How the dataset is assembled and updated

1. Unit of observation and scope

A record is a data center facility, campus, or named build phase that a public source identifies as existing, under construction, or planned. Campuses and the buildings and phases inside them are held as separate records connected by an explicit hierarchy link, never silently merged — the same infrastructure described at two levels stays visible at both, and aggregation logic (section 4) prevents it from being counted twice. Closed or decommissioned sites are retained with a closed status and excluded from every forward-looking aggregate.

2. Sources: hierarchy and conflict resolution

Facts are compiled from public materials and internal provenance is retained. Customer-facing source links are shown only where the delivery policy permits and a qualifying URL remains. When sources disagree, resolution follows a fixed ranking rather than editorial judgement: operator disclosures and official filings outrank planning and government documents, which outrank utility and regulatory materials, which outrank press coverage and directory listings. Within a rank, the more specific and more recent statement wins. Facts extracted for the same field from different pages are held as competing candidates and resolved by these rules; the losing candidates are retained internally so a resolution can be revisited when new evidence lands.

Customer surfaces select at most one eligible primary source for each facility and show the date it was read. That link is an orientation reference and may not support every individual attribute. Competitive directories, business listings, social platforms and search links are not delivered. Compiled factual values can remain present when no eligible primary URL is available; complete field-level provenance stays in the internal source library.

The reading behind the table is counted below: the public pages a search returned and that were screened, the pages read for facility facts, the field-level citations each carrying the passage that states the value, and the documents cited as a facility’s primary source. The pages themselves are not published; the counts are recomputed with every release.

3. Field definitions and normalisation

Facility power is the facility or campus power under the source’s definition, in MW. It is not annual electricity consumption. Values reported in other electrical units are converted explicitly — apparent power (MVA) is converted only where the conversion basis can be stated, and the conversion is recorded with the value. A reported range is reduced to a stated midpoint and marked as range-derived. IT load is held in its own field and never substituted into facility power; where a source states only IT or critical load, facility power stays blank.

Announced full build-out capacity (“designed for up to X MW”) is held in a separate ultimate-capacity field with the stage of the un-built remainder, and is never added to facility power or to any stage total: expansion phases routinely exist as their own records, and summing a parent’s announced ceiling as well would double-count the pipeline. Values that fail physical plausibility screens — unit slips, transposed figures — are withheld from publication and logged for a later check rather than published or silently corrected. Missing values remain blank and are never converted to zero.

4. Facility hierarchy and aggregation

Aggregation follows each hierarchy branch and uses the highest available facility-power value on that branch. When a parent campus states no power, the method moves down the branch to the nearest available values. A parent and its children are therefore never added together, and a campus with no stated total still contributes its children’s values. Country and company aggregates sum over these hierarchy-deduplicated values only from records that state a power value — they are floors supported by the public record, not estimates of total installed capacity.

5. Development status

Every record is classified as operating, construction, planning, closed, or status-not-specified, from the same ranked sources as its other facts. Planned and construction capacity is not operating capacity, and every published comparison keeps the stages separate. A status change — a campus entering service, a project cancelled — is applied through the corrections process (section 7) with the page that proves it, so the stage split can be traced and checked release over release.

6. Coverage

The current release catalogues the corpus described on the coverage page: the facility, country, city, and operator counts, the stage split, and how many facilities record each attribute. Public disclosure differs by operator and by market, so attribute availability varies across the corpus; the coverage page states it per attribute family and by development stage so the dataset’s reach can be assessed before requesting the file.

7. Corrections

Corrections are applied through dated correction files, never by editing the table in place: each correction names the facility, the field, the action, and the public page that proves it, and ships in the next versioned release. Values proven wrong are replaced or suppressed; a source URL shown to describe a different facility is unbound from the value it was wrongly attached to. Independent checks re-read the highest-impact facilities against their sources, and their findings enter the same correction files. A published release is never changed afterwards — see versioning.

