Virginia’s Loudoun County is a giant data-center market thanks in part to a radio DJ-turned county executive director for economic development.

The moratorium halts development of any new data center that would use more than 20 megawatts of electricity or would be within 500 feet of residential homes.

Advocacy groups urged Louisiana regulators to investigate how Meta's complex financial setup for its Hyperion data center could affect everyday ratepayers.

It’s unclear how many farmers have received such offers, but rural lands have been increasingly targeted as demand for data centers to power AI has grown—most recently projected to increase by 165 percent by 2030. Globally, 40,000 acres are needed to support data center growth over the next five years, Hines Research estimated.

The biggest data center companies in 2026 include server, storage, network, liquid cooling, colocation, AI, chips, hardware and cloud data center providers.

Among the many problems posed by the rapid proliferation of data centers around the world is the strain on local water supplies. These facilities need plenty of water for cooling the vast arrays of servers and other computing equipment,