Biggest Data Centers in US
With more than 5,427 operating data centers, the US is the market leader for data centers worldwide. The nation's growing demand for computing, storage, and connectivity is still being met by a number of operational data centers, including Microsoft's Quincy Data Center in Washington, Switch's Citadel Campus in Nevada, the largest colocation facility in the world, and Meta's Altoona Data Center in Iowa.
Cities like Dallas and Los Angeles hold significant numbers, with 156 and 151 operating data centers, respectively. This blog features the biggest data centers in the US in terms of IT load. To find out more, keep reading.
The Altoona Data Center of Meta:
The Altoona Data Center, located in Altoona, is one of Meta's largest operational facilities in the US. We expect the facility to have an IT load of 1,401 MW. The data center's construction commenced in 2013. We expect the project to span well over 5 million square feet, with a total expenditure of USD 2.5 billion.
Turner Construction Company is the facility's general contractor, but Meta is its owner and operator. The location serves as a test site for hybrid and electric construction machinery. The facility comprises Polk County Data Center buildings 1 and 2. It was the first of the new campus's eight data center halls in central Iowa. The building is an "H" shape, two stories high. The factory runs entirely on renewable energy and supports more than 400 operational jobs.
The Prineville Data Center of Meta:
The Oregon campus is home to the Prineville data center. Meta was one of the first to fully own the Prineville data center in the United States. The data center in Prineville, Oregon, has a 1,289 MW capacity. The facility's general contractor was chosen to be DPR Construction. One of the first data centers to receive that level of green certification, the entire campus was built in accordance with LEED®-NC Gold criteria.
At the time, the Prineville campus's PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) rating of about 1.06 was among the lowest in the industry. To promote wider industry innovation, the initiative also provided the physical framework for Meta's Open Compute initiative, which made the server and building designs openly accessible.
In order to maximize the facility's performance for the high-desert climate of the area, DPR collaborated closely with Meta's engineering and design teams when the project got underway
in 2010. They also included a highly effective evaporative cooling system and an airside economizer system that uses only ambient air.
Meta's Fort Worth Data Center:
The data center campus in Fort Worth, Texas, is approximately 2.5 million square feet in size and has an estimated IT load of 729 MW. The project was constructed in parts, with the first phase going into service in 2017. The total investment cost was USD 1.5 billion. Gradually, the administrative areas and data halls went online. By 2023, the entire campus was up and running.
Nearly 1,919 MW of new renewable energy have been developed in Texas thanks to the Fort Worth, Texas, Meta facility, which runs fully on clean and renewable energy. The Fort Worth Data Center provides vital capacity to serve Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, empowering more than 3 billion people worldwide.
Switch TAHOE RENO 1 Data Center:
Situated in Northern Nevada's Tahoe Reno Industrial Center, the Switch TAHOE RENO colocation facility is the biggest in the world. It is a component of Switch's expansive Citadel Campus, which has a maximum floor area of 7.2 million square feet and a maximum power capacity of 650 MW.
The 2,000-acre Citadel Campus is intended to eventually provide 7.2 million square feet of data center capacity. It is built with a Switch SHIELD roofing system that can tolerate winds of up to 200 mph and a tri-redundant UPS system.
Core Campus:
Switch's Core Campus is in Las Vegas, Nevada. Its operational capacity exceeds 495 MW of IT load, and its entire area exceeds 2.4 million square feet. The Core Campus is built to Tier IV Gold standards for uptime and reliability, uses high-efficiency cooling and electrical infrastructure, and houses sizable colocation and enterprise workloads.
The site, often regarded as one of the most sophisticated and secure facilities in the world, operates entirely on renewable energy. The innovative "Switch SHIELD" security architecture, fast scalability, and integrated fiber access distinguish Switch's ecosystems in Nevada. The Microsoft Quincy Data Center
Situated in Washington state, the Microsoft Quincy Data Center is one of the biggest and most sophisticated data center campuses in the US. There are three, four, and fifth-generation facilities on this approximately 270-acre, 622 MW property, with a fifth-generation facility in the works.
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Through specialized power lines, the university receives its electricity from the adjacent Grand Coulee hydroelectric station. The campus has a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of only 1.4, and the first data halls contain 18 rows of IT equipment that consumed 2.5 MW of electricity. Modern and conventional cooling methods are both present at Microsoft's Quincy data center.
QTS Atlanta 1:
Located in Atlanta, Georgia, and measuring 970,000 square feet, QTS Atlanta 1 (QTS AtlantaMetro Data Center) is one of the biggest enterprise-grade data centers in the Southeast United States. This 278 MW QTS data center can process data quickly and effectively since it has its own Georgia Power substation and direct links to significant fiber and carrier networks. It has a 1.20 PUE. DC1, DC2, DC3, and DC4 are the names of its four sublocations.
With many expandable buildings on Jefferson and Herndon streets and recently purchased acreage for additional megawatt capacity, the LEED Gold-certified complex has plenty of room to grow.
Digital Realty's Lakeside Technology Center (Chicago, Illinois) is one of the biggest carrier hotels and multi-tenant data centers in the United States. It is situated at 350 East Cermak Road in Chicago. Spread over approximately 1.1 million square feet, it is run by Digital Realty and offers over 100 MW of IT power to telecom, cloud, and wholesale colocation customers.
The location is for its deep-flood resilience engineering, generators, redundant chillers, and central Midwest network access. As a network gateway for telecom interconnects, hyperscale cloud deployments, and financial transactions, Lakeside Technology Center is essential.
The Quincy Data Center:
In Quincy, Washington, there is an 89 MW data center called Quincy Data Center Campus. It occupies 775,000 square feet of space. The Grant County Power Utility District, which supplies the electricity, has some of the lowest prices per kilowatt in the United States.
Multiple cooling systems are supported by the electrical design and power infrastructure of the Quincy data center, which guarantees effective humidity control and data module cooling.
The cooling systems include a closed-loop chilled water system that uses outside air for cooling, air handling devices on each side of the data modules, and backup systems. With the most recent cooling design for planned new buildings, the Water Utilization Efficiency (WUE) is almost zero. The U.S. Green Building Council has awarded it a LEED Gold certification.