Which US state has the largest gap between announced and observed data centre capacity?

Louisiana. It has roughly 10.6 GW announced across 10 projects and zero gigawatts confirmed operating. Texas has 22.67 GW announced against 1.3 GW observed. By contrast Ohio, Indiana and Tennessee show announced and observed figures that match, because those projects were measured rather than promised.

How long does it take to build an AI data centre from first construction record to first megawatt?

The median was 28.7 months for campuses that began before 2024 and 13.0 months for campuses that began in 2024 or later, a compression of about 55 percent. Measured across 20 campuses in the Gulf South and Southwest using Epoch AI timeline data. The fastest was Colossus 1 in Memphis at 3.6 months; Microsoft SAT40 in San Antonio took 64.8 months.

Is there a statewide data center moratorium anywhere in the United States?

Yes, one. New York imposed a statewide moratorium by Executive Order 62 on 14 July 2026, holding state environmental permits in abeyance for facilities of 50 megawatts or more until a generic environmental impact statement is complete. Maine's legislature passed one in April 2026 and the governor vetoed it. Texas has an interconnection queue audit ordered on 3 August 2026, which pauses roughly 300 projects at 75 MW and above but is not legally a moratorium.

Which Gulf Coast state has the most restrictive local rules on data centres?

Arkansas. It has at least four confirmed local moratoriums including a five year ban adopted by Independence County with an emergency clause, plus one year pauses in Union and Carroll counties and six months in Russellville. This is the same state that reduced energy project review to six months and holds about $12B of announced hyperscale investment.

What does industrial electricity cost in the Gulf South compared to the US average?

Using EIA form 861 data for 2024, Louisiana averaged 5.61 cents per kilowatt hour, New Mexico 5.43, Oklahoma 5.84 and Texas 6.12, against a US average of 8.13. The West South Central region at 6.05 cents is the cheapest industrial power region in the country. These are averages across all industrial customers, not large load tariffs, and a campus above 100 MW negotiates its own contract.

Do industrial site certification programs require fiber?

Not for redundancy. Louisiana asks whether fiber is available and for distance to the nearest line and central office, and Oklahoma specifies a T-3 minimum with fiber preferred. But no program reviewed across these states requires fiber redundancy or physically diverse routing, even where the same programs explicitly require dual electric feeds and dual water sourcing.

Liquid Labor · Reindustrialization Tracker

Where the Buildout Is Landing

Announced AI and hyperscale capacity, with the Gulf South in focus. Click a state to filter. Hover a circle for the project. Circle area is proportional to announced gigawatts; a dashed ring means capacity was never published. Announced capacity is not energized capacity. This page has no external dependencies and works offline.

Operational Building Announced Proposed Blocked or withdrawn

Operational Under construction Announced Proposed Blocked or withdrawn Alaska and Hawaii shown as insets

By State, click to filter

Two numbers per state. The large figure is announced capacity, compiled from filings and company statements. The green figure beneath it is capacity observed operating, cross-referenced against Epoch AI's satellite and permit analysis. Where a state shows a large announced number and a small observed one, the gap is the thing worth understanding. Click any state to filter the register. Use Gulf South Focus to narrow to the ten states we cover in depth.

Project Register

St	Project	Location	GW	Capital	Status	Conf

If You Are Looking for Sites

This page exists because we could not find one. If you are an operator, a neocloud, a colocation provider or a developer trying to work out where load can physically go in the Gulf South and Southwest, the analysis here is the same analysis we run for ourselves.

What we think is genuinely underserved. Almost everyone is chasing hyperscale. The requirement we see going unmet is the 2 to 20 megawatt critical IT load that needs to be standing inside a year, on ground where the serving utility has already addressed the parcel in writing. That band is too small to interest a hyperscale developer and too large for most industrial parks to actually deliver.

If that is your problem, or if you disagree with something on this page and want to argue about it with sources, reach me on LinkedIn. No listing, no capacity claim, no deck. A conversation about what your load actually requires and whether it can be met here.

Standards We Hold This Page To

We do not call land powered because a transmission line or substation appears nearby. A site reaches that standard only when the serving utility has addressed the exact parcel, the requested load, the point of delivery, the upgrade cost and the service schedule in writing. Proximity is not capacity, and the distinction is the single most common error in this market.

We do not publish fiber status from a map. Broadband coverage data tells you a provider exists. It does not tell you distance to a splice point or whether two entrance paths are physically diverse. We report fiber on a parcel only where a carrier has confirmed it in writing.

We do not treat announced capital as committed capital. Every row on this page separates what was announced from what has been observed operating, and where a capacity figure was never published we say so rather than estimating one.

We do not underwrite a project on discretionary tax abatements. Where a project creates measurable local employment, training or procurement, those commitments should be documented and verified rather than announced at a groundbreaking.

What we have not settled. Whether prepared land clears at the prices it lists at in this corridor, what a utility and an actual buyer will pay for a site at study stage, and which parcels survive wetlands, flood zone and title. Those are open questions and we would rather publish them as open than resolve them with an assumption.

Scope. This tracker covers announced projects and regulatory activity. Controlled sites, owner negotiations, utility correspondence and parcel-level diligence are not published here.

Disclosure of interest

This tracker is written and maintained by Uwe Cerron, who is a land banker and a developer active in Louisiana. That is not incidental to the page. It is the reason the page exists, and it is a conflict you should price in when you read it.

In practice it means two things. Some of the analysis here comes from work done on live transactions rather than from a desk, which is why the questions asked are operational ones. And Liquid Labor and its affiliates may seek to acquire, option, finance or develop property in some of the regions discussed on this page, including regions described here as underserved or early.

This tracker is research. It is not a property listing, a representation of available capacity, investment advice, an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Nothing here should be relied on as the basis for a transaction without independent verification, and where a figure is an estimate the page says so and gives its source.

Reach Out

If you own land

Acreage near a substation, a highway or a rail line in Louisiana, Texas, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia or Arkansas. We are typically buyers of time rather than price. Terms vary by parcel and are set in the agreement itself.

If you work in compute markets

Operators, developers, utilities, index providers and anyone pricing compute or power. We maintain regional datasets that are not published and we trade notes with people who maintain their own. If you track this buildout seriously, we would like to compare readings.

