Where Are All The Data Centers?

If you liked this piece, please subscribe to my premium newsletter. It’s $70 a year, or $7 a month, and in return you get a weekly newsletter that’s usually anywhere from 5,000 to 18,000 words, including vast, detailed analyses of NVIDIA, Anthropic and OpenAI’s finances, and the AI bubble writ large. My Hater's Guides To Private Credit and Private Equity are essential to understanding our current financial system, and my guide to how OpenAI Kills Oracle pairs nicely with my Hater's Guide To Oracle.My last piece was a detailed commentary on the circular nature of the AI economy — and how the illusion of AI demand is just that, an illusion. Subscribing to premium is both great value and makes it possible to write these large, deeply-researched free pieces every week. During every bubble there’s one very obvious thing that keeps happening: things are said, these things are repeated, and are then considered fact. Sam Bankman-Fried was the smiling, friendly, “self-made billionaire” face of the crypto industry. NFTs were the future of art, and would change the way people think about the ownership of digital media.The actual evidence, of course, never lined up. NFT trading was dominated by wash trading — market manipulation through two parties deliberately buying and selling an asset to raise the price. Cryptocurrency never took off as anything other than a speculative asset, and altcoins are effectively dead. Sam Bankman-Fried was only a billionaire if you counted his billions of illiquid FTX tokens, but that didn’t stop people from saying he wanted to save the world weeks after the collapse of Terra Luna, a stablecoin that he himself had bet against and may have helped collapse. Three months before his arrest, a CNBC reporter would fly to the Bahamas to hear SBF tell the story of how he “survived the market wreckage and still expanded his empire,” with the answer being that he had “stashed away ample cash, kept overhead low, and avoided lending,” as opposed to the truth, which was “crime.” The point is that before every scandal is somebody emphatically telling you that everything’s fine.

Everything seems real because there’s enough proof, with “enough proof” being a convincing-enough person saying that “most of FTX’s volume comes from customers trading at least $100,000 per day,” when the actual volume was manipulated by FTX itself, and the “$100,000 a day in customer funds” were being used by FTX to prop up its flailing token. In the end, the “proof” that SBF was rich and that FTX was solvent was that nobody had run out of money and that nothing bad had happened to anybody. SBF was a billionaire sixteen times over because enough people had said that it was true. Anyway, one of the most commonly-held parts of the AI bubble is that massive amounts — gigawatts’ worth — of data centers have both already been and continue to be built……but then you look a little closer, and things start getting a little more vague. While Wood Mackenzie’s report said that there was “25GW of data center capacity added to the funnel” in Q4 2025 does not say how much came online. CBRE said back in February that “net absorption of 2497MW” happened in primary markets in 2025, with other reports saying that somewhere between 700MW and 2GW of capacity was absorbed every quarter of 2025. At the time, I reached out for any clarity about the methodology in question and received no response.Okay, so, I know data centers are getting built and that they exist. I believe some capacity is coming online.But gigawatts? Or even hundreds of megawatts? How much data center capacity is actually coming online? Why did Anthropic get so desperate it took on a years old data center, xAI’s Colossus-1, full of even older chips from a competitor — one whose CEO described the company as “evil,” and that’s currently facing a lawsuit from the NAACP over allegations the facility’s gas turbines are polluting black neighborhoods?

Remember, Colossus-1 is an odd data center, with around 200,000 H100 and H200 GPUs and an indeterminate amount of Blackwell GB200s, weighing in at around 300MW of total capacity…which isn’t really that much if we’re talking about gigawatts being built every quarter, is it? So, I have two very simple questions to ask: how long does it take to build a data center, and how much data center capacity is actually coming online?These simple questions are surprisingly difficult to answer. There exists very little reliable information about in-progress data centers, and what information exists is continually muddied by terrible reporting — claiming that incomplete projects are “operational” because some parts of them have turned on, for example — and a lack of any investor demand for the truth. Hyperscalers do not disclose how many data centers they’ve built, nor do they disclose how much capacity they have available. I find this utterly inexcusable, given the fact that Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft have sunk over $800 billion in capex (and more if you count investments into Anthropic and OpenAI) in the last three years.So I went and looked, and what I found was confusing.Defining “Built” and “Operational”So, you’re going to hear people say “well Ed, data centers are being built,” and what I’m talking about is data centers that have been fully constructed and then turned on. It’s really, really easy to find data centers that are under construction, but as I’ve discussed in the past, that can mean everything from a pile of scaffolding to a near-complete data center.Yet finding the latter is very, very difficult. I’ve spent the last week searching for data centers that broke ground in 2023 or 2024 that have actually been finished, and come up surprisingly empty-handed.

