Data center osint

whole country
Loading base map

Where to look

The whole country pulls several thousand records from four services and takes a while over mobile data. Each area caches for the session once it lands.

Layers

Water put into the air here

Drawn from ground already in drought

Facilities sitting inside a current drought monitor polygon, by the worst category covering their point.

Largest estimated draws here

Counties carrying the load

Owners and operators

Sky over the map

Live geostationary imagery is pulled as a flat latitude and longitude mosaic, reprojected pixel by pixel onto the same projection as the map, and laid across the top of every state. Wind at the plume level streams over it as moving trails.

Imagery strength
Waiting on imagery
Wind trails
Waiting on the wind field

Water vapor shows moisture in the middle of the atmosphere, bright where it is wet and dark where it is dry, which is the river the evaporated water joins. True color merges the eastern and western satellites into one seamless frame.

Consumption model

Locations, capacities and industry classes come from the sources. Water figures are modeled from them with the assumptions below, so every piece on the map moves when a slider moves.

Data centers
Power density
Watts of computing per square foot of raised floor. Older colocation sits near 80. New training halls run past 300.
Raised floor share
Portion of the building holding racks.
Total power per watt of computing
Everything the site draws, divided by what the servers draw. All of it leaves as heat.
Heat rejected by evaporation
Zero means a fully closed loop site, where heat leaves as warm air and the water figure falls to nothing.
Cycles of concentration
How many times loop water is reused before minerals force a dump to sewer.
Assumed size when unmeasured
Thousands of square feet, for records mapped as a bare point with no outline.
Thermal power plants
Steam capacity on wet cooling
Share of steam turbine capacity rejecting heat through evaporative towers. The rest is treated as dry cooled or once through, with near zero evaporation on site.
Running hours versus typical
Scales the typical capacity factor for each fuel. Push it up for a summer peak, down for a mild month.
Heavy industry
Plant size versus class typical
Each industrial facility starts at the typical consumption for its class, taken from published water intensity for refineries, mills, fabs, smelters and the rest. This scales all of them together.

Reading the map

ten thousandgallons per day, log scaleten million plus
Data center, box with stack Power plant, curved tower Industry, block with chimney Mapped cooling tower

Pen dots carry the layer colour so a cluster reads by type from high up. Standing pieces carry the water colour and height, on a log scale so a data center and a nuclear station can share one map. Mapped cooling towers are physical structures drawn from the contributor database, most belonging to a plant already counted, so they carry no gallons of their own.

Where the data comes from

Data centers and cooling towers come from the OpenStreetMap contributor database through the Overpass interface. Data center roof area is measured off the mapped outline.

Power plants come from the federal energy statistics plant inventory, every operable plant of one megawatt or more, with megawatts broken out by fuel and the prime mover technology. Only plants running a steam cycle or geothermal are kept, since combustion turbines, solar, wind and batteries put no water into the air.

Heavy industry comes from the federal greenhouse gas reporting program facility register, which every large emitter files with location and industry code. The industry code sets the class and the class sets the typical draw.

Drought is the current weekly drought monitor release. Wind comes from the Open-Meteo aggregation of national weather service models at the 850 hectopascal level, around 1500 metres, which is the layer a warm plume reaches.

Backend

Leave this blank and the page talks to the public sources directly from your browser. Paste your deployed service address to route every request through it instead, which hides the sources, caches the answers and gets past services that refuse browser requests.

Also accepted as a query parameter, ?api=, so a bookmark can carry it.

Live satellite

Latest visible and infrared composite over the contiguous United States