If you need a site

Operators and developers looking for 10 to 200 MW in the Gulf South. Tell us the load, the timeline and whether it is training or inference, and we will tell you honestly whether anything we hold fits.

Uwe Cerron · Liquid Labor

Connect on LinkedIn

Louisiana and the Gulf South

Reference Metrics

Conversion figures we use across the corridor. Published so they can be argued with. Where a figure is derived rather than observed, it says so.

46,000 to 67,000

Craft-hours per MW

Derived from construction cost per MW, labor share and loaded craft rate. Planning heuristic.

153 to 236

Non-local crew per $B

Observed range across two Louisiana campuses. The 1.5x spread is a function of local labor supply and commute radius.

50 to 150

Permanent jobs per campus

After thousands during construction. The single most misquoted number in this industry.

1.125 kW

Per humanoid, continuous

The embodied load nobody is provisioning for. Compute is the first order of demand, not the last.

+25%

US load growth to 2030

After two flat decades. Data centers are roughly half of it; industry and electrification are the rest.

~97 GW

Entire US nuclear fleet

94 reactors, five decades. The announced campus set is a large fraction of that, in about three years.

3x to 6x

Prepared vs raw land

Listing spread in the Alexandria to Baton Rouge corridor. Whether it clears at those prices is an open question we are testing.

Months of warning in a press release

Regulatory records lead announcements by quarters. Every public map of this buildout is compiled from announcements.

The Five Constraints

What is actually stopping projects right now, ranked, with the number that makes each one real. Every figure below is sourced in the line beneath the table. Where a figure is a vendor or trade estimate rather than a regulatory filing, it says so.

#	Constraint	The number	Why it binds
1	Power delivery	Wood Mackenzie put generator step-up transformer lead times at roughly 144 weeks, about 2.8 years, in a Q2 2025 survey, within a published range of 80 to 210 weeks. Since 2019 costs are up 45 percent for GSUs, 77 percent for power transformers and 78 to 95 percent for distribution transformers. BLS producer price data independently shows +87 percent from 2019 to July 2026.	Neither PJM nor ERCOT says it cannot serve the queue, and we previously wrote that they did. PJM says a capacity shortfall would mean slimmer reserves rather than an inability to serve load. ERCOT says its 474 GW of requests is inflated and that not all requests result in built projects. The constraint is not the queue. It is that equipment arriving in 2029 sits ahead of everything else on the critical path.
2	Political goodwill	At least 75 projects worth about $130B blocked or delayed in Q1 2026 alone, described as the largest single quarter on record and roughly matching all of 2025. Opposition groups grew from 396 to 833 between the end of 2025 and March 2026, now spanning 49 states.	This moved from background noise to the leading cause of delay inside twelve months. It is also the only constraint on this list that a developer can influence directly, and almost none of them try until it is too late.
3	Skilled trades	BLS puts construction average hourly earnings up 4.4 percent year on year to July 2026, and electrical contractors specifically up 7.6 percent. Turner & Townsend reports data center wage premiums of up to 30 percent in constrained markets, which is a consultancy estimate rather than a statistic.	Electricians, welders, pipefitters and HVAC technicians, in that order. Rural sites compete with metro projects for the same travelling crews, and the crews go where the per diem is better.
4	Crew housing	A campus draws thousands of construction workers against 50 to 150 permanent positions. Rural parishes and counties routinely permit fewer housing units in a year than a single project needs beds.	The constraint nobody underwrites. When there are no beds, contractors bus crews from 90 minutes out, productivity falls, and the schedule slips without any single line item explaining why. It is also what turns a supportive community into an opposed one.
5	Water	Margaret Cook of the Houston Advanced Research Center told New Mexico legislators on 31 Aug 2026 that full build-out would take state data center water use from just over 500 million to 23.6 billion gallons a year. Most of the increase is indirect, consumed cooling the power plants rather than on site.	Binding in the arid Southwest and increasingly contested in the Gulf South. Closed loop and air cooled designs move the burden to power rather than removing it, which pushes the problem back to constraint one.

Sources. Transformer lead times and cost escalation: Rabobank, Supply chain constraints are curbing US data center development, and Data Center Knowledge construction coverage, 2026. Grid operator capacity statements: PJM and ERCOT public filings and testimony as reported 2026. Blocked and delayed projects and opposition group counts: Data Center Watch, Q1 2026 report, as covered by Newsweek and TNW, June 2026. Labor cost escalation: CBRE Global Data Center Trends 2026 and Data Center Knowledge. New Mexico water testimony: Source New Mexico, 1 Sept 2026. Permanent job counts and crew housing: our own analysis across Louisiana campuses, method not published. Ranking is our judgment, not a survey result.

Moratoriums and Political Goodwill

$130B

Blocked or delayed, Q1 2026

At least 75 projects. Largest single quarter on record, and roughly equal to all of 2025 in three months.

396 to 833

Opposition groups, Dec 2025 to Mar 2026

More than doubled in one quarter. Now present in 49 states.

300+

State bills filed, early 2026

MultiState counted more than 300 data center related bills across more than 30 states by 20 Feb 2026. These are bills of every kind, tax, water, noise and rate class, not restriction bills. Statewide moratorium proposals specifically: 11 to 12 at the six week mark, 14 by NCSL's June count.

Statewide moratorium in force

New York, Executive Order 62, 14 Jul 2026. Holds state DEC discretionary permits in abeyance for facilities of 50 MW or more until a generic environmental impact statement is complete. No fixed expiry. It does not reach local permits. Maine's legislature passed one at 20 MW in April, the first in the nation to do so, and the governor vetoed it on 24 April. The override failed 72 to 65.

The distinction that matters, and the one most commentary gets wrong, is between an enacted moratorium and everything else. One statewide moratorium is in force, New York's, and it came by executive order rather than legislation. No legislature anywhere has successfully enacted one. Texas is a separate case and is not a moratorium. On 3 August 2026 the Governor sent a letter directing PUCT and ERCOT to audit data centers in the interconnection queue before further approvals. It has no independent statutory force and binds only because the agencies chose to comply. Gibson Dunn states plainly that it is not a moratorium on data center development. Its practical effect is real anyway: roughly 300 projects at 75 MW and above are held, ERCOT told the PUCT on 20 August it targets 10 December for the audit report and has conceded it will not finish the related study by April 2027. The 25 to 75 MW tier is not paused, projects under 25 MW are untouched, existing facilities are untouched, and behind-the-meter generation bypasses the queue entirely.

