Epoch AI has launched the Frontier Data Centers Hub, an independent database that tracks the construction progress of major US artificial intelligence data centers. The database aggregates high-resolution satellite imagery, permit records, power agreements, and company documentation to provide detailed, verifiable timelines for some of the largest AI data center projects.
According to Epoch AI, the analysis shows that five facilities are on track to reach the 1 gigawatt (GW) scale in 2026, including:
- Anthropic–Amazon New Carlisle (January 2026)
- xAI Colossus 2 (February 2026)
- Microsoft Fayetteville (March 2026; labeled as borderline 1 GW)
- Meta Prometheus (May 2026)
- OpenAI Stargate Abilene (July 2026)
These hyperscale builds represent a major jump in compute capacity, which Epoch AI quantifies as about 2.5 million NVIDIA H100-equivalent GPUs across the 13 large US campuses tracked. That total is estimated as roughly 15 percent of all H100-equivalent units delivered globally by late 2025. At 1 GW, a single data center’s electrical demand is comparable to that of approximately one million US households.
The Frontier Data Centers Hub is organized for engineers, operators, and infrastructure professionals to monitor ongoing construction, featuring up-to-date site photos, permit records, and analysis of power and cooling infrastructure. The system also correlates physical infrastructure like chillers and equipment pads visible in satellite photos with official permits to estimate compute and power deployment.
Ben Cottier, researcher at Epoch AI, stated, “Data centers typically come online in stages, expanding power usage over months or years. Companies rarely clarify this, which creates confusion about true capacity.” Cottier added, “A key thing that makes large-scale data centers discoverable is their cooling infrastructure. It’s hard to hide the massive chillers required to prevent billions of dollars in equipment from overheating. By analyzing satellite imagery and correlating it with permit documents and hardware specifications, we can estimate capacity within surprisingly narrow margins.”
The Frontier Data Centers Hub is available to the public at https://epoch.ai/data/data-centers.
Source: Epoch AI
