Land Availability Constraints and the Data Center Boom in the United States: A Synthesis of the 2024–2026 Evidence Base
The United States is in the midst of a data center construction cycle without precedent in the history of commercial real estate. JLL's North America Data Center Report – Midyear 2026 documents a market in which colocation vacancy has held at a record low of approximately 1% for three consecutive years, more than 66 gigawatts (GW) of capacity is under construction, 95% of that pipeline is precommitted through binding leases or owner-occupied development, and first-half 2026 absorption set a record at 25 GW, double the level of a year earlier. At year-end 2025, 64% of new construction had already migrated outside the traditional mature hubs of Northern Virginia, Dallas–Fort Worth, and Silicon Valley into so-called "frontier markets". The market shock has been catalyzed by generative artificial intelligence (AI), whose training and inference workloads have driven a step change in compute density, power draw per rack, and therefore in the land and water footprint of new campuses. Iconic projects such as Meta's 2,250-acre, 4-million-square-foot, up-to-5 GW Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, developed through a joint venture with funds managed by Blue Owl Capital, illustrate the order-of-magnitude shift from megawatt-scale facilities to gigawatt-scale "AI factories".
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