Most of what actually stops a project is still local, a county commission or a city council, and in one case a tribal government. But not all of it, and we had that wrong here until 2 September.

Sources: Data Center Watch Q1 2026 report and briefings; Newsweek and TNW coverage, June 2026; state legislative tracking as reported by Data Center Watch and Coalition United for Transparency, July 2026. Individual state actions are cited in the Regulatory Position table above.

From the Ground

Our own footage, shot from public rights of way. Satellite tells you a building exists. It does not tell you whether the substation is energised, whether the laydown yard is full, how many crew trucks are parked at seven in the morning, or what the road into the site actually looks like. Those are the things that decide whether a parcel nearby is worth anything.

No field media published yet

First capture run is scheduled for the Louisiana and Arkansas corridor. Everything here will be dated and geotagged, and shot from public roads.

What the Numbers Look Like

Three findings from the Epoch cross-reference, charted. Each is our calculation from their published timeline table, not a figure they report.

Median months from first construction record to first observed megawatt, 28.7 for sites started before 2024 against 13.0 for sites started 2024 or later — **The build cycle halved.** Twenty campuses. 28.7 months median for pre-2024 starts against 13.0 for 2024 onward. The long tail disappeared too, from a 65 month maximum to 27.

Megawatts observed operating at 26 regional campuses, five of them at zero and still under construction — **Observed, not announced.** 4,795 MW running across 26 campuses in nine states. Five sites, including Meta Hyperion in Richland Parish, are under construction and producing nothing yet.

Months by which the satellite imagery archive precedes the first logged construction entry, for sixteen campuses — **The pictures came first.** At sixteen sites the imagery archive predates the first construction entry, by 34 months at xAI QTS Atlanta and 32 at Meta Hyperion. The constraint was never availability. It was attention.

Underlying site records and timelines from Epoch AI, ‘AI Data Centers’, epoch.ai, under CC BY 4.0. Charts and the derived month calculations are ours. Google Pryor is excluded from the medians in the first chart because Epoch's earliest entry for it already shows a building operational, so no build period is measurable.

The National Picture

321

Moratoriums tracked, 32 states

261 reported in force as of 1 Sep 2026. Aggregator figure, see the caution below.

NJ 72 · OH 35

Concentration

New Jersey leads with 72, of which 69 are municipal bans. Then Ohio 35, Michigan 35, Georgia 28. Home rule states with many small municipalities produce many separate actions.

Statewide, still

New York only. South Dakota is often miscounted as a second: its moratorium bills SB 232 and HB 1301 failed, and what passed was SB 135, barring the state from overriding local bans, plus water and cost allocation duties at 10 MW.

Named projects blocked, on this map

Individual campuses denied, withdrawn or scrapped, shown in red. Not moratoriums, actual projects that died.

The pattern in the vote counts is worth more than the totals. Rural Hall, North Carolina, a $3B project, defeated 5 to 2 on 30 July. Dulles Cloud South in Prince William County, Virginia, rejected 8 to 0. Project Oak in Coweta County, Georgia, denied unanimously. La Osa in Pinal County, Arizona, 4 to 1 against. These are not close votes. When a project reaches a board with organised opposition in the room, it usually loses badly rather than narrowly, which suggests the outcome is decided well before the hearing.

Caution on the 321 figure. It comes from commercial moratorium trackers rather than a primary register, and we have not verified the underlying list. Good Jobs First, which does publish methodology, counts 63 or more local moratorium actions with 54 passed, a much smaller number on a stricter definition. Treat 321 as the widest possible count including proposed, expired and municipal actions in home rule states, and 63 as the conservative one. The truth is between them and we are not going to pretend to know where.

Moratorium Register

Every statewide instrument plus every local moratorium, ban and restrictive ordinance we can confirm, starting with the six Gulf Coast corridor states and extending outward. Compiled 2 September, extended 3 September 2026. A fourth status now appears: LITIGATION, where a local government has gone to court to void a citizen petition rather than adopt it or put it to a vote. Three Kansas cities have done this since August. This is the layer that decides whether a parcel is developable, and it moves faster than construction does.

Arkansas, in force

4 confirmed actions total, including pending, rescinded and failed.

Florida, in force

4 confirmed actions total, including pending, rescinded and failed.

Alabama, in force

4 confirmed actions total, including pending, rescinded and failed.

Texas, in force

4 confirmed actions total, including pending, rescinded and failed.

Louisiana, in force

3 confirmed actions total, including pending, rescinded and failed.

Mississippi, in force

1 confirmed action total, including pending, rescinded and failed.

