The AI Boom Is Inheriting the Geography of America’s Old Energy Economy

The AI boom is inheriting the geography of America’s old energy economy

America’s demand for computing power may look like a new economy, but the places supporting it are often shaped by an older one. A peer-reviewed study published in Nature Cities mapped 4,283 data centers across the contiguous United States. It found that 97.5% were inside metropolitan or micropolitan statistical areas. These areas include suburbs and smaller urban regions, not only downtown districts. Even the small share of data centers outside…

US data center locations shaped by urban infrastructure and fossil fuel

Data centers are often imagined as remote warehouses of servers, rising quietly in rural landscapes where land is cheap and electricity is abundant. A new study challenges that picture, finding that the infrastructure powering the digital economy is overwhelmingly urban. Across the United States, 97.5 percent of data centers are located within metropolitan or micropolitan statistical areas, tying the expansion of cloud computing, artificial inte…

Inside the Urban Machine: Where America's Data Centers Actually Live

An NYU Tandon study examined the locations of 4,283 data centers across the contiguous United States and found that 97.5% of them sit inside urban cores and their immediate surroundings, challenging the prevailing narratives of a "rural cloud."