Some projects are stuck in construction hell, eternally dueling with planning departments over permitting, some are chugging along with no real substantive updates, some, as is the case with Nscale’s Loughton, England data center, have done effectively nothing for the best part of a year, some are perennially adding more capacity to the order as a means of continuing raking in construction bills, and some are claiming their data centers are “operational” as only a single phase has turned on.You should also know that even once construction has finished, the buildings themselves must be fully filled with the necessary cooling, power and compute hardware, at which point it can be configured to meet a client’s specifications (which can take months), at which point the unfortunate soul building the facility can actually start making money.Building A Data Center Is Difficult, And Nobody Has Built A 1GW Data Center YetI think it’s also worth revisiting how difficult data center construction is, and how large these new projects are. This starts with a very simple statement: nobody has actually built a 1GW data center (to be clear, it’s usually a campus of multiple buildings networked together) yet. There are campuses — such as Stargate Abilene — which promise to reach 1.2GW, but nearly two years in sit at two buildings at around 103MW of critical IT load each with, based on discussions with sources with direct knowledge of Abilene’s infrastructure, a third building sitting fully-constructed but with barely any gear inside it.It’s fundamentally insane how many different companies are trying to build these things considering how difficult even the simplest data center is to build.Take, for example, American Tower Corporation’s edge data center in Raleigh, North Carolina, which I’ll mention a little later. This is a 1MW facility — or one-hundredth the size of a gigawatt facility — occupying 4000 sq ft of real estate at first and expanding to 16,000 if ATC actually gets it up to 4MW. That’s about two-and-a-bit times larger than the typical American home. And, from ground-breaking to ribbon-cutting, it took eleven months to complete. And that’s not including all the other necessary time-consuming bits, like finding land, securing permits, and so on.

That’s a simple one. People want to build data center campuses a thousand times larger than that. Look at how difficult it is.In fact, it’s so difficult that the companies can’t build all of it at once. Larger data center campuses are almost always divided into “phases,” in part because that’s the smartest way to build them, and in part with the express intention of convincing you that they’re “fully operational.” For example, CNBC’s MacKenzie Sigalos reported in October 2025 that Amazon’s Indiana-based (allegedly) 2.2GW Project Rainier data center was “operational,” but only seven out of a planned 30 buildings were actually operational, and her comment of “with two more campuses [of indeterminate capacity] underway.” This comment was buried two videos and 600 words into a piece that declared the data center was “now operational,” with the express intent of making you think the whole thing was operational.To give her credit, at least she didn’t copy-paste the outright lie from Amazon, which claimed that Rainier was “fully operational” in a press release the same day. You’ll also note that Amazon never provides any clarity about the actual capacity of Rainier.Sigalos did exactly the same thing when the first (of eight) buildings of Stargate Abilene opened, declaring that “OpenAI’s first data center in $500 billion Stargate project is open in Texas,” burying the comment that only one was operational with another nearly complete several hundred words earlier. These are intentionally attempts to obfuscate the actual progress of the data center buildout, and if I’m honest, I’ve spent months trying to work out why big companies that were supposedly building large swaths of data centers would be trying to do so.Unless, of course, things weren’t going to plan.Is Microsoft Misleading Us About Its Data Center Capacity?Microsoft claims to have brought around 4GW of data center capacity online in the last two years, but it’s unclear how much actually got built.In an analysis of all announced groundbreakings and land acquisitions, it appears that Microsoft has only finished the first phase of its Atlanta and Wisconsin data centers.