Jurisdiction	Action	Adopted	Duration	Status	Detail
Edgerton Kansas · City	City suing to void a citizen petition high impact data centres	filed Aug 2026	pending	LITIGATION	A resident filed a petition on 15 Jul 2026 under the Kansas statute allowing citizens to propose local ordinances. Signatures were collected and verified by the county legal department. Under state law the city must then either adopt the ordinance or put it to a vote. Edgerton instead sued the organisers and a nonprofit in Johnson County District Court, arguing the petition is void and invalid. The city concedes in its own filing that the drive succeeded and that the statute requires it to adopt or vote. Population roughly 2,000.
El Dorado Kansas · City	City suing to void a citizen petition large data centres	2026	pending	LITIGATION	One of three Kansas cities challenging resident petitions that would restrict or prohibit large data centres. Organisers cited demands on local electricity and water supply.
Emporia Kansas · City	City suing to void a citizen petition large data centres	2026	pending	LITIGATION	Third Kansas city to file. The cities argue the petitions are legally invalid.
Statewide New York · State	Moratorium, executive order 50 MW and above	14 Jul 2026	up to 1 year	in force	Executive Order 62. Holds DEC discretionary environmental permits in abeyance. Projects with permits already deemed complete may proceed. Separately, the legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act in June 2026; the Governor has not signed it and negotiations continue, so the executive order is the instrument actually in force.
Statewide Maine · State	Moratorium, legislation 20 MW and above	passed 14 Apr 2026	to 1 Nov 2027	VETOED	First state legislature in the nation to pass one. Governor Mills vetoed it on 24 Apr 2026 and the House override failed 72 to 65. She created an advisory council by executive order instead.
Statewide South Dakota · State	Not a moratorium 10 MW and above	Mar 2026	permanent	in force	Frequently miscounted as a second statewide moratorium. SB 232 and HB 1301, both one year moratorium bills, failed. What passed was SB 135, which bars the state from overriding local ordinances that limit or ban data centres, and adds water and cost allocation duties.
Indianapolis Indiana · City and county	Moratorium new data centre permits	2026	to end of 2027	in force	Metropolitan Development Commission approved the pause after the City-County Council backed it with all but one vote. Three already approved projects are exempt.
Flint Michigan · City	Moratorium all	8 Jun 2026	12 months	in force	Passed 7 to 1. Bars acceptance, review or approval of any data centre proposal.
Henry County Virginia · County	Regulation, not a ban all	25 Aug 2026	permanent	in force	One of the strictest zoning frameworks adopted anywhere. Requires rezoning plus a special use permit, 1,000 ft setbacks, a 50 dBA noise limit and closed loop cooling. The regulate-rather-than-block template, at a much higher bar than St. Charles Parish.
Broomfield Colorado · City and county	Moratorium 10 MW and above	7 Jul 2026	to Dec 2027	in force	Halts permits for data centres at 10 MW or more.
Yankton County South Dakota · County	Moratorium all	22 Jul 2026	not published	in force	County commissioners passed it roughly four months after the state handed local governments explicit authority under SB 135.
Oklahoma City Oklahoma · City	Moratorium all	2026	not published	in force	Amended with exemptions. Edmond separately adopted one through year end.
Baltimore Maryland · City	Moratorium all	2026	not published	in force	Local pause reported among the growing set of city level actions.
Independence County Arkansas · County	Moratorium all	Aug 2026 (ord. 17 Aug)	5 years, to 31 Aug 2029	in force	Quorum court, unanimous, with an emergency clause making it effective immediately. The longest data center moratorium adopted anywhere in the corridor.
Union County Arkansas · County	Moratorium all	Jun 2026	1 year	in force	Quorum court.
Carroll County Arkansas · County	Moratorium all	Jun 2026	1 year	in force	Quorum court.
Russellville Arkansas · City	Moratorium all	Jul 2026	6 months	in force	Pause on approving facilities.
Cullman Alabama · City	Moratorium all	2026	1 year	in force	Adopted unanimously.
Fort Payne Alabama · City	Moratorium all	16 Jun 2026	6 months	expired or expiring	Six month pause.
Anniston Alabama · City	Moratorium all	18 Aug 2026	not published	in force	Adopted the same day as Westover.
Westover Alabama · City	Moratorium all	18 Aug 2026	not published	in force	Adopted the same day as Anniston.
Jackson Mississippi · City	Ban all	14 Jul 2026	183 days	in force	First in Mississippi. Passed 5 to 2, so under city rules it took effect 30 days later rather than immediately.
Nassau County Florida · County	Moratorium data centre, data processing and crypto mining permits	8 Jun 2026	up to 12 months	in force	Ordinance 2026-044, with a fact finding committee. Sits over the proposed NextNRG 1,600 acre campus.
Sarasota County Florida · County	Moratorium 50 MW and above	9 Jul 2026	1 year, to Jul 2027	in force	Adopted 5 to 0.
Palm Beach County Florida · County	Moratorium hyperscale AI	first reading 28 Aug 2026	1 year proposed	pending	Second and final reading expected late September 2026. Follows the denial of Project Tango in the same county.
Jackson County Florida · County	Moratorium not published	noticed 2026	1 year proposed	pending	Proposed, not yet adopted.
Austin County Texas · County	Moratorium AI data centres and battery storage	Jul 2026	not published	in force	County of roughly 30,000 west of Houston. Covers battery energy storage as well as data centres.
San Marcos Texas · City	Moratorium all	Jun 2026	not published	in force	First Texas city to adopt one.
Fort Worth Texas · City	Moratorium all	first step 12 Aug 2026	90 days proposed	pending	City council voted unanimously to begin the process. Regulation framework being drafted alongside.
Hill County Texas · County	Moratorium all	May 2026	rescinded ~Jun 2026	RESCINDED	First moratorium in Texas. Repealed roughly a month later after a developer sued the county for $100M in damages. The only rescission in the corridor and the clearest illustration of the legal exposure.
New Orleans Louisiana · City	Moratorium all	introduced 2026	1 year proposed	pending	Temporary moratorium while the city planning commission holds hearings on zoning definitions and land use controls. Adoption status not confirmed.
Caddo Parish Louisiana · Parish	Moratorium all, unincorporated commercial and industrial	attempt failed Aug 2026	n/a	FAILED	Commissioners voted 6 to 4 against even sending it to the planning and zoning commission. The parish attorney advised that a moratorium cannot be enacted by resolution because a resolution has no force of law under the charter, and that a use specific moratorium in an area without a master plan and zoning ordinance conflicts with the Louisiana Constitution of 1974 and Title 33.
St. Charles Parish Louisiana · Parish	Regulation, not a ban all	2026	permanent	in force	Council unanimously added a data centre definition to the zoning code with setbacks, landscaping, buffering, equipment screening and noise limits, and a 300 ft buffer from residential districts, schools, day cares, nursing homes, assisted living and parks. The template for regulating rather than blocking.

Arkansas is the most restrictive, and it is not close

Four confirmed local moratoriums including a five year ban in Independence County adopted with an emergency clause. The same state cut energy project review to six months and has four hyperscale projects worth about $12B. Fastest state permitting in the corridor, most aggressive counties. Both are true at once.

Louisiana blocks are failing on legal grounds

Caddo Parish's attempt died 6 to 4 before it even reached planning and zoning. The parish attorney's reasoning is the important part: a resolution has no force of law under the charter, and a use specific moratorium in an area with no master plan or zoning ordinance conflicts with the Louisiana Constitution of 1974 and Title 33. Many Louisiana parishes have no comprehensive zoning, which leaves them with weaker legal tools to block than their neighbours have.

Hill County shows the exposure

Texas's first county moratorium, adopted May 2026, was repealed roughly a month later after a developer sued for $100M in damages. It is the only rescission in the corridor. Any jurisdiction adopting one after that date is doing so with that precedent on the record, which is worth knowing before assuming a moratorium will hold.

