As in the UK, proposed datacentre construction in the US is undergoing a geographical shift.
There, the datacentre pipeline is shifting towards the centre of the country, with Texas and other midwestern states being the main beneficiaries. That’s due to a combination of available power and maturing technologies that can mitigate water use, especially in potentially water-constricted states such as Texas.
That’s according to US datacentre analyst Synergy, which looked at the current US datacentre footprint and future plans of the world’s major cloud and datacentre operators.
These hyperscalers and large datacentre operators had 1,360 operational sites at the end of 2025, of which 580 are in the US. Synergy calculates 437 more datacentres are proposed for the US in coming years (of a total 803 worldwide).
As Computer Weekly found for the UK, the datacentre pipeline far exceeds the capacity of that currently installed, reflecting the fact that planned datacentres – aimed at massively dense and power-hungry artificial intelligence (AI) workloads – are likely to be built at much larger capacities than hitherto.
John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, said: “As infrastructure constraints intensify and market dynamics continue to shift, hyperscale providers are increasingly reallocating capital toward central US regions, with Texas emerging as the primary focal point.
“A new wave of GW-scale campuses is taking shape in non-traditional locations such as Abilene, Mount Pleasant, South Bend, El Paso, Boone County and Kansas City. While established hubs will remain strategically important, the centre of gravity for new hyperscale investment is clearly moving elsewhere.”
Datacentre alley
Having said that, Virginia seems set to retain its “datacentre alley” crown due to a combination of location, power availability and local tax regimes. But western states such as Oregon and Nevada are likely to decline due to electricity grid constraints, cessation of tax breaks and friction with green energy goals.
Here, Virginia – transited by 70% of the world’s internet traffic – has benefitted from being close to major government and commercial centres, is home to the world’s highest density of dark fibre, has seen massive tax incentives, and is geographically and meteorologically “boring” in that it is largely free from earthquakes, wildfires and tornadoes.
While Virginia has benefitted from being the historical nexus of the internet and a specially-constructed infrastructure with low prices, it is now subject to strain on its power grid.
In the Midwest, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Missouri will all grow rapidly in importance, as they have attracted multiple major projects from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and CoreWeave.
Texas is set to benefit from the coming wave of datacentre construction in the US as a result of abundant power. Its Electric Reliability Council of Texas is largely independent – physically and in terms of oversight – from the rest of the US. This has allowed for faster grid connections than elsewhere.
And while Texas is drought-prone, when it comes to planned datacentre development, it is hoped this will be mitigated by evolution towards closed-loop liquid cooling in which relatively little water is used, compared with evaporative cooling that can waste tens of millions of litres per datacentre per day.
That said, developers are selecting areas with some water resilience, such as Dallas-Fort Worth and San Antonio, which make heavy use of recycled water for industry and other uses.
Finally, more mature datacentre regions such as Oregon and Nevada are projected to lose market share, and may struggle to transition to gigawatt-scale datacentres.
In Oregon, reasons include pauses on tax breaks, a backlash against preferential rates on energy given to datacentre operators, and increased protection of forests and farmlands that has squeezed potential datacentre construction sites.
Nevada, meanwhile, is suffering electricity constraints. It has a legal mandate for 50% renewable energy by 2030, while the state’s largest utility has said it will need three times the electricity to power Las Vegas to meet proposed datacentre demand.