8. Derived values are quarantined

A facility that states no power value is never given one. Nothing on this site, in any total, ranking, aggregate, chart or exported figure, is derived from a peer average, a floor-area rule of thumb, or any other proxy. Where an internal size estimate exists it is used for exactly one thing: the size of a city bubble on the map, drawn hollow and dashed so the distinction survives without a caption. It enters no total, ranking, aggregate, chart or delivered figure, and automated tests enforce that boundary against the published field names on every release. The coverage page states how many facilities state each attribute, so the size of what is unknown is visible rather than filled in.

9. Reserved: electricity and emissions

The commercial release publishes no electricity-consumption or greenhouse-gas figures and no emissions factors. The calculation layer is specified and reserved for a future versioned release: electricity derives from load or capacity with explicit PUE, utilisation, and stage assumptions; emissions require a declared accounting boundary, and on-site or contracted supply changes the applicable energy mix, not the demand. When this layer is released it will carry its own method version, input-release lineage, and scenario definitions, and this page will be extended before any such figure is sold. No number from this reserved layer appears anywhere in the current product.

10. Monthly source checks and versioning

The table is maintained by a monthly round in four steps. First, a set of facilities is chosen for re-reading: projects in planning or under construction, whose stage can change; facilities whose value rests on an older page; and facilities an official record or a news item has newly mentioned. Second, their public sources are searched and read again, and each candidate value is written down with the page and the passage that states it. Third, every candidate is checked against the value already held: a match confirms it, a better-supported value replaces it, and a weaker one is set aside. Fourth, the accepted changes enter the next release as dated correction files, so a stage advance or a new power figure can be traced to the month and the page that produced it.

Each release is compiled from these changes, checked by automated release gates, read by a person, and only then published under a new release ID. A release that has been delivered is never edited in place, and months without material change publish no new release. The release notes compare every release with the one before it and count each month’s source checks.

11. Limitations

Public facility information is incomplete, uneven across markets, and changes over time. Aggregates cover only facilities whose public record states a power value, and source definitions can differ — campus power, utility connection, and project scale are not always the same quantity, which is why the source definition travels with the value. The dataset records what the public evidence supports at access time; it is not investment, engineering, or regulatory advice.

12. Places and location

Every facility is placed in a country, a first-level division where the country has one, and a city. The public site shows places at city level: a city marker on the map is the city’s centroid from the GeoNames gazetteer, not a facility site, and spelling variants of one city are merged into one page. Cities are drawn only where the gazetteer entry has been cleared for publication; a city whose name matches a same-named place elsewhere is checked against the facility’s own public description before it is drawn. Country and first-level division outlines are Natural Earth. The file supplied on request may carry a finer location under its own licence terms, agreed per order; the website never does.

13. Public reference datasets

Beyond operator pages, press and planning documents, facilities are checked against public reference datasets where one exists for the field. Each is used for the fields it can speak to, under its own terms, and is named here so a reader knows what was consulted; the matching itself stays in the internal source library.

United States federal and state government works are used as public records; OpenStreetMap under ODbL 1.0 with attribution; GeoNames, Epoch AI and Global Energy Monitor under CC BY. Attributions are listed on the third-party notices page.

14. On-site generation

Where a public record states that a facility is served by generation on its own site — gas turbines, fuel cells, reciprocating engines, solar with storage, or a dedicated plant — the method records the technology, the supply role (primary supply, bridging supply until a grid connection, or backup), the stated capacity and the stage of the generation project, each with its own source. Standby diesel kept for outages is not counted as on-site generation. These fields are compiled from generator filings, air permits and operator statements; they are part of the file supplied on request and are not yet summarised on this site.

15. Proposing a correction

Send the facility ID, the affected field, the proposed value, a public source URL, and a short explanation through the contact page. Substantiated corrections enter the next round’s correction files and ship in a later release; the reporter is not identified in the data.