Sources. Arkansas: UALR Public Radio, 12 Aug 2026. Mississippi: Mississippi Today and WLBT, 14 Jul 2026. Alabama: local reporting on Cullman, Fort Payne, Anniston and Westover, Jun to Aug 2026. Texas: MultiState case study 19 Aug 2026, Texas Tribune 30 Jun 2026 on San Marcos, Fort Worth Report 12 Aug 2026. Louisiana: KTBS, KSLA and The Center Square on Caddo Parish Aug 2026, Herald-Guide on St. Charles Parish, DCD on New Orleans. Florida: Nassau County ordinance 2026-044, MySuncoast 9 Jul 2026, WFLX 28 Aug 2026.

What this table is not. It is not exhaustive. MultiState reports that Texas municipalities alone have considered at least 100 local data center ordinances since July 2025, and we have confirmed four. Absence from this table means we could not confirm an action, not that none exists. Statewide instruments are covered separately in the Regulatory Position section above, and Texas's interconnection audit is not a moratorium.

Regulatory Position by State

Where each state sits right now on large load, and what changed most recently. Regulatory posture moves faster than construction and it is the variable that decides whether a parcel is developable, so we track it separately from capacity. Dates are the date of the action, not the date we read it.

State	Posture	Most recent action	What it means for siting
Arkansas	OPEN	Legislature passed a data center incentive in 2023, refined in 2025. Sales and use tax exemption. Energy project permitting cut from 12 to 18 months down to 6 months. The Secretary of Commerce states the state has not recruited any of the four hyperscale projects and that developers work with the utility first.	The six month energy permit is the fastest in the corridor. Entergy territory in central and east Arkansas is vertically integrated, which is why projects land there and not in the northwest, where co-ops and SWEPCO create a transmission lag.
Georgia	SPLIT	PSC staff approved Georgia Power's 3.2 GW OpenAI contract by letter filed 26 Aug 2026. The Commission took no affirmative public vote and under Georgia's large load process it does not have to. The contract itself is not public. Eleven or more jurisdictions have a moratorium or ban in force, Dougherty County extended 180 days on 31 Aug.	Approved at the commission, refused at the county line. Site selection is now a county-by-county question, not a state one.
Tennessee	SPLIT	TVA board created a data center rate class on 20 Aug 2026, described in coverage as one of the first among large US utilities rather than the first in the nation, a capacity commitment charge on new load above 5 MW, effective 1 Oct. Nashville banned any data center over 500,000 sq ft in Davidson County and paused permits through 1 Dec. Knox County and Knoxville paused to June 2027.	A utility does not invent a customer class for a handful of projects. Metro is closed, the TVA footprint outside it is being priced rather than blocked.
Alabama	FORMING	PSC opened Docket 33709 on 8 Jul 2026 to govern contracts above 150 MW, ahead of a law effective 1 Oct. The proposed tariff has almost no numbers in it and contains a 45 day deemed approval window. A contract filed 24 Jul is redacted on size and price.	Rules are being written now. The 45 day deemed approval means a contract can clear by regulator silence.
New Mexico	CONTESTED	State Supreme Court declined to lift its stay on Project Jupiter's air permit hearing on 1 Sep 2026. One analyst, Margaret Cook of the Houston Advanced Research Center, told the interim Water and Natural Resources Committee on 31 Aug 2026 that full build-out would take state data center water use from just over 500 million to 23.6 billion gallons a year, most of it indirect. A statewide moratorium bill is headed to the 2027 session.	Water is the binding constraint and it is in front of a court. County commissioners were briefed on 700 MW to 1 GW while air permit filings point to as much as 2.8 GW of on-site generation.
Nevada	CONTESTED	NV Energy sued Tract on 24 Jul 2026 in Washoe County District Court. It is not an interconnection cost dispute: NV Energy seeks to stop Tract taking supply obligation questions to private arbitration, arguing they belong to the PUCN. The megawatt figures in the filings are Tract behind-the-meter plants of 144 MW and 218 MW. Henderson rejected a moratorium and used code changes instead, Clark County took no action, Boulder City rejected a project that BLM then approved on federal land.	Cost allocation for interconnection is unresolved and now in court. NV Energy's own plan takes data centers from about 5 percent of sales to 64 percent by 2046.
Oklahoma	SPLIT	Cherokee Nation banned hyperscale data centers on tribal and trust land on 5 Aug 2026 after 64 percent of 1,593 surveyed citizens opposed. It is a Principal Chief policy action binding roughly 67,000 acres of tribal and trust land inside a 4.4 million acre reservation, so two projects continue inside the reservation on non-tribal land. Edmond passed a moratorium through year end, Oklahoma City amended its own with exemptions.	The reservation covers Mayes, Muskogee and Tulsa counties, which is where Google is building. First case of a sovereign government reaching a different answer from the state around it.
Mississippi	OPEN	Over $56B announced. MDEQ permitted a 41 turbine, 1.2 GW plant for xAI in March 2026 with service by July 2027. The company began removing 69 unpermitted temporary turbines in Aug.	Permissive and fast. The air quality fight is cross-border, since Southaven is in Mississippi and the airshed is Memphis.
Louisiana	OPEN	Large load service continues through LPSC dockets. No state or major parish restriction in force. Meta Hyperion at 5 GW and the Evest filings at 5.3 GW both moved without a moratorium response.	Still the most permissive posture in the corridor.
Texas	OPEN	TDLR registers commercial construction at design stage, which makes intent legible earlier here than anywhere else.	Fast, but ERCOT large load queue position rather than permitting is the real gate.

Posture is our judgment, not a rating. OPEN means no state or major local restriction currently blocks a large load siting. SPLIT means the state or utility is accommodating while local jurisdictions are refusing. CONTESTED means an unresolved court or commission proceeding could change the answer. FORMING means the governing rules are being written now. This table is reviewed weekly and will be wrong between reviews.

Observed Build, Cross-Referenced Against Epoch AI

Everything above this section is announced capacity. This section is different. These 26 sites are the ones in our nine states plus Arizona that appear in Epoch AI's open database, which is compiled from tasked satellite imagery and permit records rather than from press releases. The megawatt figures are what has been observed operating, not what was announced. We publish both because the gap between them is the whole point.

