The nation's biggest AI data centers are taking root in some unexpected places

In Kuna, Idaho, residents are reacting with conflicting emotions to their new neighbors: sprawling data campuses that take up land and power.

The small town outside Boise is one of many rural areas getting transformed across the United States as real estate and technology firms seek sparsely populated regions with little competition for the energy and cooling waters needed to power the artificial intelligence boom.

Kuna is home to a giant new data center underway for Facebook parent Meta. It's an example of the type of project seen in new television commercials for the tech giant, extolling the virtues of data center development. In one media spot, a farmer notes that Meta's new data center in Iowa is bringing more jobs to the area, helping to offset a decline in agriculture revenue.

The Yamamoto family is one of those beneficiaries of such development in Kuna. The family sold 620 acres that long held a farm to a developer, then helped it win approvals for the Gemstone Technology Park, a data center built to handle up to 800 megawatts of power demand, enough electricity to power up to 600,000 homes annually — about 55 times more than Kuna's roughly 11,000 residential properties.

But not everyone on the ground is on board.

Some, like the Murray family, fear the agricultural town of Kuna will lose too many farms to this industrial addition: "Farming is the heart of Kuna, and that's exactly why we chose to raise our family here 12 years ago," resident Shalee Murray said at a recent city council meeting. "Once you allow industrial development, it sets a precedent, and soon the surrounding farmland follows."

During the rise of the internet in the 1990s, data center operators wanted to be near highly populated financial trading, commerce and government hubs like New York, downtown Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Those geographic strategies look different today.

Northern Virginia, near the data-heavy federal government in Washington, D.C., is still considered the largest market for data centers, with what real estate services firm CBRE estimates is the capacity to use nearly enough electricity to power more than 3.5 million homes.

But the industry is heading further afield, with technology giants including Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon expanding into areas including southern Idaho, Texas' Big Country, Ohio, Indiana and the Midwest farmlands in search of lower-cost land and power.

The projects are part of an explosion in data and energy campus development across the United States — fueled by super-charged demand for computer processing power for artificial intelligence and cloud storage application — that is reshaping parts of rural America.

"Anyone who has land in core or secondary markets — and now farming areas — is trying to sell their site for multiples of what it's worth as data center land," said Andy Cvengros, JLL executive managing director and co-lead of the firm's U.S. Data Center Markets team, during a recent webcast.

At least 16 gigawatts of colocation and hyperscale data center space is under construction at new and expanding projects across North America, the highest amount on record, Andrew Batson, JLL's head of data center research in the Americas, told CoStar News.

CoStar News combed through company filings, permits and other records to map the new digital networks underway. Here's a glimpse of some out-of-the-way places where projects are taking shape.

The din of thousands of dump trucks and other construction vehicles has replaced the sounds of tractors and combines in the once-bucolic town of Holly Ridge, Louisiana, population less than 2,000.

The vehicles are hauling earth and other materials for Meta's sprawling data center campus under construction in Louisiana's Richland Parish.

The project, called Hyperion, is slated to be the social media platform's largest data center to date at 4 million square feet. Meta in October announced a joint venture with Blue Owl Capital that values the investment at $27 billion.

The 2,250-acre site on former cotton, corn and soybean fields is among several "titan clusters" of data centers that Meta plans to build across the U.S., according to a post last summer by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” the Facebook founder said.

Early Spanish settlers started clearing trees and giant cane for farming in the late 1700s in Richland, a rural parish about 250 miles northwest of New Orleans named for its rich and fertile soil.

Small towns such as Delhi, Rayville and Holly Ridge sprouted up during the late 1800s and early 20th century as cotton, corn and soybean farmers built churches, schools and businesses.

As farming declined across Louisiana in recent decades due to rising costs of fertilizer, fuel, labor and equipment, northeast Louisiana politicians and economic development officials began trying to attract other industries to the area.

To diversify the area's economy, the state in 2006 bought the 1,450-acre Franklin Farm property, with the goal of luring an automobile factory. But the plans fell through as a headlight manufacturing plant in nearby Monroe closed, followed a few years later by the shuttering of the General Motors facility in Shreveport, according to local news reports.

Other efforts to bring in manufacturers and other businesses failed due to lack of funding to build water, sewer and other infrastructure. But in early 2024, hope emerged for the parish, one of the state's poorest regions, with one in four residents living below the federal poverty line.

Local utility company Entergy pitched the Franklin Farm property to Meta after learning that the tech giant was looking for a large data center site in the South. Entergy agreed to build three natural gas-fired power plants to meet the facility's enormous power demands.

Meta began construction in December 2024 on the Hyperion project and aims to finish the campus between Rayville and Delhi in phases through 2030.

Cornell University researcher Jen Liu, who studies the effects of data centers, broadband and other computing technology on small communities in the American South, sees parallels between Meta's project and boom periods in rural Louisiana dating back to sugarcane production in the 1700s — the area's first economic boom — to the oil and petrochemical boom in the 20th century.

Meta's original code name for the Hyperion data center was Project Sucre — the French word for sugar — referencing the state's history of sugarcane plantations and economic booms, Liu said in an interview.

