- Data center developers are heading out west to find land and power for their projects
- Companies like Meta have launched PR campaigns in an apparent attempt to get ahead of local opposition
- Job growth is a key part of the pitch
You may have noticed something strange happening. You may have ignored it at first. But after repeatedly being subjected to them, they’ve become hard to brush aside: Ads, and more specifically – and unusually – ads for data centers.
Data centers aren’t typically something you see advertised. But these ads aren’t trying to sell you on a GPU, cloud platform or some other product. They’re trying to sell you on an idea – the idea of a data center coming to your small town.
Why now, though? And why the focus on small towns in the mid- and southwest like Altoona, Iowa (just outside Des Moines), Grayslake, Ill. (outside of Chicago) and Los Lunas, N.M.? Because that’s where data centers – a lot of data centers – are headed.
Take Dallas County, Iowa, for example. Located just outside of Des Moines (on the other side from Altoona), the area currently has 212 MW of data center capacity. But currently known build plans will balloon that figure to 1300 MW in the coming years, according to data from the U.S. Department of Energy.
And Dallas County isn’t even the hottest spot on the map.
The data center shift
Northern Virginia and Tier 1 cities (think ones with NFL teams) have until recently served as data center hubs. However, space is running out and the need for more compute muscle is skyrocketing, so data center developers are looking elsewhere.
New Albany, Ohio, was one of the first new hotspots to emerge in 2023, alongside Atlanta, Ga.; Phoenix, Ariz.; and Boston, Mass. Now, data from the U.S. Department of Energy shows developers are converging on a new set of targets primarily in the central and western parts of the country.
The data shows that Storey County, Nev.; Ozaukee County, Wis.; Indiana County, Pa.; and Kendall County, Ill, are poised to see some of the largest jumps in data center capacity.
The data center pitch
So, what does this have to do with ads?
As the AI boom has prompted more building, data centers have started to see more pushback from communities – even those that have long been home to data centers. In just the last month, local officials in Chandler, Ariz., (a suburb of Phoenix) and St. Joseph County, Ind., rejected rezoning requests for major data center projects, while officials in East Vincent, Pa., halted consideration of a proposal following an outcry from residents.
The rising tide of opposition is obviously a problem for developers and tech titans, who are now apparently trying to smooth things over with PR campaigns. While local residents have primarily objected to data center projects on energy, water and aesthetic concerns, it seems data centers are hoping the prospect of new jobs will overcome these.
Meta’s data center ads, for instance, seem to make the argument that its facilities will provide new jobs that can help save shrinking towns.
This line isn’t new. AWS hosted a roundtable in Washington D.C. in 2023 during which panelists pointed to jobs and tax revenue as key benefits of data center rollouts. But there’s a big difference between the number of jobs data centers create in the short term – thousands of contractors are working to build a facility – and the number needed to run a data center once it is operational.
A look at the job numbers released by companies mentioned in our recent data center project rundown, for instance, shows that the expected number of permanent employees per project ranged from 1,000 for a sprawling 1 GW+ campus to just 50 for a 192 MW facility.
Meanwhile, data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed that the number of people employed in the data center industry rose slightly from 481,100 in November 2022 to 486,200 in November 2025. Over the same period, available North American data center capacity more than doubled from 3.9 gigawatts to 8.1 gigawatts.
Will it stick?
There is one other interesting factor in play.
Buried in the footnotes of the Department of Energy map is this caveat: “There is a high degree of uncertainty in completion rate of planned projects, which typically outnumber realized facilities by a large factor.”
So maybe some of these projects will follow in the footsteps of Foxconn's Wisconsin flop and neither the jobs nor the planned data centers will materialize after all.