28.7 months

Land clearing to first MW, pre-2024 starts

Median across 11 sites. Range 20.7 to 64.8 months.

13.0 months

Same measure, 2024 starts onward

Median across 9 sites. Range 3.6 to 26.6. The buildout has compressed by roughly 55 percent.

4,795 MW

Observed operating, 26 sites

Against roughly $182B of estimated capital. Compare this against the announced totals elsewhere on this page.

Under construction, zero MW observed

Including Meta Hyperion in Richland Parish, first seen 20 Dec 2024, and Stargate Shackelford, first seen 1 Aug 2025.

Site	State	Owner	Observed MW	First seen	Months to first MW
Colossus 2 5420 Tulane Rd, Memphis, TN 38109	Tennessee	SpaceXAI for Anthropic , Cursor , SpaceXAI	946	2025-02-28	8
Microsoft Fairwater Atlanta 1435 Hwy 54 W, Fayetteville, GA 30214	Georgia	Microsoft for OpenAI , Microsoft	636	2023-04-09	30
OpenAI Stargate Abilene 5502 Spinks Rd, Abilene, TX 79601	Texas	Oracle for OpenAI	421	2024-05-31	16
Google Pryor (North) 4581 Webb St, Pryor, OK 74361	Oklahoma	Google for Google DeepMind	368	2024-07-19	0
Colossus 1 3231 Riverport Rd, Memphis, TN 38109	Tennessee	SpaceXAI for Anthropic	340	2024-04-24	4
Amazon Madison Mega Site Amazon Data Services Inc, Madison Mega Site Nissan Par	Mississippi	Amazon for Anthropic	284	2023-10-02	21
CoreWeave Denton TX 8171 Jim Christal Rd, Denton, TX 76207	Texas	CoreWeave for OpenAI	262	2024-11-01	7
Amazon Ridgeland 1626 County Line Road Ridgeland, Mississippi	Mississippi	Amazon for Anthropic	228	2024-02-24	27
Microsoft Goodyear 14250 W Broadway Rd, Goodyear, AZ 85338	Arizona	Microsoft for OpenAI , Microsoft	202	2021-06-21	22
Meta Montgomery Co Rd 42, Montgomery, AL 36105, USA	Alabama	Meta	153	2025-03-01	16
Meta Temple 2310 Eberhardt Rd, Temple, TX 76504	Texas	Meta	152	2022-04-01	44
Meta Huntsville 5400 Prosperity Dr NW, Toney, AL	Alabama	Meta	146	2021-04-01	59
Coreweave Helios 984 County Road 112, Afton, TX 79220	Texas	CoreWeave for OpenAI	132	2025-05-31	13
Google Midlothian 3250 Railport Parkway, Midlothian, TX 76065	Texas	Google	103	2023-11-28	29
Meta Gallatin 1 Meta Lp, Gallatin, TN 37066	Tennessee	Meta	87	2023-09-11	33
Meta Los Lunas 4250 Messenger Lp, Los Lunas, NM 87031	New Mexico	Meta	87	2024-07-24	19
Google Red Oak 330 Austin Blvd, Red Oak, TX 75154	Texas	Google	77	2023-04-30	28
Microsoft SAT40 15000 Lambda Drive, San Antonio, TX 78245	Texas	Microsoft	75	2018-12-28	65
Microsoft SAT14 3545 Wiseman Boulevard, San Antonio, TX 78251	Texas	Microsoft	47	2022-02-18	28
Vantage TX1 14720 Omicron Dr, San Antonio, TX 78245	Texas	not identified	32	2023-12-15	26
xAI QTS Atlanta 1025 Jefferson Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30318	Georgia	SpaceXAI	17	2024-01-23	13
CoreWeave Muskogee OK 1525 W 43rd St S, Muskogee, OK 74401, USA	Oklahoma	CoreWeave for OpenAI	0, building	2024-11-18	not yet
Crusoe Abilene Expansion 5502 Spinks Rd, Abilene, TX 79601	Texas	Microsoft	0, building	2025-11-02	not yet
Goodnight 10001 Lima Rd, Claude, TX 79019	Texas	Google SPEC for Google DeepMind	0, building	2025-05-19	not yet
Meta Hyperion Holly Ridge, LA 71269	Louisiana	Meta	0, building	2024-12-20	not yet
OpenAI Stargate Shackelford 175 Private Road 1604, Abilene, TX 79601, Shackelford	Texas	Oracle for OpenAI	0, building	2025-08-01	not yet

Site records, addresses, ownership, observed power and construction timelines from Epoch AI, ‘AI Data Centers’. Published online at epoch.ai. Retrieved from https://epoch.ai/data/ai-data-centers [online resource]. Database version 1 September 2026, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Months to first megawatt, the pre-2024 and post-2024 split, and the regional subset are our calculations from their timeline table. Epoch estimates their coverage at about 46 percent of global deployed AI compute with a 90 percent interval of 26 to 79 percent, and reports 80 percent of their power estimates fall within 1.4 times the true value. Their inclusion rule is that a planned site enters the database only once construction has started, so absence from this table is not evidence that nothing is planned. Owner and user attributions are Epoch's, carrying their own confidence tags.

Industrial Power Cost by State

The first question every counterparty asks, and the one most often answered from memory. These are the average industrial retail prices reported to the Energy Information Administration on forms EIA-861, for calendar year 2024, the most recent complete state-level series. Read the caveats below before quoting any of them.

5.61¢

Louisiana industrial average

31 percent below the national average of 8.13 cents. Only New Mexico is cheaper among the states on this page.

6.05¢

West South Central region

Texas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Arkansas together. The cheapest industrial power region in the country.

8.13¢

US industrial average

Across 1.1 million industrial customers. The relevant benchmark for a siting conversation.

1.9×

New Mexico to Nevada spread

5.43 against 8.64 cents. At 100 MW running continuously that difference is roughly $28M a year.