"Just like those prior industries, the Meta project has benefited from decades of a pro-business political environment in Louisiana," Liu said.

She added that the fallout of those prior booms can also serve as a lesson to today's development trends.

"Residents are often left to shoulder the risks of extractive development, from sugar, cotton and lumber to petrochemicals," Liu said.

For instance, Richland Parish's utility customers could be left to pick up the costs of Entergy's three gas-powered plants if Meta were to pull out of the Hyperion project, she said.

"If the AI bubble pops, what happens in the aftermath? Those who were there to make money will have made money," Liu said.

Rob Cleveland of Grow NELA, the economic development organization for northeast Louisiana, countered that the Meta project has already brought "direct and measurable benefits" to the state.

"The contractors have already spent tens of millions of dollars in our region in small businesses that are owned by Louisiana residents," Cleveland told the Louisiana Public Service Commission, before the body approved three new gas power plants to supply electricity for the Meta project. "Tire shops, hardware stores, restaurants, auto dealers, equipment rental companies have already experienced exponential growth."

Cleveland said the number of companies looking at the region tripled in the first six months after Meta announced the project.

Economic impact studies conducted for Grow NELA found that Hyperion will generate over $1 billion in wages for construction workers and another $160 million in sales tax revenue over five years. A separate study by the John Burns consulting firm found that housing demand generated by the project will fuel residential development in the region, Cleveland said.

Liu said that determining how many permanent jobs that projects like Hyperion will create is difficult. Many data center construction contractors are from other parts of the country, similar to trends during past booms in the oil and gas industry, she said.

"There are murky promises about the promise of jobs, but whether that actually materializes is a different question," Liu said.

Amarillo resident Jennifer Elsik had no idea the largest real estate development in the history of the Texas Panhandle was starting right across the fence from the farm that has been in her family for a century.

Then, the surveyors and land speculators began calling.

"We were unaware of this project until we started getting phone calls," Elsik told Carson County commissioners during a public hearing to approve sweeping tax abatements for AI infrastructure startup Fermi America's data center and energy campus near Amarillo. "'We want to buy your property for speculation, surveyors are going to come to your property tomorrow.'"

Fermi's multiphase Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus could span up to 13 million square feet across 5,800 acres and provide more than 11 gigawatts of capacity. Fermi America did not immediately respond to a request for comment from CoStar News.

Elsik and other Amarillo residents filled the Carson County courthouse on Oct. 28 to express concerns about whether the public had adequate notice about the project on land leased from Texas Tech University near the Pantex nuclear weapons assembly plant.

"Gas lines, water lines, utility lines — all of them had been, you know, proposed that they were going to run directly across our property," Elsik told commissioners. "And we had no knowledge of it."

Some county residents, including Walker Floyd, whose family settled the area in the late 1800s, spoke in favor of Fermi's project. Floyd, speaking to fellow residents, said Fermi floated the project more than a year ago, "so if you weren't paying attention, that's on you."

Texas Tech plans to have programs that will teach students about AI, he added.

"These are not just data centers," Floyd said. "The AI data center is going to have millions and millions of chips in it, and those chips allow artificial intelligence to actually do its learning and training."

Texas is home to several of the country's biggest planned AI data center developments, with major hyperscale projects stretching from the cattle ranches and cotton fields of the Panhandle to the Rio Grande Plains near the U.S. and Mexico border.

In Abilene, such projects as OpenAI's Stargate, part of a planned $500 billion investment in data centers across multiple states, are proposed to convert thousands of acres of red-clay prairie in the Lone Star State's Big Country into clustered hubs of data farm buildings.

OpenAI in September announced more Stargate data center sites in Texas, New Mexico, Ohio and an undisclosed Midwest location. The new sites — plus the Abilene campus and projects underway with AI cloud provider CoreWeave — put Stargate on track to provide nearly 7 gigawatts of capacity on over $400 billion in investment over the next three years, the company said.

Kuna's abundant undeveloped land, low-cost hydroelectric power from the nearby Snake River and low risk of natural disasters such as earthquakes or hurricanes are drawing in technology firms like Meta and Diode Ventures, developer of the proposed Gemstone Technology Park.

The Facebook parent company expects to open its nearly 1 million-square-foot data center project in southeast Kuna in late 2026. Meta announced the $800 million project on 485 acres in early 2022.

Kuna officials last spring approved the Gemstone Technology Park project, an even larger $1 billion data center development. Diode Ventures, a subsidiary of global engineering firm Black & Veatch, bought land for the project from the Yamamotos.

After selling the land, Judy Yamamoto and her daughter Tricia Waters in April urged the Kuna City Council to approve the rezoning of the family property from agriculture to industrial to allow the Gemstone project to move forward.

Judy Yamamoto recalled how her husband Duane, who served as Kuna's mayor from 1976 to 1989, worked the land until he was in his early 80s. He passed away in February at age 90.

The city council voted to rezone the property after Diode Ventures pledged to contribute more than $44 million to the police and fire departments and school district.

As Waters told the council, "this project closely aligns with our family values and my dad's wishes for us to be good stewards of the land."