Virginia is being kicked off its technology pedestal after long holding the distinction of being the most data center-intensive state in the country.
Old Dominion still leads with 320 centers in operation, but is projected to soon lose first-place status to Texas, which has escalated efforts to expand data centers with a host of building projects in the works, according to the Visual Capitalist’s ranking system.
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Texas has 212 facilities currently operating. When hundreds more data centers that have been announced and under construction are opened, it will have 962, compared to Virginia’s 954. Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Illinois are among other states leading the country in building out more centers.
In Texas, two data center firms are expected to spend nearly a billion dollars to add to their growing presence south of Dallas, the Dallas Morning News reported on Thursday. In Georgia, Coweta County approved earlier this week plans to build a massive 829-acre, $17 billion data center known as “Project Sail.” In Pennsylvania, Amazon has pledged to spend $20 billion over the next decade on building just two data centers in Luzerne and Bucks counties. In Illinois, state lawmakers gathered on Wednesday for the first of three legislative hearings on data center development, local impact, and energy use, months after the DeKalb City Council approved a massive 560-acre data center by Edged.
Data centers have increasingly been primarily recognized for their importance to technology giants such as Microsoft, Meta, and Google in powering artificial intelligence. Washington now believes data center development is a critical component of national security as the United States looks to maintain its lead in the AI race over China and other global competitors.
The U.S. leads the world in data center development, and the government is pushing efforts to accelerate its expansion as international focus on such operations spikes. The capital expenditure of the 14 largest publicly owned data center operators globally is closing in on $750 billion in 2026, compared to under $450 billion spent in 2025, according to a Bloomberg analysis.
MASSIVE VIRGINIA DATA CENTER DEVELOPMENT DRIVES DEBATE ABOUT PRICE OF TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENT
In the U.S., monthly spending on data center construction was over $2.4 billion as of January, roughly 16 times the level in early 2014, according to Our World in Data.
The Trump administration has invested in efforts to speed up the production of such facilities, which are the powerhouses that store, manage, and process data used by millions of people every day. Data centers support everything from scrolling social media, backing up photos to iCloud, and navigating with Google Maps, to helping small businesses, streaming services, online retailers, and others that rely on the facilities for data storage and cloud-based computing services.
