What is a data center?
Wikipedia describes a data center as a physical room, building, or facility used to store, manage, and disseminate data and information, including information-technology infrastructure, computer systems, and associated components.[1] We use that broad definition because operators do not always disclose workloads, or whether a facility can support cloud, enterprise, colocation, AI, or other compute.
An AI data center is still a data center: a building or campus for servers, networking, storage, cooling, power, fiber, and backup systems.
Start with an address
Enter a home address, neighborhood, or ZIP code to see the searched location, nearby facilities, lifecycle status, distance, evidence confidence, and screening impact range. The map currently covers the Houston area and is expanding to The Woodlands, Brazoria, Galveston, College Station, Conroe, Victoria, and nearby regional locations.
Three lifecycle groups
Operational or substantially completed facilities.
Construction evidence exists. A new building or campus phase may be related to an existing facility.
Planned, prospective, shadow-announced, or uncertain projects. These remain visible with clear confidence labels instead of being silently discarded.
* Additional network facilities
Carrier hotels, network hubs, and smaller colocation rooms can be toggled as a separate class while remaining in the inventory.
What counts as evidence?
Data Center Map and Baxtel are useful business directories for discovering names, addresses, operators, campuses, and phases. They are not treated as a single final authority. Our normalized inventory aims to be a digital archive: it preserves those listings and compares them with operator pages, permits, utility records, government sources, and reputable reporting.
Sources can disappear or change. We retain the published facts, access date, source role, original URL, and available snapshot metadata so a removed listing does not erase the historical basis for a record.
Electricity scale
Where a source lists power in kW or MW, the profile also shows an approximate Texas-home equivalent. The screening comparison uses 1.5 kW of average continuous household draw. It is a capacity comparison, not disclosed actual consumption.
Anything above 100 homes equivalent is considered significant for this project and starts at one electricity point before local distance effects are considered. A 26 MW listed capacity is approximately 17,333 homes equivalent. Actual electricity use may be lower or vary over time.
What the impact range means
The score is a transparent screening range, not a medical conclusion, property-value forecast, legal opinion, or environmental impact assessment. Water and electricity retain regional effects; air uses an atmospheric-dispersion screening proxy; sound and vibration attenuate faster with distance. The formulas and scientific references are documented in the methodology notes.
Distance and science
We do not use a single inverse-square rule for every category. The EPA air-dispersion framework uses emissions, meteorology, and downwind receptors. Outdoor sound is evaluated using engineering propagation methods such as ISO 9613-2:2024. Water and grid effects are modeled with regional floors because watersheds, utility capacity, and interconnected systems do not end at a five-mile circle.
Questions to ask
- Is the record built, under construction, or announced?
- Is the location exact, approximate, or only a candidate point?
- Which facts come from an operator, permit, utility, government record, directory, or reporting?
- Is the listing a campus, building, phase, carrier room, or duplicate provider record?
- What power, cooling, water, generation, noise, traffic, and land-use facts remain unknown?
Community impact dimensions
We organize research around electricity and grid effects, water consumption, air emissions and onsite generation, sound, vibration, construction and traffic, zoning and land-use context, and waste heat. These categories are inspired in part by Erin Brockovich’s community-focused environmental advocacy and Community Healthbook. The categories and scoring method remain the developer’s methodology; these organizations do not endorse the project or its calculations. Wildlife and land context are discussed in the calculator notes, but are not scored separately because they overlap with land use, water, construction, traffic, zoning, and flood context.
References
Use the map for orientation, open the facility profile and source links, and perform independent legal, environmental, appraisal, and inspection due diligence.