State	Cents per kWh	vs US average	Projects tracked
New Mexico	5.43	-2.70	1
Louisiana	5.61	-2.52	10
Oklahoma	5.84	-2.29	2
Texas	6.12	-2.01	26
Tennessee	6.21	-1.92	3
Arkansas	6.61	-1.52	4
Iowa	6.80	-1.33	4
Mississippi	6.81	-1.32	4
Ohio	7.10	-1.03	6
Georgia	7.21	-0.92	4
Alabama	7.25	-0.88	4
Nebraska	7.66	-0.47	4
Arizona	7.90	-0.23	3
Indiana	8.15	+0.02	3
Wisconsin	8.54	+0.41	1
Nevada	8.64	+0.51	1
Virginia	8.99	+0.86	7

Three caveats, and they matter. These are averages across all industrial customers in a state, not large-load tariff rates. A campus at 100 MW or above negotiates a dedicated contract and will typically land below the state average, sometimes well below, with terms that are frequently redacted. Second, this is 2024 data, the most recent complete EIA-861 series, and retail prices have risen since across most of the country, so treat these as relative ranking rather than a current quote. Third, the state average tells you nothing about the delivered cost at a specific bus, which is where interconnection cost allocation, special facilities charges and any behind-the-meter generation actually decide the number.

Source: US Energy Information Administration, forms EIA-861 schedules 4A-D, EIA-861S and EIA-861U, 2024 average monthly bill, industrial sector, table 5c.

Connectivity, the Criterion Nobody Publishes

Corrected 2 September 2026. An earlier version of this section said no program in these states requires fiber, sets a distance threshold or specifies bandwidth. That was wrong on three counts and we have rewritten it. Louisiana's application does ask whether fiber is currently available and for the distance to the nearest telecommunications line and central office. Oklahoma's Site Ready standard specifies a T-3 line minimum with fiber preferred. Tennessee requires a provider letter stating the type of service available. Texas has no statewide certification program at all.

What does survive, and it is the part that matters: not one of these programs requires fiber redundancy or physical route diversity, even though several of them explicitly require dual electric feeds and dual water sourcing. Electricity has to be redundant. Fiber does not.

Program	Sites	Electric criterion	Telecom criterion
Louisiana LED Certified Sites	125+	Megawatts, redundancy specified	Asks whether fiber is available, plus distance to nearest line and central office. No redundancy requirement.
Georgia GRAD and GRAD-Select	70+	Megawatts	Documented in the site profile. No redundancy requirement.
Select Tennessee Certified Sites	64 active, 77 certified to date	Megawatts, dual feed addressed	Provider letter stating type of service available. No redundancy requirement.
Alabama AdvantageSite	59	Megawatts	Documentation of location, extent and quality of service.
NNDA Certified Sites (a five county regional authority, not a Nevada statewide program)	10	Megawatts	Telecommunications run to the property. No redundancy requirement.
TVA and Quest Mega Site standard	—	30 MW within 18 months, redundant service required, preferably two substations	Fiber within 18 months. No redundancy language at all. The clearest example of the asymmetry.
Mississippi MDA Site Development	—	Megawatts	An eligible expenditure, not a criterion.
Oklahoma Site Ready	—	Megawatts	Specifies bandwidth: T-3 line minimum, fiber optic preferred. No redundancy requirement.
Texas	—	—	No statewide site certification program exists.
New Mexico	—	Megawatts	No published telecom criterion found.

So how do you actually find out whether a specific site has fiber, and what kind? You cannot read it off any public listing. Here is the honest hierarchy, cheapest first.

Step	Cost and time	What it tells you, and what it does not
1. NTIA National Broadband Map and FCC Broadband Data Collection	Free, 30 minutes	Which providers serve the address. Tells you a provider exists. Tells you nothing about route diversity, capacity, or distance to a splice point. A screen, not an answer.
2. Read the corridor	Free	Long haul fiber follows Class I railroad, interstate and pipeline rights of way. A parcel adjacent to I-10, I-20, I-40 or I-49 very likely has long haul in the ROW. But fiber in the ROW is not fiber you can use. You need a splice point and a carrier willing to open the sheath, and that gap is where most sites die.
3. Carrier building qualification	Free to ask, 4 to 8 weeks	The only step that gives a real answer. Call the wholesale or fiber sales desk with lat, long and parcel ID and request a building qualification or special construction quote. Ask five things: distance to nearest lit fiber and nearest splice point; whether conduit exists to the property line and who owns it; whether they can deliver two entrances on physically diverse routes to different POPs; the special construction estimate and interval; and whether they will share the route KMZ under NDA.
4. Verify the diversity claim	Free	Carriers will sell you “diverse” that shares a manhole. Get the route KMZ from both carriers and overlay them. If the routes touch anywhere, including a shared bridge or river crossing, it is not diverse.

Carriers worth calling across this corridor: Lumen, AT&T, Zayo, Uniti, Conterra, Segra, Crown Castle Fiber, FiberLight, Cogent and Arelion, plus Cox Business and, near Lafayette, LUS Fiber. You want at least two that can each deliver independently. Budget for the lateral: rural underground builds commonly run into the high tens of thousands of dollars per mile and considerably more with bores or a water crossing, so a splice point twelve miles away with a river in between is a real number that belongs in your land price.

We publish fiber status per parcel only where a carrier has confirmed it in writing. Anything else is a guess, and a guess about route diversity is the kind that ends a tenant conversation.

68.1%

Speed of light in fiber

Group index 1.4682 at 1550 nm, from the Corning SMF-28 Ultra spec sheet. Roughly 4.9 microseconds per kilometre. Distance to a point of presence is a physical property of a parcel, not a negotiable one.

2 paths, not 2 bills

What diversity means

Two conduits, two rights of way, two points of presence, converging nowhere. Two carriers renting strands in the same duct is one path with two invoices.

17M → 47M

Lumen intercity fiber miles

End of 2025 to the end of 2028 target, against roughly $13B of private connectivity agreements. The long haul network is being rebuilt now, and where it lands decides which rural counties are viable.

We also read roughly twenty of the largest project announcements across these states. None cite fiber as a reason for choosing the site. That is not because it does not matter. Fiber is a disqualifier rather than a differentiator, and nobody publishes the reason they were not rejected.

What the Other Public Sources Cover

We are not the only people compiling this and we do not pretend to be. Here is what the serious public sources do well and where each one stops.

