AI runs on land, water, power, and silicon. The datacenter buildout has become one of the largest capital programs in industrial history — the fourteen largest operators alone are on course to spend roughly $750 billion in 2026 — and the discourse around it swings between alarm and dismissal, often untethered from the permits, filings, and utility data that actually measure it. This page tracks the buildout and its consequences on the record: what is being built where, what it consumes, what it pays, and what the GPU market that fills it costs.

The through-line this cycle is the gap between what is announced and what is real. Headline commitments run to the hundreds of billions, but the primary record keeps adjudicating in both directions — energized concrete at Abilene and Mount Pleasant on one side; a 600 MW Stargate expansion scrapped, up to half of 2026's planned capacity slipping, and a causal study finding data centers create almost no permanent jobs on the other.