12 Metros That Are Powering the Next Wave of Data Center Development

Picking a data center market used to be simple: Northern Virginia, Silicon Valley, Chicago, Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth. These Tier-1 hubs cornered the market on hyperscale investment because they had decades of connectivity, workforce, and utility relationships nobody else could match.

That's not how it works anymore. AI has made power availability the single biggest factor in site selection, bigger than fiber, bigger than reputation. The old hubs are stuck with multiyear interconnection queues and land that's either gone or overpriced. So the investment is moving to metros that barely had a data center a few years ago, all chasing the same thing: power they can actually get, and get ASAP.

Here are the 12 metros we're keeping a close eye on, ranked by total announced investment, from biggest to smallest.

1. Kansas City, Missouri

Roughly $110 billion

Kansas City tops the list on the strength of two separate projects. "Project Kestrel," backed by developer Shenandoah Computing and financed through Port KC revenue bonds, is a planned $100 billion campus near the airport with six buildings across roughly 380 acres. Right next to it, Google has confirmed its own $10 billion project called "Project Mica." Between the two, Kansas City has more announced data center investment on the books than anywhere else on this list. Kansas City's central location, open land, and existing power make it a real contender.

2. Salt Lake City, Utah

Roughly $72 billion

Salt Lake City has earned the nickname "Silicon Slopes," and the numbers back it up. Utah now hosts more than two dozen tracked data center projects worth a combined $72 billion or so in announced investment. The metro has low risk of natural disasters, competitive power prices, tax breaks on data center equipment, and fast fiber connections to the coasts. Development is spreading out along the Wasatch Front, from downtown out through West Jordan and Bluffdale, all the way to big hyperscale campuses near Eagle Mountain.

3. Memphis, Tennessee

Roughly $55 billion

Memphis, along with nearby Southaven, Mississippi, is turning into a real AI infrastructure hub. xAI's Colossus supercomputer complex represents somewhere around $35 billion once you count the buildings, power infrastructure, and cooling on top of the GPUs, and the company added another $20 billion Southaven facility right next door. The metro's central logistics position, existing power infrastructure, and available industrial land are drawing continued investment beyond xAI as well.

4. Monroe, Louisiana

More than $50 billion

Monroe is home to Meta and Blue Owl Capital's "Hyperion" campus, which started out as a $27 billion project and has since been expanded to more than $50 billion as Meta doubled the site's planned capacity to 5 gigawatts. That's an enormous amount of space and power, more than you could ever find in a crowded market like Northern Virginia. This one project basically put Monroe on the map.

5. Northern Indiana (South Bend-Elkhart and Lake County)

Roughly $26 billion

Northern Indiana has turned into a real hotspot for AI computing, and it's growing from two directions at once. Amazon alone has committed around $26 billion combined across its original St. Joseph County campus near South Bend and Elkhart and a newer round of investment reaching into Lake County, near Chicago. Both areas offer open land and power that's much easier to get than in more crowded parts of the Midwest, while Lake County also gets to stay close to Chicago's fiber network.

6. West Texas (Abilene-Amarillo)

Roughly $26 billion

Abilene and Amarillo have become two of the biggest names in the industry lately. OpenAI and Oracle's Stargate site in Abilene has drawn around $15 billion in secured financing so far, and Texas Tech and Fermi America's HyperGrid campus near Amarillo carries an estimated $11 billion price tag. Both metros benefit from Texas' deregulated power grid (ERCOT), tons of open land, and rules that let companies build their own power supply instead of waiting in line for the grid.

7. Columbus, Ohio

Roughly $20 billion and climbing

Columbus, including nearby New Albany, Licking County, and surrounding suburbs, has quietly built up more than $20 billion in cumulative data center investment from Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, and others. Some of this pairs data centers with chip factories and dedicated power plants in the same footprint. Columbus also has state tax breaks, solid fiber, and a central location that makes it easy to serve much of the eastern half of the country.

