Where AI data centers are being built: selected projects

Where are data centers being built for AI? Company announcements identify projects across Texas, Ohio, Louisiana, Georgia, Wisconsin and other US states, alongside sites in Canada, Europe, India, Australia and Abu Dhabi. This guide compares selected locations and the capacity and milestones each developer announced.

The locations below come from the companies’ own announcements. Read them alongside our AI data centers tracker. Capacity is given as each company states it. Some figures describe power drawn from the grid, others the IT load or “compute capacity,” so they are not directly comparable. Source review: October 31, 2026. Dates below identify the announcement being summarized. Historical operating milestones are attributed to that dated source; they are not a new inspection of the facility. Older plans may have changed.

What decides the location

Where companies explain their choice, power and land come first. Microsoft says it spread its Fairwater sites across states because land and power availability make it “more attractive – and at this point necessary – to spread the work across different physical locations.” That makes a location map useful for understanding delivery constraints, provided a power agreement is kept separate from an operating compute cluster.

Some projects reuse industrial sites. OpenAI describes development at the former Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant site in Pike County, Ohio. NextEra describes the Department of Energy’s Paducah Site in Kentucky as a former enrichment site.

United States

Texas. The flagship Stargate campus in Abilene, run with Oracle, was “already up and running” in September 2025, according to OpenAI, with Oracle delivering Nvidia GB200 racks from June 2025. The same announcement named Stargate sites in Shackelford County and Milam County. On July 15, 2026, Crusoe and Lancium announced a 1.0 GW campus in Childress, for an unnamed hyperscale customer. Figure and Nscale plan up to 100,000 Nvidia Vera Rubin GPUs in Barstow, from the second half of 2027.

Louisiana. Meta said on July 13, 2026 that it is expanding its Richland Parish data center to 5 GW of compute capacity, an investment of more than $50 billion in the region.

Ohio. OpenAI joined the PORTS-Pike project in Pike County on August 17, 2026, securing about 8 GW-IT with SB Energy, Nvidia and the Department of Energy, in a six-year buildout through 2032. A SoftBank-developed Stargate site is in Lordstown, according to OpenAI’s September 2025 announcement.

Georgia. Microsoft’s Fairwater Atlanta began operating in October 2025. OpenAI’s Project Camellia in Effingham County is contracted for 3.2 GW of power from Georgia Power, delivered in phases between 2028 and 2032.

Wisconsin. Microsoft’s first Fairwater datacenter in Mount Pleasant was fully operational as of June 23, 2026, with a second facility due in 2028. OpenAI said in October 2025 that a Stargate site in Wisconsin will be developed by Oracle with Vantage.

Tennessee and Mississippi. xAI’s Colossus is in Memphis. In a July 30, 2026 update, the operator’s site, branded SpaceXSI, described a supercomputer spanning the Tennessee-Mississippi state line and a 1.2 GW power plant under construction in Southaven, Mississippi.

Kentucky. NextEra Energy and Brookfield announced a campus at the DOE Paducah Site on July 29, 2026, with more than 1.2 GW of compute capacity and up to 4.6 GW of dedicated generation once fully built in 2032.

New Mexico and Indiana. OpenAI named a Stargate site in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. Meta broke ground on a 1 GW campus in Lebanon, Indiana, in February 2026.

Canada

On July 8, 2026, Meta broke ground on a 1 GW, AI-optimized data center in Sturgeon County, Alberta, its first in Canada and the 33rd in its fleet, with an investment of more than CA$13 billion. Meta says it is fully funding the new generation and grid infrastructure the site needs.

Europe: Finland, Norway and the UK

Pure Data Centres Group launched its Seinäjoki campus in Seinäjoki, Finland, on July 14, 2026. Phase 1 is 110 MW and already fully leased; the full campus is planned at more than 550 MW of campus capacity, subject to the necessary permissions and contracting. The release says the substation for the first data hall was live; that does not establish that the entire campus was operating.

Microsoft said in September 2025 that it plans a hyperscale AI datacenter in Narvik, Norway, with nScale and Aker, and the UK’s largest supercomputer in Loughton with nScale.

India

Microsoft said on September 21, 2026 that its India South Central region in Hyderabad is live, with a three-zone design, and named it a strategic hub for Asia and the Global South. Microsoft says its datacenter regions across India are now AI-enabled.

Australia

Nvidia announced on September 9, 2026 that it is working with Australian partners, including Firmus, Sharon AI, IREN, ResetData, Megaport, CDC, NEXTDC and AirTrunk, on up to a 2 GW buildout by 2027. The partners will operate the sites; Nvidia supplies its DSX platform.

United Arab Emirates

OpenAI announced Stargate UAE on May 22, 2025: a 1 GW cluster in Abu Dhabi with 200 MW expected to go live in 2026, built with G42, Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco and SoftBank. It was the first partnership under OpenAI for Countries.

Projects by region

Some large commitments name no site at all. AMD and Anthropic agreed on up to 2 GW of AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs; CoreWeave reported about 4.2 GW of contracted power; and Anthropic, Macquarie Asset Management and GIC formed Theseus Infrastructure with an initial US focus. These announcements establish commitments without identifying a specific campus in the cited releases. They should not be assigned a location by inference.

For the underlying hardware and delivery questions, see AI data centers versus traditional facilities, AI data-center power consumption and Microsoft Fairwater.