We Mapped Rural Data Center Development – and Opposition. Here’s What We Found | The Daily Yonder
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Washington, D.C.’s metropolitan area has long hummed with data centers. The region, which encompasses much of Northern Virginia, has become known as Data Center Alley, home to more data centers than anywhere else in the world. But the data center boom, driven by the rise of AI and the race to build the infrastructure powering it, is changing the geography of these energy-intensive, warehouse-like facilities.
Data centers have arrived in rural America.
The Daily Yonder analyzed crowd-sourced data on the locations of data centers, how they connect to existing grid infrastructure, and where communities are fighting back.
Though the majority of in-progress data centers are in metropolitan areas, our reporting and data analysis show that large data centers, characteristic of the current boom, represent outsized investments in rural areas. Smaller populations often mean smaller tax bases and fewer government officials, leaving rural communities with fewer resources to negotiate deals with developers or weather the tax revenue fallout after facility closures.
The Geography of the Data Center Boom
The following map shows the number of data centers in both metropolitan and non-metropolitan, or rural, counties. As of June 2026, approximately 30 of the 529 data centers currently in operation are located in rural counties, representing about 6% of operating data centers. At the time of this analysis, 16 rural data centers were either recently approved or currently under construction, representing about 12% of all in-progress projects.
The Daily Yonder uses a county-level definition of rural derived from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). All counties outside of a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) are classified as rural for the purposes of this analysis.
Information on the locations of data centers comes from FracTracker Alliance, an organization providing the public with interactive tools to understand oil, gas, petrochemical, and data center development across the country.
While there are many other datasets out there tracking data center development, few of them are publicly accessible, making a complete analysis difficult. We chose FracTracker because of the organization’s methods for obtaining data and the monthly frequency with which it updates the database. We saw that frequency as a key metric for tracking this fast-evolving issue. FracTracker obtains information from crowd sourcing, media announcements, partner datasets, and public records. While the organization is primarily focused on proposed data centers, it is slowly adding existing data centers to the database.
That means that the data used in this analysis is preliminary. Because it is a work in progress, FracTracker encourages readers to share new and updated information about data centers in their own communities via a submission form.
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How Do the Daily Yonder’s Findings Compare to Others?
Analyses that rely on other rural definitions and datasets yield different results. For instance, a recent analysis by the Pew Research Center relied on data from Data Center Map, an industry database. Pew Research found that more than 1,500 new data centers are planned nationwide, with 67% slated for rural areas.
Yet Pew Research uses a slightly broader interpretation of rural than the Daily Yonder. Pew Research interprets rurality as it is defined by the U.S. Census Bureau’s urban-rural classification, which includes areas on the outskirts of metropolitan counties that have low population density. These communities are not captured in the OMB definition that the Daily Yonder uses.
Still, as data centers expand beyond metropolitan areas, their development and reception in Census-defined rural places often resemble patterns found in non-metropolitan counties defined by the OMB.
So, although figures may vary by rural classification method, the general trend is that the presence of data centers is a growing concern in rural communities, particularly because the complex dynamics of data center development show up differently in smaller municipalities.
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