How a Data Center Gets Built
Six stages from a field with a substation to a campus training models — who is involved, how long each takes, what stops it, and the words people use.
Every example below is a real campus on Koko's Data Center Eye View, where its full record and sources live.
The lifecycle
Six stages, end to end
Stage 1
Site and power
Where is there land, water, fibre and, above all, power?
- Who is involved
- Developer, utility, landowners, state economic-development office
- How long
- Months to years; the interconnection queue sets it
- What stops it
- No grid capacity; a moratorium; a water fight
- On the map
- Stargate Saline Township (The Barn) — rejected by the township, litigated, settled
Stage 2
Tenant, capital and incentives
Who will lease it, who funds it, what does the state give up?
- Who is involved
- Anchor tenant, fund or SPV, lenders, state and county
- How long
- Runs alongside stage 1
- What stops it
- Financing and demand forecasts move — Abilene's 600 MW expansion was dropped this way
- On the map
- Meta Hyperion — a ~$27 billion Blue Owl JV, three gas plants approved in phases
Stage 3
Permits and the public
Air, water, zoning, rate cases — and the vote.
- Who is involved
- Regulators (PSC, EPA/state air, planning boards), residents, advocacy groups
- How long
- Months; longer where contested
- What stops it
- A permit suit (Colossus), a local pause (300+ jurisdictions), a statewide order (New York)
- On the map
- xAI Colossus 2 — turbines first, Clean Air Act suit after
Stage 4
Build the shell and the power
Concrete, substations, turbines or a reactor restart.
- Who is involved
- EPC contractors, turbine and transformer suppliers, utilities
- How long
- ~12–24 months for a building; three years for a turbine order; 2027–2035 for nuclear
- What stops it
- Equipment lead times — GE Vernova's book runs to 2031
- On the map
- Stargate Doña Ana (Project Jupiter) — foundations under way, Q4 2028
Stage 5
Fit out the hall
Racks, liquid cooling, networking, and hundreds of thousands of GPUs.
- Who is involved
- Chip vendors, integrators, the tenant's own engineers
- How long
- Weeks per building once the shell is powered
- What stops it
- Chip allocation and export controls
- On the map
- Microsoft Fairwater Atlanta — 140 kW racks, no UPS, no generators
Stage 6
Operate and expand
Run it, measure it, and start the next phase.
- Who is involved
- Operator, utility and permanent staff whose size depends on the site and service model
- How long
- Decades; expansions every 1–2 years
- What stops it
- Rate shock and community fatigue — the Phase 2 fights
- On the map
- Amazon Project Rainier — 7 of ~30 buildings live; a $15 billion Phase 2 met zoning pushback
Who is who
The six layers of the chain
Every company on the map sits in one of these layers.
Anchor tenants and labs
OpenAI · Meta · Microsoft · Amazon (AWS) · Google (Alphabet) · xAI (SpaceX) · Anthropic · G42 · MGX
Chips and compute
NVIDIA · AMD · Amazon Trainium · Broadcom · Groq
Developers, builders and operators
Crusoe · Vantage Data Centers · STACK Infrastructure · Related Digital · SB Energy (SoftBank) · Khazna Data Centers · Nscale · Aker · Aligned Data Centers · Oracle · Equinix · Digital Realty · AdaniConneX · Nxtra (Airtel)
Power: generation, fuel and grid
Constellation Energy · Vistra · Talen Energy · Holtec · Oklo · TerraPower · Kairos Power · X-energy · Energy Northwest · NuScale · Entergy · Williams · EQT · NextEra Energy · Tennessee Valley Authority
Turbines, transformers, cooling
GE Vernova · Siemens Energy · Hitachi Energy · Bloom Energy · Vertiv · Schneider Electric · Eaton · Foxconn
Capital: funds, SPVs and lenders
Blue Owl Capital · AI Infrastructure Partnership (AIP) · BlackRock · Global Infrastructure Partners · SoftBank Group · Macquarie Asset Management · Blackstone · Brookfield · KKR · Bpifrance · US Department of Energy loan office
Vocabulary
The words, in plain English
- MW / GW
- Megawatts and gigawatts of power. A gigawatt is roughly the output of one large nuclear reactor, or the draw of about a million US homes.
- Facility power vs IT power
- Facility power is the whole campus's draw; IT power is what the servers see. The gap is cooling and conversion. Sources rarely say which they mean.
- PUE
- Power usage effectiveness: facility power divided by IT power. 1.2 means 20% overhead.
- PPA
- Power purchase agreement: a long-term contract to buy a plant's output at an agreed price, often 20 years. The nuclear deals here are PPAs.
- Behind the meter
- Generation on the customer side of a meter. Delivery still depends on equipment, permits and operating arrangements; it does not imply a fast or approved connection.
- Front of the meter
- Power delivered through the grid under a contract. Talen and Amazon restructured their deal this way to avoid FERC approval.
- Interconnection queue
- Processes to study new generation or load connections. Generator queues and large-load studies are different; neither alone proves power available to a campus.
- SMR
- Small modular reactor: a factory-built reactor of tens to a few hundred megawatts. None supplying a data center is operating yet; Hermes 2 is scheduled for 2030.
- Restart
- Returning a closed reactor to service — Crane (Three Mile Island) and Palisades. Faster than a new build, still measured in years.
- Uprate
- Raising an existing reactor's licensed output; Vistra's deal with Meta includes 433 MW of them.
- SPV / JV
- A special purpose vehicle or joint venture that owns the campus so the tenant leases rather than builds — how Hyperion is financed.
- Moratorium
- A temporary ban on approving new projects while rules are written; more than 300 US jurisdictions have one.
- Community benefit agreement
- A negotiated package — jobs, local hiring, water limits, payments — exchanged for local approval.
- Hyperscaler
- The largest cloud operators — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Oracle — building at gigawatt scale.
- Colocation
- A data center whose operator leases space and power to many tenants; Equinix and Digital Realty.