How this record is built
What this site records
ComputeCompute documents data centers and the government approvals behind them: the land use entitlement, the water supply agreement, the air permit for the backup generator fleet, the grid interconnection, the tax abatement. Each aspect is recorded with the authority that approved it and the public instrument that shows it. Approvals a facility's demand makes necessary later, such as new generation or transmission, enter the record when a public filing documents them.
Where the data comes from
| Source | License | What it provides |
|---|---|---|
| UnGovr records requests | Public records (state law) | Requests we file with agencies for permits, approvals, and utility agreements, scoped to what each state's records statute allows. |
| Press reporting, via UnGovr News | Facts from cited press coverage | Facility records confirmed from press coverage, with each press event linking its source article. |
| Epoch AI Frontier Data Centers and GPU Clusters | CC BY 4.0 | Facility identification, location, and per site power, compute, and cost figures. |
| Wikidata | CC0 1.0 | Facility identifiers, coordinates, and operator or owner links. |
| US EPA FRS/ECHO | US public domain | Facility registry identifiers and environmental permit and compliance data. |
| California permit records (air districts, CEC dockets, CEQAnet) | Public records | Land use, air, and environmental review approvals for California facilities. |
| Virginia permit records (DEQ air permits, county land-use approvals) | Public records | Air permits, backup generator inventories, and land-use approvals for Virginia facilities. |
| Irish public records (planning registers, An Coimisiún Pleanála, EPA licensing, EirGrid and CRU publications) | Public records | Planning permissions, EPA industrial emissions licences, and grid connection policy records for Irish facilities. |
| US EPA eGRID | US public domain | Regional grid carbon intensity rates, used in the emissions estimate below. |
| Operator self-published fact pages | Facts individually cited to operator pages | Figures a company publishes about its own site, each cited to the page that states it. A company is a party in the record here, never the graded subject. |
| County parcel records (assessor and GIS parcel rolls) | Public records | Parcel identity and ownership of record for facility sites, fetched from county-published parcel layers; every parcel cites the county's own record. Owner names of private individuals are not published. |
| USGS Estimated Use of Water in the United States, county-level data for 2015 | US public domain | County water withdrawal totals, the denominator for the county water context figures. |
Attribution: Includes data from Epoch AI, used under CC BY 4.0. The IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, ODbL 1.0) is consulted internally to identify facilities for research; no atlas data is republished here. Commercial data-center directories are not used.
Public records, within the law
Records requests behind this site are made under state public records law, scoped to what each statute allows. Our analysis of every records law: law.ungovr.org/records/us. A refusal is recorded as not disclosed. A blank is recorded as not yet requested. Neither is an accusation.
Status vocabulary
- On record
- The approval exists and its instrument has been identified.
- Pending
- The approval process has started; the facility is proposed, approved, or under construction.
- Disclosed
- A measurement has been published or recorded in a public document.
- Not disclosed
- A measurement or approval was requested, and the response, if any, did not include it.
- Requested
- A dated public-records request for this measurement or approval is pending with the named custodian. It resolves to disclosed or not disclosed once the custodian responds.
- Not yet requested
- No records request covering this measurement or approval has been filed yet.
- Estimated
- The figure is our calculation from disclosed inputs, not a disclosed measurement itself.
Water figures
Water rows on facility pages carry a small expand control that opens the figure's context: what is on record, how it compares in size to the county's documented water withdrawals, what the cooling design implies, and which public record would establish what is not yet on record.
County comparisons use the US Geological Survey's county-level water-use estimates for 2015, the most recent complete county release (doi:10.5066/F7TB15V5). They are size comparisons only. A facility's figure is not part of the 2015 totals, and the county figures are not a limit or an allocation. We always show the county total alongside its composition (public supply, irrigation, and other documented uses), and never compare against a single flow alone.
How a facility cools determines what a gallon figure means. Evaporative systems consume most of the water they draw; closed-loop and air-cooled designs draw little water on site but use more electricity for the same heat; published estimates of that penalty range from roughly 10 to 65 percent (The Atlantic, 2026, reporting estimates from cooling researchers). Water used to generate a facility's electricity is not included in the figures on these pages.
Most operators do not publish facility-level water figures. Where no figure is on public record, the row says so; absence of a record is a records gap, not a finding about the facility. The record that usually establishes water demand is the will-serve letter or water supply assessment held by the serving utility, and those documents are requestable under state public records law (law.ungovr.org/records/us).
Issuing authorities
Where a step or record names an authority before any record exists, the name identifies the body that would issue that record. For utility service the body is resolved from mapped service-area boundaries: drinking-water system areas from the State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB), electric and gas service territories from the California Energy Commission (CEC), and sanitation district boundaries from county and LAFCO mapping, with municipal limits as the stated presumption for sewer service where no district is mapped. A marker naming the basis identifies these names, and the marker's tooltip names the layer it came from using those same abbreviations. These names say the address sits inside the body's mapped service area, or inside its municipal limits for the sewer presumption; they do not assert a customer relationship.
Estimated emissions
Some facilities carry an estimated annual grid emissions figure. It is our calculation, always labeled as an estimate, never a disclosure: power capacity x an assumed utilization of 75 percent x 8,760 hours x the EPA eGRID carbon intensity for the facility's grid region, converted to short tons of CO2e. Every input is recorded with the estimate. Facilities that are not operating carry no estimate.
The oversight score
A per-jurisdiction score of which oversight structures exist is in progress. Until it ships, each facility page reports approval status directly.
Corrections
For errors on this site, a wrong county assignment, a broken citation, a mislinked approver, use ungovr.org/support/new.