approximately 4 million square feet. Crusoe, Blue Owl Capital, and Primary Digital Infrastructure formed the $15 billion joint venture to finance the development.

Oracle and OpenAI dropped a separate expansion of about 600 MW near the site in March 2026 and shifted that capacity to other Stargate campuses, which keeps Abilene at its eight-building plan.

Oracle began delivering NVIDIA GB200 racks in June 2025. By September, the campus was running early AI training and inference workloads, with the completed development designed to connect hundreds of thousands of GPUs through an integrated network.

The buildings accommodate both liquid and air cooling. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling uses a closed-loop system that recirculates water without evaporating it, reducing ongoing cooling-water demand.

The power design includes a 1.2 GW grid connection, planned battery storage and solar resources, and natural-gas turbines for backup power. Access to abundant wind energy was a major factor in selecting Abilene.

6. Meta Sarpy Data Center

Operator: Meta Platforms
Location: Papillion and Springfield, Sarpy County, Nebraska
Building Area: 4 million sq. ft. at full buildout
Buildings: 9 in the expanded campus plan
Investment: More than $2.5 billion
Building Certification: LEED Gold
Status: Operational since 2019

A dedicated two-lane overpass across Highway 50 links Sarpy’s eastern and western sections, which shows how far the campus has spread. It opened in 2019 as the Papillion Data Center and took the Sarpy name in 2021, when an expansion added more than 500 acres in neighboring Springfield.

A July 2022 announcement raised the plan to 9 buildings and 4 million square feet. Turner Construction paired data center buildings in an H shape, linking each pair through shared administrative offices, and Buildings 5 and 6 alone hold 1 million square feet of data storage plus 60,000 square feet of offices.

Investment tops $2.5 billion, and the campus employs more than 300 people. Omaha Public Power District serves the site, while Meta’s Nebraska commitments add 320 MW of renewable generation.

5. Meta Eagle Mountain Data Center

Operator: Meta Platforms
Location: Eagle Mountain, Utah
Building Area: 4.5 million sq. ft. under the 2022 expansion plan
Investment: More than $3 billion, including the 2026 expansion
Building Certification: LEED Gold
Status: Operational since 2021; expanding

Eagle Mountain came with its own factory. Mortenson set up a manufacturing plant in West Jordan to produce precast electrical ductbanks, prefabricated walls and hot-aisle containment for a construction scope of 28 data halls totaling nearly 300 MW.

Construction started in 2018, and the campus began serving traffic in July 2021. A 2022 expansion grew the plan to 4.5 million square feet, and a September 2026 expansion pushes Meta’s Utah investment past $3 billion.

The newest buildings will pair closed-loop liquid cooling with dry cooling, cutting cooling-water consumption to zero. The campus will still draw water for domestic use, fire protection and equipment maintenance.

The 2026 expansion will bring more than 1,200 construction workers at peak and more than 300 operational jobs. Meta has put over $50 million into local roads and water infrastructure since work began, and its 13 Utah energy projects add more than 1.7 GW of generation and 600 MWh of battery storage.

4. Meta Prineville Data Center

Operator: Meta Platforms
Location: Prineville, Oregon
Building Area: 4.6 million sq. ft.
Buildings: 11
Investment: More than $2 billion
Building Certification: LEED Gold
Status: Operational since 2011

Meta’s data center playbook started in Prineville. The company’s first custom-built campus broke ground in 2010, and its server and facility designs became the foundation of the Open Compute Project, which opened them to the wider industry in 2011.

Those custom servers and electrical systems let the original building use 38% less energy and cost 24% less than Facebook’s existing facilities at the time, with outside-air and evaporative cooling carrying the heat load.

A March 2021 expansion added two buildings and 900,000 square feet, bringing the campus to 11 buildings and Fortis Construction’s completed work to 4.6 million square feet. More than 350 people work there.

Pacific Power supplies the campus, and three Oregon energy projects add 220 MW of generation. Meta’s water-restoration target for Prineville is twice the volume the data center consumes.

