About
Civic intelligence for AI infrastructure.
AI data centers are being built across the United States faster than communities, regulators, or journalists can track them. datacenter.observer is a single, open-source platform that answers four questions citizens deserve clean answers to:where are they being built, who is building them, when can the public weigh in, and how are the companies and officials involved connected.
What's tracked today
Projects
1598
Gigawatts
292.1
Companies
121
Officials
448
Events
64
Upcoming
49
Capex
$455B
States covered
48
Methodology
The current dataset is editorial — assembled from public reporting (Reuters, Bloomberg, WSJ, local press), company press releases, and the FracTracker Alliance, datacentertracker.org, and Epoch AI open datasets. Every project links back to the public sources that informed it; if you find an error or have a missing project, the repo welcomes pull requests.
The data layer (lib/data/source.ts) is now backed by Supabase Postgres with public-read row-level security. Each serverless instance hydrates the full dataset on cold start and serves O(1) lookups thereafter. Migrations live in supabase/migrations/; the seed pipeline in scripts/seed-supabase.ts is idempotent and re-runnable from typed seed files.
The dataset is augmented by three automated pipelines: PostGIS powers the /api/nearby radius queries via a GIST-indexed geography column. FracTracker Alliance's public dataset of ~1,500 US sites is re-ingested daily from their CSV feed (Vercel Cron, 06:00 UTC); imported rows carry the ft- slug prefix and never overwrite editorial entries. Geocodio resolves the US House district for each site weekly (Mon 07:00 UTC) so a Memphis project pings only Steve Cohen, not all nine TN reps.
Open data sources
- FracTracker Alliance· 1,400+ US sites, daily updates
- datacentertracker.org· CC BY 4.0 — community actions & legislation
- Epoch AI Frontier Data Centers· Satellite-verified hyperscale tracking
- Geocodio· Federal + state officials by address
- OpenStates / Plural Policy· State legislators, bills, hearings
- unitedstates/congress-legislators· CC0 federal officials, photos, contact
License & ethics
Code: AGPL-3.0 — derivative works remain open. Data: CC BY-SA 4.0. Source citations accompany every datapoint. Where the source is community-maintained (e.g., FracTracker, datacentertracker.org), we follow upstream licensing and link to attribution.
This project is informational, not adversarial. The goal is to make public processes visible to the public who has the right to participate in them.
Get involved
Built in the open by Benjamin Life (@omniharmonic). Suggestions, corrections, and additions welcome — especially missing projects and local-official seeds.