The glass went on last. Around 2006 I watched a data center go up in a residential part of Reston, Virginia, and once the shell was finished, the builder wrapped it in glass windows so it would pass for one more suburban office building. None of us on the street knew what it was for. VMware had made server virtualization practical, and Amazon started renting servers by the hour that summer, back when "cloud" still needed explaining at dinner.

Twenty years later, Northern Virginia runs 4,496.5 megawatts of operating data center capacity, the largest inventory in North America (CBRE, 2026). Operators there stopped dressing the buildings as offices long ago. This year, for the first time, another market is building more.

Northern Virginia Filled Up Before Demand Slowed Down

CBRE reported on August 27 that Atlanta passed Northern Virginia in capacity under construction during the first half of 2026. Atlanta had about 2,882 megawatts underway, up 52.3% from a year earlier, against 2,420.2 megawatts in Northern Virginia (CBRE, 2026). Northern Virginia's vacancy rate fell to 0.2% (CBRE, 2026), and nearly all of its capacity scheduled for 2026 delivery was already committed, according to Data Center Frontier's summary of the report.

Across CBRE's eight primary North American markets, vacancy held at 1.4%, and tenants had preleased 80.4% of the capacity under construction (CBRE, 2026). You are competing for buildings that do not exist yet. Data Center Frontier lists local approvals alongside power and fiber as the constraints that now decide where those buildings go, and it credits Atlanta's lead to tax incentives and available labor.

Power and permitting constraints are slowing Northern Virginia's expansion, while Atlanta offers tax incentives and room to build.

The Next Wave Lands in Counties Writing Their First Data Center Rules

Pew Research Center counted more than 1,500 U.S. data centers in development in an April analysis. Sixty-seven percent of the planned sites are in rural areas, while 87% of operating data centers are in urban ones (Pew Research Center, 2026). Thirty-nine percent of planned sites are in counties that have no data center today (Pew Research Center, 2026). Pew's planned category counts sites, not megawatts, and covers projects under construction, proposed projects and land-banked parcels, based on directory data accessed February 19, 2026.

Northern Virginia's counties spent two decades working out substations, transmission routes, water agreements, tax rules and noise limits for data centers. A rural county reviewing its first application may have a small planning staff and little experience evaluating a load that size. University of Illinois researchers pointed out that the companies proposing these campuses bring specialized lawyers and engineers to the table, while local officials often have fewer resources to evaluate the deals, according to Investigate Midwest.

I wrote in September about towns freezing data center permits over power bills and water. Pew's data puts many of the next hearings in places that have never held one.

Your next cloud region may depend on a county writing its first data center ordinance.

Pew counted sites in the Data Center Map directory. The same directory sits behind a state ranking from the law firm Jones & Swanson circulating this week, which puts Virginia first with 674 listings and Wyoming second per capita (Jones & Swanson, 2026). The directory lists operating, under-construction, planned and land-banked sites together, and a five-megawatt edge room counts the same as a 500-megawatt campus. Use listing counts to see where projects are headed, and CBRE's megawatt figures to see how much capacity will arrive and when.

The Two Largest Data Center States Sit on Grids That Set Records This Summer

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported on October 15 that three grid operators set all-time peak load records this summer. PJM Interconnection, which serves Virginia and 12 other states plus Washington, DC, peaked at 162.6 gigawatts on July 2 (EIA, 2026). The Electric Reliability Council of Texas peaked at 91.1 gigawatts on July 22, 6.5% above its prior record, and the Southwest Power Pool reached 58.0 gigawatts on July 27 (EIA, 2026).

The agency tied most of those peaks to heat waves during the country's hottest summer on record. Virginia and Texas hold the most listed data centers (Jones & Swanson, 2026), and their grid operators, PJM and ERCOT, both set records. Atlanta sits on neither grid, so a provider building there answers to a different utility and a different set of regulators.

Deserts and Orbit Are the Next Answers on the Table

When U.S. counties say no, builders look further out. G42 is leading a five-gigawatt AI campus in Abu Dhabi, backed by the United Arab Emirates' power supply and sovereign capital. Iranian attacks in March damaged two Amazon Web Services data centers in the UAE and one in Bahrain. Since then, Emirati officials have been revising the plan, and the project will now likely become a network of data centers spread across the country, according to sources who spoke with Reuters. G42 told Reuters that work on the campus was progressing as planned and that the project's specifics remain under continuous review.

In orbit, a builder skips the zoning board and the grid. Google launched its first Project Suncatcher prototype on October 1, and by October 30 the satellite was online and running a Gemma model, TechCrunch reported. The satellite carries four tensor processing units, but its power supply lets it run one at a time for about 20 minutes, according to TechCrunch's corrected report. Scaling up brings a second limit: space has no air to carry heat away, so radiator size caps how much compute each satellite can run.

Each option swaps a zoning problem for a cost you have not priced yet: physical security in the Gulf and power and heat in orbit.