America's planned data center capacity is 6.2 times what is currently running
Data center announcements have become their own genre of press release, quoting gigawatt figures that sound less like office parks and more like national grids. Cleanview's September 2026 count suggests most of those gigawatts are still waiting on a connection.
US data centers in operation today draw 61.8 GW. The figure sitting in the planned column is 385.8 GW, a multiple of 6.2x, which means that for every gigawatt currently humming away in a server hall, another 5.2 exist so far on paper.
The pipeline is also wildly uneven by state. Texas has 97.9 GW planned against an operating base of just 7.2 GW, a ratio of 13.7x and comfortably the most lopsided of any major market. Indiana, a relative newcomer to the hyperscaler map, sits at 11.5x, with 15.6 GW planned on a base of 1.4 GW. Ohio (6.1x), Georgia (5.5x), and Arizona (3.5x) are building on bases of 4.1 GW, 3.0 GW, and 3.7 GW respectively.
Virginia is the exception. Long the default address for American internet infrastructure, it has the biggest operating fleet on the list at 17.3 GW and a comparatively restrained 34.8 GW planned, giving it the lowest ratio here at 2.0x. That is roughly what a mature market looks like once the cheap land and the spare substation capacity have gone.
Naturally, "planned" is doing a lot of work in a dataset like this. Projects get announced, queued for interconnection, resited, and shelved, and no utility is budgeting for the full 385.8 GW to show up. How much of it does get energized will be settled in interconnection queues and transformer order books, which move at a rather different speed than a chip fab.
Source: Cleanview