8. Milwaukee, Wisconsin

$15 billion

Milwaukee jumped into the spotlight with the $15 billion "Lighthouse" project in Port Washington, a partnership between Vantage, Oracle, and OpenAI.Wisconsin has what a lot of Midwest markets are running out of: open land, real power capacity, and a government that still wants this kind of investment.

9. San Antonio, Texas

Roughly $14.5 billion

San Antonio's headline project is CloudBurst's 706-acre campus straddling Guadalupe and Hays counties, a planned $14.5 billion investment good for 1.2 gigawatts of capacity. Beyond that flagship deal, the metro has a flexible city-owned utility, growing fiber networks, and plenty of open industrial land, which means developers don't have to wait years just to get power turned on.

10. Reno, Nevada

$3 billion and growing

Reno has become the go-to overflow valve for Silicon Valley. It sits just three milliseconds and about 250 miles from the Bay Area, but with way more open land and much lower power and land costs. Vantage recently added a 224-megawatt, $3 billion campus, joining Google, Apple, Microsoft and Switch, which already have a presence in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. The region's full investment total is almost certainly higher once every operator is counted, but $3 billion is the biggest single number attached to one project so far.

11. Houston, Texas

Investment climbing, but more spread out

Houston's data center activity has historically taken a back seat to Dallas-Fort Worth, and its investment so far looks more like a series of individual projects (Amazon's $1.2 billion campus southwest of the city is one recent example) than one headline megadeal. That's shifting as the metro leans on its energy industry expertise, direct access to Gulf Coast power infrastructure, and developers who are used to working with big energy companies.

12. Central Washington (Quincy-Wenatchee)

Decades of investment, no single mega-number

Quincy and East Wenatchee have quietly been a data center hub for over 20 years, longer than almost anywhere else on this list. Individual campuses here, like Vantage's roughly $1 billion Quincy site, are modest by today's gigawatt-scale standards, and there's no single figure that captures the region's cumulative investment across Microsoft, Sabey, Yahoo, NTT and others. What Quincy offers instead is proven, decades-long staying power: access to cheap hydroelectric power from the Columbia River, often under 0.03 cents per kilowatt-hour, and a mild climate that lets facilities cool themselves with outside air most of the year.

What All These Metros Have in Common

A few things connect every metro on this list:

• Power beats fiber. Every single one of these metros can get companies plugged into power faster than the old, crowded hubs.
• Room to build big. These huge AI campuses need thousands of acres of land, not the smaller lots that used to be enough. All 12 of these places have that kind of space available at a reasonable price.
• Local governments want the investment, for now. States and utilities in these areas have been rolling out the welcome mat for big projects. But that could change. Some states are already pulling back on their tax breaks, and local communities are starting to push back on the noise, water use, and grid strain that comes with hosting a massive campus.

Hot Markets, Real Risks

Just because these places are hot right now doesn't mean they're easy. They're attracting all this investment because they can offer something the big,  established markets can't, not because doing your homework here is any simpler. A metro might have plenty of land and a utility company that's excited to work with you, but it might not have the permitting experience, water infrastructure, or community track record that a place like Northern Virginia has built up over 20 years.

Before committing to any of these markets, you need real answers. How much power can that substation actually deliver right now, not just on paper? Does the local water authority know how to handle a project this size? Will the tax incentives still be around in five years, given how many states are reconsidering them? And how does the local community actually feel about a project this big landing in their backyard?

This is exactly the kind of digging we do at Site Selection Group. We look at power capacity, gas availability, water rights, permitting timelines, and community sentiment together, so our clients pick sites where the deal that gets announced is the deal that gets built.

In Conclusion

This shift toward secondary markets isn't a fluke. It's what happens when AI demand grows faster than the power grid can keep up. These 12 metros aren't just backup options anymore. They're where the next wave of major data center projects is actually happening, and where the next big opportunities (and risks) are showing up.

Reach out to Site Selection Group to talk about how we evaluate emerging data center markets.