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Counties
Every county with a recorded action or a mapped site. Select a row to open its record on the map.
Data and sources
The analysis layer on top of existing data center trackers: a county-level linked dataset connecting community actions, local legal text, energy and political data. Existing trackers document what happened where; this project asks why resistance spreads and what happens next.
Download
- counties.csvOne row per county: action counts, moratorium dates, zoning text scores, demographics, vote margin, electricity prices, generating capacity. CC BY 4.0, except that the zoning score columns derive from LOCUS-v1, which its dataset card licenses CC BY-NC 4.0.
- events.csvOne row per community action, with its summary, status, source links and how it was placed in a county. CC BY 4.0.
- codebook.mdEvery column defined, with known caveats.
- im3_sites_county.csvMapped data center sites per county. Licensed separately under ODbL 1.0, not CC BY.
Join key throughout: the 5-digit county FIPS code. Methods and code are private during pre-publication review.
Sources
| Source | Supplies | License | Retrieved |
|---|---|---|---|
| datacentertracker.org (UC Berkeley) | Community actions, summaries, source links | CC BY 4.0 | |
| LOCUS-v1 | Zoning text scores | CC BY-NC 4.0 | |
| Census ACS 2023 5-year, gazetteer, county adjacency, place and county-subdivision crosswalks | Population, income, education, county names, land area, neighbors, placing cities and townships in counties | Public domain | |
| Census cartographic boundary file, 1:20m (plotly/datasets mirror) | County shapes on the map | Public domain | |
| County presidential results (tonmcg) | 2024 vote margin | MIT | |
| PUDL (Catalyst Cooperative), EIA Form 861 | County electricity price, 2024 | CC BY 4.0 | |
| EIA Electric Power Monthly, table 5.6.B | State industrial electricity price | Public domain | |
| EIA Form 860 and 860M | Generating capacity (download only) | Public domain | |
| IM3 Open Source Data Center Atlas v2026.02.09 (PNNL), which contains information from OpenStreetMap, © OpenStreetMap contributors | Mapped data center sites | ODbL 1.0 |
Typeface: Overpass, SIL Open Font License 1.1.
Reading the data
What the map can and cannot tell you.
- An empty county is not a quiet county.
- Actions come from datacentertracker.org, which finds them through news coverage and web research. Places with little local reporting are recorded less often, and coverage before 2025 is thin. The tracker states that AI systems helped synthesize and structure its database and that entries may contain errors.
- “Enacted” is the dataset's reading of the tracker's status.
- The dataset counts the tracker's statuses passed, active, approved and expired as enacted. A moratorium counts for its county whether the county, a city, a township or a utility district inside it adopted it, and it stays counted after it expires. Some records tagged as moratoriums and marked active or approved describe something else, such as a resolution asking for a moratorium or the approval of a project. Each record shows the tracker's own status and text, so read the record before citing a county.
- The latest months are undercounted.
- Actions enter the tracker with a lag, so the most recent bars in the timeline will grow as records arrive.
- Mapped sites are not all sites.
- The circles count data centers that someone has drawn in OpenStreetMap. That favors established facilities: new and under-construction campuses are often missing. A county absent from the site file has no mapped site, which is not the same as no data center.
- Statewide and federal actions are not on the map.
- Statewide actions are listed inside each county record under its state. Federal actions are in events.csv only, except a few that the tracker ties to one place, which count there (the District of Columbia's actions are federal bills). Two local actions could not be placed in a county with confidence and are left out.
- Zoning scores are model-read and cover 2,244 counties.
- LOCUS-v1 scores passages of local law with a language model; the county value is the mean over the zoning passages of its county and municipal codes. Hatched counties have no coverage, which is missing data, not a score of zero.
- The county power price is modelled.
- EIA does not report electricity prices by county. The 2024 price divides the revenue of the utilities that serve each county by their sales, both statewide, so neighboring counties under one utility share a price; Texas retail providers report no service territory and are left out. The state price in each record is EIA's figure for the current year to date, a different period.
- Connecticut, Alaska and Puerto Rico are special cases.
- The tracker files Connecticut's actions under its eight legacy counties, which the Census Bureau replaced with planning regions in 2022. The county table follows the new regions, so those actions are in events.csv but not on the map, and the legacy counties are hatched, as are two areas whose boundaries changed (Valdez-Cordova, Alaska and Bedford city, Virginia). Alaska reports elections by district, so its boroughs have no vote margin; nor do Puerto Rico's municipios, which are in the table but outside the map. Neighbors follow the Census adjacency file, which includes counties that touch only across water.