3. Meta Altoona Data Center

Operator: Meta Platforms
Location: Altoona, Iowa
Building Area: More than 5 million sq. ft. at full buildout
Investment: More than $2.5 billion
Building Certification: LEED Gold
Status: Operational since 2014

Facebook’s network fabric debuted at Altoona. The design organized servers into groups of 48 racks, which made capacity easier to add and delivered 10 times the in-building capacity of the older cluster design.

Construction began in 2013, and the first building went online in November 2014 with that fabric, outside-air cooling and Open Compute Project hardware. Turner Construction serves as general contractor, and a seventh expansion announced in December 2021 added two buildings, pushing the plan past 5 million square feet.

By that point the project had taken 26,000 tons of steel and 8.7 million work hours. More than 400 people run the campus today, the largest operations staff among the Meta sites on this list, and MidAmerican Energy supplies power alongside a Meta-backed Iowa project adding 225 MW of generation.

2. QTS Fayetteville Data Center

Operator: QTS Data Centers
Location: Fayetteville, Georgia
Building Area: 6.2 million sq. ft. at full buildout
Buildings: 13
Campus Land Area: 615 acres
Status: Partially operational; construction ongoing

QTS’s Fayetteville campus sits along Highway 54 West, between Veterans Parkway and Tyrone Road. Its development includes 13 buildings totaling approximately 6.2 million square feet, more than any other campus on this list except Citadel.

The campus houses Microsoft’s Fairwater Atlanta AI facility, which began operating in October 2025. That facility alone spans more than 1 million square feet within the larger QTS development.

Fairwater uses NVIDIA GB200 NVL72 systems, with 72 GPUs per rack, to train and run AI models. Its two-story design places computing equipment closer together, shortening connections and reducing communication delays between processors.

A dedicated fiber network connects the Atlanta facility with Microsoft’s Fairwater infrastructure in Wisconsin. This allows computing resources across different states to cooperate on large AI workloads, including model training.

The Fayetteville campus uses closed-loop cooling that continuously recirculates water, avoiding ongoing water consumption for cooling once operational. Construction requires water for concrete work, dust suppression, and site preparation.

Development continues across the wider campus, with Clayco and HITT among the construction teams working on site.

1. Switch Citadel Campus

Operator: Switch
Location: Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, Nevada
Building Area: Up to 17.4 million sq. ft. at full buildout
Initial Campus Land Area: 2,000 acres
Design Standard: Switch’s proprietary Tier 5 Platinum
Status: Operational since 2017; expanding

Switch’s Citadel Campus is a large colocation development near Reno, alongside Tesla’s Gigafactory. Switch is building it out in phases.

Tahoe Reno 1, the campus’s first building, runs high-density computing and enterprise workloads.

The campus incorporates redundant power systems, a 20-foot concrete perimeter wall, and round-the-clock security and operations teams. Its Switch SHIELD design uses two independent roof decks rated to withstand 200-mph winds.

Switch applies its proprietary Tier 5 Platinum standard to the facilities. This standard covers power and cooling resilience alongside physical security, network connectivity, and other operational requirements.

The campus connects to Switch’s SUPERLOOP fiber network, linking northern Nevada with Las Vegas and major California markets. Connections provide 4.5-millisecond latency to the Bay Area and 7-millisecond links to Switch’s Core Campus in Las Vegas.

Switch supports the campus with renewable energy and continues expanding its power infrastructure toward multigigawatt capacity.

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1. Equinix DC2 Data Center (Ashburn, Virginia)

Equinix DC2 sits on the company’s Ashburn campus in Northern Virginia. The facility provides 118,446 square feet of colocation space. It provides access to one of the world’s largest peering markets and the largest peering exchange on the U.S. East Coast.

The facility supports cloud, enterprise, and public-sector workloads near Washington, D.C.

2. Equinix NY4 Data Center (Secaucus, New Jersey)

Equinix NY4 in Secaucus serves financial, media, and enterprise customers across the New York metropolitan area. The facility provides 151,771 square feet of colocation space and access to Equinix International Business Exchange services.