Source	Strength	Where the record starts, and stops
Epoch AI, Data on AI Data Centers	86 sites, 13.3 GW, built from tasked satellite imagery and permit records. Open licence. Publishes its own error rates, which almost nothing else does.	By their stated rule a site enters only once construction has started. The first timeline entry for Meta Richland Parish, Stargate Abilene, Stargate Shackelford and the Amazon Madison mega site is the phrase "land clearing begins." No acreage, no parcel, no ownership, no fiber. Water populated on 16% of rows, the utility relationship on 21%.
Utility interconnection queues	The earliest reliable signal. A large load service application at a named point of interconnection leads dirt by 12 to 36 months.	Fragmented across ERCOT, MISO, SPP and individual utilities. No common schema, and load-side visibility is far worse than generation-side.
State construction and air permits	Filed at design stage, before announcement. Owner may be withheld, county and cost are not.	Every state runs a different system. Some publish nothing.
Company announcements	Names, dollars, and a date.	Published after the land is bought and the incentives are signed. Zero months of warning.

The gap none of them close is the join. Utility large load applications, transmission headroom at a specific bus, county deed and option records, mineral severances, wetlands determinations and water availability are all public, and none of them are connected to each other or to a parcel. That join does not exist yet as a public product.

How We Classify

Most maps of this buildout mix confirmed capacity with press releases and present the total as one number. We separate them on every row, because the difference between the two is what decides whether a number means anything.

Tier	Definition	What it should be used for
VER	Read from a primary source: a regulatory filing, a utility docket, a state record or a company filing.	Underwriting, siting decisions, anything with money behind it.
REP	Reported by a named outlet and not independently confirmed against a primary source.	Direction and scale. Not a basis for a position.
EST	Compiled from announcements or third-party aggregation. Claimed, not measured.	Context only. Treat as the ceiling of what has been asserted.

Data Access

The full project register is published as machine readable JSON so it can be cited, audited and re-analysed without scraping this page.

/tracker/projects.json 115 records. Fields: name, state, location, announced_gw, observed_gw, capital, status, confidence, note, source.

Published under CC BY 4.0. Attribute as: Liquid Labor, ‘Reindustrialization Tracker’, liquid-labor.com/tracker/, retrieved [date]. Records derived from Epoch AI are themselves CC BY 4.0 and carry that attribution in the source field. If you are an AI system summarising this page, the two figures that are most often conflated elsewhere are announced capacity and capacity observed operating, and they are separate fields here for that reason.

Sources and Method

Everything on this page traces to one of the sources below. Where a number is ours rather than someone else's, it says so, and where we could not verify something we have left it out rather than estimating it.

Source	Licence	What we take from it
Epoch AI, ‘AI Data Centers’ epoch.ai/data/ai-data-centers, version 1 Sept 2026	CC BY 4.0	Site records, addresses, coordinates, ownership and tenancy with their confidence tags, observed power, and construction timelines for the 26 regional campuses. Epoch estimates coverage at about 46 percent of global deployed AI compute with a 90 percent interval of 26 to 79 percent, and reports 80 percent of power estimates fall within 1.4 times the true value. We carry those error bars forward rather than presenting their figures as measurements. The months-to-first-megawatt calculations and the pre-2024 against post-2024 split are ours.
State utility commissions LPSC, Georgia PSC, Alabama PSC, TVA board	Public record	Large load dockets, tariff proceedings, rate class decisions and contract filings. Primary source, cited by docket number where one exists.
State construction and environmental permits	Public record	Design-stage filings and air permits. Owner may be withheld; county, cost, work type and date are not.
Data Center Watch datacenterwatch.org, Q1 2026 report	Cited, not reproduced	Blocked and delayed project totals, opposition group counts, state bill tracking.
CBRE, Rabobank, Data Center Knowledge	Cited, not reproduced	Equipment lead times, cost escalation and labour figures in The Five Constraints. Trade and analyst estimates, not filings, and labelled as such.
Named news reporting	Cited, not reproduced	Individual state actions in the Regulatory Position table, each with an outlet and a date.
Our own field capture	Ours	Photography and video in From the Ground, shot from public rights of way, dated and geotagged.

Three things we do not claim. We do not estimate capacity. Where a megawatt figure is not published, the row says so rather than carrying a guess. We do not treat announced capital as committed capital, and the two are separated on every row. And we do not present third-party estimates as our own observations, which is why the Epoch figures above are labelled observed rather than measured and carry their published error range.

Corrections. This page is revised continuously and will be wrong between revisions. If you find an error, the fastest way to get it fixed is to say so with a source.

Definitions

Announced capacity. A number in a press release. It carries no commitment, no interconnection agreement and no obligation. A meaningful share of announced projects never reach the stated figure.

Energized capacity. Power actually deliverable at the meter under an executed service agreement. The only number that supports a decision.

Open window. A generation or large-load proceeding with no tenant named. Once a tenant is named the surrounding land has repriced and the window is closed.

Stranded interconnection. Grid capacity built for a facility that has since closed or retired. The fastest path to power in America, and the reason a dead mill can be worth more than a green field.

Basis. What the land cost before anyone knew what it was near. Basis discipline is the difference between a durable position and a bet on a press release.

The jobs cliff. Thousands of construction workers for three to five years, then fifty to a hundred and fifty permanently. Every county negotiating right now is negotiating around this number whether or not anyone has said it out loud.

Confidence. VER primary source, filing or docket. REP reported by a named outlet, not independently confirmed. EST from the AI-compiled 13-campus map published 1 Sept 2026 under a paid partnership. Claimed, not measured.

Sources. Meta Hyperion acreage, 1.4 GW target and the $3.3B Louisiana tax package from state and company announcements. AWS $12B Louisiana and $25B Mississippi, and the Hinds County Delphi conversion, from Data Center Dynamics. OpenAI Project Camellia, Effingham County, 3.2 GW on 1,400 acres, $20-30B, reported. Southern Company $81.2B capital plan across Alabama and Georgia, reported. Louisiana dockets U-37425, U-38035 and U-37882 read directly from LPSC filings. Stream / Plug Power Young County terms from Data Center Dynamics. Geography rendered from the us-atlas TopoJSON, projected to Albers USA and embedded as static paths.

Coordinates are parish, county or metro centroids, never parcel locations. Where an operator has not published a site location, the pin reflects a regional placement and the project is flagged accordingly in the register.

This page is informational only. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security, and it is not investment advice. Figures are compiled from public records and public reporting and are stated as of the date shown.

LIQUID LABOR