The largest AI data center campuses will soon be a fifth the size of Manhattan

With a satellite view of each data center, we manually traced the outline of the data center campus using the Measure tool in Copernicus Browser, which measures area automatically. We traced the data center campus based on visual cues. Data centers typically require land to be cleared before construction, and the boundary of cleared land is usually clear in satellite imagery. We also looked at images across time to confirm what land was cleared immediately before construction began.

Public reports corroborate our land area measurements. For xAI Colossus, the architecture and engineering firm Gresham Smith state the main building alone to be 785,000 square feet, or roughly 0.07 square kilometers. The aerial photos on that page, combined with satellite data, indicate that the full site including adjacent substations is about 0.39 square kilometers. For OpenAI Stargate Abilene, the real estate news company CoStar reports 875 acres for the whole site, or about 3.5 square kilometers, matching our calculation from satellite data. For Meta Hyperion, construction partner Mortensen reports the site to be 5 miles by 1 mile wide, which aligns with our satellite-based measurements, though we estimate the area to be 4.2 square miles (11 square kilometers) due to a cutout of land along the western edge of the campus. The total area of Hyperion’s main buildings is not yet known.

We measured the total land area for a data center campus, which tends to be much larger than the area just for the buildings that house IT equipment. For example, the eight IT buildings planned for Stargate Abilene total about 0.14 square miles: 10% of the total campus area (this blueprint on p.157 states 484,960 square feet for one building). The total campus area, including the energy and cooling infrastructure, is a better indicator of the physical footprint of the data center.

Although visual cues make the boundaries of a data center campus fairly clear, we do not outline exact property boundaries, and the shapes shown in our graphic are approximate. We included land area for directly adjacent infrastructure that is used for the data center, without necessarily being on the same property: for example, the electrical substations next to the xAI Colossus building. However, we did not include infrastructure further away, e.g. a power plant connected to the adjacent substation.

The land area measurements were based on the latest satellite images and publicly documented plans for each data center. However, the final area taken up by a data center campus is subject to change due to temporary needs and changes of plan.