Its location near New York City suits trading systems, financial platforms, and regulated enterprise workloads.

3. CoreSite LA1 Data Center (Los Angeles, California)

CoreSite LA1 occupies One Wilshire in downtown Los Angeles, one of the West Coast’s most connected buildings. The facility provides more than 171,000 square feet of data center space. CoreSite’s wider Los Angeles campus provides access to more than 325 networks, including global carriers and subsea cable systems.

LA1 connects to CoreSite LA2 and LA3 through dark fiber. Multiple subsea cables provide routes between the West Coast and Asia-Pacific markets. CoreSite completed a major electrical upgrade at One Wilshire in August 2025, including a new generator plant and other critical infrastructure improvements.

4. Equinix MI1 Data Center (Miami, Florida)

Equinix MI1 in downtown Miami serves as a primary network exchange point between the United States and Latin America. The facility provides 255,513 square feet of colocation space within a six-story reinforced-concrete building.

The facility sits above the 500-year base flood elevation, which matters in a hurricane-exposed market where regulated deployments need direct access to Latin America.

5. Digital Realty ORD10 at 350 E Cermak (Chicago, Illinois)

Digital Realty’s ORD10 at 350 E Cermak is a major Midwest interconnection hub. The eight-story facility spans 1,005,500 square feet and supports deployments ranging from individual cabinets to multi-megawatt suites. It provides access to more than 70 network providers.

ORD10 uses N+1 UPS and cooling redundancy. Its compliance coverage includes ISO 27001, PCI DSS, SOC 2, and SOC 3. The building holds LEED Gold and Energy Star certifications. Its scale and network density support cloud, financial, and enterprise deployments that require direct connectivity in Chicago.

Final Thoughts

Every campus in this ranking spans multiple buildings, and Citadel, QTS Fayetteville, Stargate Abilene and Eagle Mountain are still adding space. AI workloads are changing how those buildings get built. Stargate Abilene and Microsoft’s Fairwater Atlanta facility run dense GPU racks on closed-loop liquid cooling, and Meta’s next Eagle Mountain buildings will run dry cooling with zero cooling-water consumption.

Campuses still under construction, including Meta’s Hyperion and Vantage’s Frontier, will reshape this ranking as their first phases come online. For businesses buying colocation, power availability, fiber access and land decide where space is open and what it costs, the same factors that put these campuses where they are.

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FAQs

1. Which Company Owns the Most Large Data Center Campuses in the US?

Meta owns more of the largest U.S. data center campuses than any other company. Its campuses in Virginia, Texas, Alabama, Nebraska, Utah, Oregon and Iowa make up most of this ranking, and every one serves Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other apps.

2. What Is a Data Center Campus?

A data center campus is a group of data center buildings on one site, run by one operator and sharing substations, fiber entry points and security. Switch’s Citadel Campus and Meta’s Altoona campus each count as one entry in this ranking, even though both hold multiple buildings.

3. Who Builds the Largest Data Centers in the US?

Hyperscale cloud and social media companies build the largest U.S. campuses, with Meta behind most of the entries in this ranking. Among companies that lease space to other businesses, Digital Realty and Equinix run the biggest national portfolios.

4. How Is AI Changing the Size of US Data Centers?

Almost 800 hyperscale data centers sat in the known development pipeline as of early 2026, enough to double hyperscale capacity in about three years. AI campuses pack more power into each building. Stargate Abilene and Fairwater Atlanta both run GPU racks dense enough to need liquid cooling, and Meta, Google and Microsoft are building AI campuses in Texas, Indiana, Louisiana and Wisconsin.

5. What Powers the Largest US Data Centers?

The campuses in this ranking draw grid power from local utilities, and the owners match that power with renewable energy contracts. Meta pairs each campus with renewable projects in the same state and signed a 20-year agreement with Constellation for 1.1 GW of nuclear power. AI campuses add their own backup, and Stargate Abilene keeps natural-gas turbines on site.