U.S. Hyperscale Investment Shifts Decisively Inland

RENO, NV, April 13, 2026

New data from Synergy shows that the focus of US hyperscale developments has shifted substantially away from coastal regions and towards the center of the country, with Texas and Midwestern states being the main beneficiaries. At the end of 2025, Texas and the Midwest accounted for 33% of operational US hyperscale data center capacity, while Synergy's pipeline of future hyperscale data centers shows that they will account for 53% of new capacity coming online over the next few years. Northern Virginia has, and will continue to have, the single biggest concentration of data centers, but as AI has supercharged investment in infrastructure, the geographic focus has moved more inland, seeking out areas where power is more readily available. By a wide margin Texas is the most prominent state in the pipeline. In the Midwest, Wisconsin, Indiana, Michigan and Missouri will all grow rapidly in importance, as they have attracted multiple major projects from Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI and CoreWeave. The research is based on an analysis of the data center footprint and future plans of 21 of the world’s major cloud and internet service firms, including the largest operators in SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, search, social networking, e-commerce and gaming. Together they had 1,360 operational hyperscale data centers at the end of 2025, of which 580 are in the US. Synergy's known pipeline of future hyperscale data centers has another 803 data centers that will come online in the next few years, of which 437 are in the US. While there are more operational data centers than there are in the pipeline, the pipeline actually has a bigger overall capacity, reflecting the fact that hyperscale data centers have continued to increase in size in terms of their IT capacity. The companies with the broadest data center footprint are the leading cloud providers – Amazon, Microsoft and Google. In addition to a huge data center footprint in their home US market, each also has multiple data centers in many other countries around the world. In aggregate the three now account for 58% of all hyperscale data center capacity. They are followed in the ranking by Meta, Alibaba, Tencent, Oracle, Apple, ByteDance and then other relatively smaller hyperscale operators. 

“As infrastructure constraints intensify and market dynamics continue to shift, hyperscale providers are increasingly reallocating capital toward central U.S. regions, with Texas emerging as the primary focal point,” said John Dinsdale, Chief Analyst at Synergy Research Group. “A new wave of gigawatt-scale campuses is taking shape in non-traditional locations such as Abilene, Mount Pleasant, South Bend, El Paso, Boone County, and Kansas City. While established hubs will remain strategically important, the center of gravity for new hyperscale investment is clearly moving elsewhere.”