“Data center” has become a word that covers a warehouse of bitcoin miners, a phosphate plant, a university's research cluster, a natural-gas power station, and a building full of servers rented to a hundred different companies. These are not the same thing, and a registry that treats them as the same thing produces counts that cannot be trusted.
This page sets out exactly where Gridwatch draws each line, and why. Every rule here is one the registry actually enforces — several were written after a facility taught us we had the line in the wrong place.
The building often looks identical. The distinction is what the facility sells, and to whom.
The operator fills the building with its own machines, mines for its own account, and sells nothing to anyone. Economically it is a factory producing a commodity, and an industrial power user. No tenants, no colocation product, no third-party compute.
Third parties bring their own machines and rent space, power, cooling, and connectivity. It sells exactly what a colocation data center sells. The customer happens to run mining hardware instead of web servers.
This is not a distinction we invented. The public operators draw it themselves — their filings separate self-mining from hosted mining from colocation as distinct business segments, because the market and their accountants treat third-party colocation as a different business from mining coins.
A phosphate operation, a bauxite plant, or an aluminum smelter is not a cryptocurrency facility and is not a data center. The word collides; the facilities do not. This sounds obvious and is a live source of error — a keyword sweep for “mining” in a county's records returns both, and only one of them belongs in a data center registry.
A gas plant, a solar array, or a battery storage installation next to a data center is power generation — a source of electricity, not a consumer of it. It is not a data center row, even when it is built specifically to serve one, and even when it shares an owner.
This matters more as facilities move off-grid. A campus that generates its own power contains both a compute load and a generation site. They are two different things in the public record, and Gridwatch registers only the first.
A university's research cluster, a hospital's server room, a county clerk's records system, a company's own internal IT — these are enterprise or institutional computing, not facilities offering compute to third parties.
The test that resolves nearly every hard case: does this facility provide space, power, cooling, or compute to someone other than its owner? If not, it is a power user, not a data center.
A company can sell colocation without owning a data center — by reselling space inside someone else's. Directory listings frequently present a reseller as a facility, which inflates counts and puts pins on buildings that hold no data center at all.
Gridwatch resolves this at the parcel. If the address turns out to be an office suite, or the “facility” turns out to sit inside a building another operator runs, the reseller is not a row — the facility it sits in is, and it is already registered.
Some of the most important facilities in a market do not look like data centers and were never built as one. A former telephone company central office — the switching building the local exchange carrier put up decades ago — often becomes a carrier hotel: a densely interconnected building where many networks meet and many operators rent space.
These are real data centers by function, and they are systematically missed by anyone searching for buildings that look the part or for parcels coded as such. Gridwatch sweeps for them deliberately.
The company whose name is on the building is frequently not the company that owns the parcel. Both facts matter, and confusing them is one of the most common errors in public data-center information.
The operator owns the parcel, directly or through an affiliated entity it controls. The strongest anchor: title and operation agree.
The facility is real and the operator is real, but a third-party landlord holds title. The facility is registered; the ownership is recorded as what it is.
The distinction is not academic. A landlord can sell a building; an operator can leave one. A registry that records only who is in there cannot tell you which of those happened.
Large facilities are commonly held by single-purpose entities — a company formed to hold one property, often named after the street it sits on. That entity may be the operator's own affiliate, or a genuinely unrelated landlord. You cannot tell from the name. Gridwatch traces the entity to a person or parent before deciding the grade, and records the finding either way.
A large facility often has one operator who owns and runs the building, and many other companies operating inside it. Both are true simultaneously. Gridwatch anchors the building to the operator who runs it and records the others as what they are — occupants of a facility, not facilities of their own. Counting each tenant as a separate data center is how a single building becomes six.
A facility's status is not an opinion about how likely it is. It is a statement about what exists in the public record right now.
| Rumored | A sourced report exists. No application, no filing. |
| Proposed | An application, rezoning, or development agreement has been filed — but no building permit has been issued. |
| Permitted | A building permit has been issued. Not applied for. Issued. |
| Under construction | There is vertical construction on the parcel. |
| The facility is running. | |
| Cancelled | The project was real, was tracked, and died — withdrawn, denied, or abandoned. |
The line most often blurred is between proposed and permitted. A county commission approving a rezoning, a development agreement, or a land-use designation is an entitlement — permission to seek permission. It is not a building permit. A project can be unanimously approved by a county and still be proposed, because approval and permit are different documents. Gridwatch has corrected its own records on exactly this point.
And cancelled projects stay visible. A withdrawn project was sourced, verified, and evaluated to the same standard as any other — and the fact that it died is information people need. A registry that quietly deletes its cancellations leaves you unable to distinguish a project that never existed from one that was defeated.
The hardest honest answer to “is a data center coming to my county?” is often: there is a signal on the record, but nothing has been filed. That answer deserves somewhere to live. Gridwatch keeps two surfaces.
Facilities anchored to a specific parcel, verified in primary records. Every row is a place you could stand.
Sourced, county-level signals with no parcel anchor: a moratorium moving through a commission, a site being marketed to developers, a reported inquiry with no application behind it. These are real and cited, and they are not facilities. They never appear as pins on the map, because there is no parcel to pin them to.
An item graduates from one to the other when the record does: a filed, parcel-anchored application makes it a registry row. An adopted ban with no project behind it closes it out. Nothing moves between surfaces because it feels more or less likely.
Every facility in the registry traces to a primary record — an assessor's parcel, a deed, a county ordinance, a commission's minutes, a regulator's filing, an operator's own disclosure. Secondary sources can corroborate. They cannot establish.
The reason is practical, not ideological. A number that originates in a directory and gets copied into a report, then cited by an article, then quoted at a county meeting, has been repeated four times and verified zero. By the time it reaches you it is indistinguishable from a verified number — unless someone kept the trail.
Gridwatch keeps the trail. That is the entire product.