How much land does a data center need?

There is no single number. Documented US campuses run from under 100 acres to more than 2,000, and the large campuses being announced now are mostly in the hundreds of acres or more. The acreage a project needs depends on how much power it will draw, how many buildings it plans over time, and how much ground the county requires between the buildings and the neighbors. Power is what decides whether a site works at all. Acreage decides how big it can grow.

How much land have real data center projects used?

These are figures the companies or state agencies published themselves, as they stated them. Where a number was not published, the table says so rather than guessing.

Project	Location	Land	Power or building size
QTS Atlanta 1	Atlanta area, Georgia	99 acre campus	278 MW or more
T5 Grayslake	Grayslake, Illinois	160 acres	up to 480 MW of IT capacity
Microsoft Fairwater	Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin	315 acres	1.2 million square feet under roof
Stargate site	Shackelford County, Texas	700 acres	3.7 million square feet
Google	West Memphis, Arkansas	more than 1,000 acres	not published
Stargate site	Abilene, Texas	1,100 acres	1.2 gigawatts
Tract	Caldwell County, Texas	1,515 acres	over 2 gigawatts at full build out
Meta	Richland Parish, Louisiana	2,250 acres	4 million square feet

Two things stand out. The 99 acre campus is rated at 278 megawatts or more, while the 1,100 acre Abilene site is rated at 1.2 gigawatts, about eleven times the land for a little over four times the power. Acreage and power do not rise in step. And the largest figure is not the end of the story: in July 2026 Louisiana announced that Meta would expand that campus to nearly 10 million square feet and 5 gigawatts of IT capacity.

Why does a campus need so much more land than the buildings cover?

Because the buildings are only one of four things on the site.

Power equipment. The larger projects bring their own substation. Google’s West Memphis campus includes a substation facility. QTS plans three dedicated, on-site substations for its Atlanta 1 campus. T5 says an onsite electrical substation will serve Grayslake. A grid planning group, GridLab, describes loads of 150 megawatts and up as served by a dedicated substation at higher voltages such as 230 or 345 kilovolts.

Setbacks and buffers. Counties increasingly write distances into their rules. Calvert County, Maryland requires data centers to sit at least 200 feet from all property lines and 400 feet from lots with homes. Loudoun County, Virginia requires structures next to residential land to be set back at least 200 feet. A model ordinance from York County, Pennsylvania suggests buffer yards of up to 300 feet for the largest buildings. Every one of those feet is land the project needs and cannot build on.

Later phases. Campuses are planned in stages, and developers buy for the last stage, not the first. Microsoft’s first Fairwater facility covers 315 acres, while Racine County’s economic development office reports that the company now owns 1,575 acres in the village.

Everything else. Roads, parking, water and stormwater systems, fencing and security all take space, on top of the buildings themselves.

Does more acreage mean more power?

No. Power comes from the grid connection, not from the land. Dominion Energy says new data centers with loads under 50 megawatts can often be connected using existing distribution lines, while loads above that will most likely need transmission extended and a new substation built. It also notes that sites near existing transmission lines and substations can shorten the time needed to deliver power.

That is why a modest parcel in the right place can matter more than a large one in the wrong place. We explain what the right place looks like in what is powered land.

Is my land too small?

Possibly not, for two reasons. The table above includes a campus of 99 acres, and not every project is a campus of that size. And neighboring parcels are sometimes put together into one site, so a smaller tract next to other land near the same line can still be part of an answer.

What usually rules land out is not the acreage. It is distance from high voltage power, ground that floods, or terrain that would cost too much to level. Shape matters too: one block of land is easier to use than the same acreage split by a road or a creek. The rest of the checklist is in what makes land qualify.

Where do we fit in this?

We look at land of many sizes, and we would rather review a tract that turns out to be too small than miss one that would have worked. We buy or option land ourselves and develop it into sites data center companies want, and we say no to most of what we look at. The county, a rough acreage and anything you can see nearby is enough for us to tell you where your land stands.