Study finds existing urban power grids attract new data center siting, not greenfield rural builds as commonly assumed.

When people picture a data center, they often imagine something remote: a vast warehouse humming quietly far from the city. New research from NYU Tandon School of Engineering challenges that assumption fundamentally.

The study, published in Nature Cities, examined 4,283 data centers across the contiguous United States and found that 97.5% of them sit inside metropolitan or micropolitan statistical areas—urban cores and their immediate surroundings. The roughly 2.5% of facilities technically outside city limits are, on average, just 8.5 miles from the nearest urban edge.

The concentration is striking even within the urban category. Five metro areas—Washington–Arlington–Alexandria, Chicago, Dallas–Fort Worth, New York–Newark–Jersey City, and Phoenix—account for nearly a third of all U.S. facilities. Washington alone hosts 610 data centers, reflecting Northern Virginia's status as the global capital of data infrastructure.

Lead researcher Maurizio Porfiri, director of NYU Tandon's Center for Urban Science + Progress, noted: "There is a prevailing narrative of these data centers being somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in rural areas, being a positive force for employment, and being the future of rural communities. We dramatically challenged this view."

The strongest predictor of data center location is electricity capacity—how much power local generators can produce. Data centers are power-hungry, running thousands of servers continuously and drawing enormous, steady loads from the grid. A notable finding goes further: closed coal plants near cities are becoming magnets for new data center development. When a plant shuts down, the power lines and grid connections built to carry continuous electricity do not disappear. Data center developers tap directly into that infrastructure or, in some cases, redevelop the sites themselves.

The numbers reflect this pattern. Among cities overlapping with areas designated as Energy Communities under a 2022 federal policy designed to support regions hurt by coal plant closures, data centers under development are twice as likely to be found there than in cities without that designation.

Because data centers draw from their local grid, their carbon footprint depends heavily on how that grid generates power. A typical data center in Montana or North Dakota produces more than 350,000 tons of CO2 emissions annually, while the average facility in Vermont, New Hampshire, or Arkansas produces less than 3,000 tons.

Beyond electricity supply, data centers cluster where IT workers and high-speed internet are concentrated. Local water shortages seem to have less impact on data center placement, despite the facilities consuming enormous amounts of water for cooling.

The industry's opacity compounds these challenges. "As this industry rapidly grows, the limited publicly available data on its footprint creates a real challenge," said postdoctoral researcher Ofek Lauber Bonomo. "That makes it more difficult for planners, for local residents, and for anyone trying to make informed decisions about their community's future." Co-author Anton Rozhkov added: "The patterns we found were consistent and clear. Where the infrastructure already exists, the data centers follow. The question now is whether that is the future we want to build."