Compare Data Centers
In 2025 OpenAI said it needed more data centers than it could build itself, so it signed a contract for Oracle to build them, worth about $300 billion. That one deal was negotiated in public and strained everyone involved. This section sets it against the rest of the data center buildout since 2023: how big it really is, how much of it nobody has announced, and how it is being paid for.
OpenAI Data Centers Compared to U.S. Data Centers →
A scrolling visual story in three acts: the OpenAI and Oracle deal and the pieces that fell off it, the buildout around it measured in "OpenAI deals", and where the two stories stop adding up. It counts every large campus worldwide; most of them (362 of the 533 known campuses) are in the United States.
| OpenAI's Oracle deal | Everything else, known and unreported | |
|---|---|---|
| Campuses | 5 | about 711 |
| Floor space | 12 million sq ft | 1.6 billion sq ft |
| Power | 4.5 GW | 547 GW |
| Money | $300 billion | about $17 trillion |
The whole buildout is about 134 times the floor space, 122 times the power and 57 times the money of the deal OpenAI said was too big to build itself. Counting only what is likely to actually get built, it is still about $10.6 trillion, or 35 OpenAI deals.
Why it belongs in Deep State
- Much of it is hidden. Big campuses are filed under shell companies and code names: Meta's Indiana campus as Project Domino by Orla LLC, Ohio's Project Klondike approved under a non-disclosure agreement. We estimate about a quarter of the buildout is unreported (range 15 to 40%).
- The government's own count sees about a quarter of it. The Census Bureau tallies an $85 billion annual rate of data center construction, while the 66 GW JLL counts under construction in North America implies $250 to $320 billion a year.
- It is paid for with borrowed and off-the-books money. About $3 trillion of data center commitments sit off company balance sheets, according to the Wall Street Journal, and chip makers are funding their own buyers.
All figures are research estimates as of October 11, 2026, at full build-out. Sources, method and ranges are at the bottom of the comparison page.