Data centres are, for the first time, being targeted in military conflicts as a means to disrupt daily life and damage economies. A Russian attack recently hit a Datagroup facility in Ukraine. A series of strikes by Iran in March damaged AWS facilities in both Bahrain and the UAE. A month later, an Oracle data centre in Dubai was damaged.

In an age where data centres are high-value targets, the construction of new infrastructure might necessitate changes to a country’s defense policy.

To find out how the data centre landscape was changing – and where these changes were concentrated – we analysed the concentration of and increases in data centre numbers of 143 countries between 2023 and 2026.

Key findings

Out of the countries with the highest data centre growth:

  • The US saw the biggest increase in data centres (by numbers reported), rising from 5,300 in 2023 to 5,427 in 2026
  • The Netherlands has the greatest concentration of data centres by landmass (8.9 per 1,000 km²) and population (16 per 1 million people)
  • A quarter of the countries experiencing the highest data centre growth suffer from ‘extremely high’ water stress
  • The US has more than 10 times more data centres than any other country
  • Three of the top countries for data centre growth have an internet penetration of less than 50% of the population
  • Five of the countries experiencing the highest data centre growth have more than doubled their data centre counts in the past three years

Where are the most data centres being built?

Of the countries with the biggest increases, the US was the most striking. Between 2023 and 2026, its data centre numbers increased by 127 (from 5,300 to 5,427). Russia, too, showed a marked increase – from 174 to 251.

African countries recorded the biggest percentage increases (though starting from small initial counts). South Africa went from 31 to 63 data centres (103% increase), Nigeria from 11 to 29 (164% increase), Morocco from 5 to 15 (a 200% increase), Kenya from 9 to 19 (a 111% increase), and Tanzania from 2 to 11 (a 450% increase).

Top countries with the most new data centres

  1. The United States – up 127: from 5,300 in 2023 to 5,427 in 2026 (2%)
  2. Russia – up 77: from 174 in 2023 to 251 in 2026 (44%)
  3. The United Kingdom – up 58: from 465 in 2023 to 523 in 2026 (12%)
  4. France – up 56: from 266 in 2023 to 322 in 2026 (21%)
  5. Germany – up 54: from 475 in 2023 to 529 in 2026 (11%)
  6. Brazil – up 42: from 155 in 2023 to 197 in 2026 (27%)
  7. South Africa – up 32: from 31 in 2023 to 63 in 2026 (103%)
  8. The Netherlands – up 27: from 271 in 2023 to 298 in 2026 (10%)
  9. Nigeria & Australia – up 18: Nigeria from 11 in 2023 to 29 in 2026 (164%) and Australia from 296 in 2023 to 314 in 2026 (6%)
  10. Italy – up 17: from 151 in 2023 to 168 in 2026 (11%)
  11. Spain – up 15: from 129 in 2023 to 144 in 2026 (12%)
  12. Malaysia and Mexico – up 14: Malaysia from 48 in 2023 to 62 in 2026 (29%) and Mexico from 159 in 2023 to 173 in 2026 (9%)
  13. Chile – up 13: from 46 in 2023 to 59 in 2026 (28%)
  14. Indonesia and Belgium – up 12: Indonesia from 76 in 2023 to 88 in 2026 (16%) and Belgium from 69 in 2023 to 81 in 2026 (17%)
  15. Morocco and Kenya – up 10: from 5 in 2023 to 15 in 2026 (200%) and Kenya from 9 in 2023 to 19 in 2026 (111%)

Data centre density is most apparent in Europe

Several countries have built data centres in what are already extremely dense digital-infrastructure environments. Of the countries with the biggest data centre increases, five of them with more than one data centre per 1,000 square km were in Europe:

The Netherlands was particularly notable. It has 298 data centres over a land area of just 22,670 square km (equating to 8.9 data centres per 1,000 square km). This is an increase of 10 percent on the 2023 count of 271 data centres. By population, it has more than 16 data centres per one million people.

Concerns about land being given over to data centres were raised long before these additions. The Dutch government placed a moratorium on the construction of new data centres back in 2019, only for it to be lifted in 2020. Resistance from local communities led to another temporary halt in 2022, followed by rules in 2024 that prevented the building of massive (hyperscale) new data centres in the majority of the country. Note, however, that this isn’t particularly limiting given that the definition of ‘hyperscale’ is a facility that is more than 10 hectares (approximately 14 football pitches) and that has an electrical connection capacity of more than 70 megawatts (the output of a small power station).

The Netherlands continues to attract interest from data centre owners due to its excellent connectivity, major internet exchanges (especially AMS-IX), strong fibre infrastructure and proximity to major European markets.

Earlier this year, Microsoft purchased 37.5 hectares of agricultural land in Middenmeer, north of Amsterdam. It claims that, while it has no plans to build a data centre on the site, “it would be nice if we could ever develop on it”.

Switzerland, which is of a similar size to the Netherlands, is also well-positioned in terms of stability, strong infrastructure, and robust data protection. It has a high density of data centres (3.1 per 1,000 square km), with approximately 60 percent of existing capacity concentrated in the Zurich–Aargau–Schaffhausen region. By population, it has more than 13 data centres per one million people.

More data centres are on the way. An AI data centre covering four hectares is under construction in Laufenburg, and there are projects in Glattbrugg, Geneva, Lupfig, Zurich, and Basel that all have completion dates within the next two to three years.

Beyond Europe, there are several countries in Africa that are experiencing rapid percentage growth (though from a very low initial count). This is despite the far smaller proportion of online citizens. Internet penetration is 41 percent in Nigeria, 35 percent in Kenya, and 31 percent in Tanzania, while in the UK, Germany and Switzerland it’s 90+%).

While African countries have growth potential and plenty of land for building, the resources needed to keep the data centres online are scarcer.

Data centre increases in water-stressed countries

Data centres are notoriously thirsty, with the largest of them requiring up to five million gallons of water a day. Reducing direct water consumption through alternative cooling methods can shift some of the environmental burden towards electricity generation. However, these power plants themselves use water for cooling and other industrial processes.

Despite this, our research shows that, of the countries where data centres have increased most, five are in countries suffering ‘extremely high’ water stress (based on data from 2023). The World Resources Institute defines this as a country that regularly uses up more than 80 percent of its entire available water supply.

Chile is Latin America’s second largest market for data centres, despite being under the most water stress (it scored 4.5 out of 5 in 2023). The country launched its National Data Centers Plan in 2024, with the aim of positioning itself as the region’s leading digital infrastructure hub. It has good connectivity and is politically stable – both of which are attractive to tech companies.

As with other countries, data centres tend to be concentrated in particular areas of Chile, exacerbating water usage problems. According to The Guardian, the largest data centres in Quilicura, north of Santiago, use 1.5 billion litres of water per year. The area has experienced years of drought conditions. In May of this year, Chilean courts rejected some residents’ attempts to prevent Amazon Web Services from building a data centre in the nearby Huechuraba district.

South Africa is another severely water-stressed country (it scored 4.2 out of 5 in 2023) that also acts as a regional data-centre hub. The country has more than doubled its data centre count over the past three years. In 2025, Microsoft announced plans to spend $329 million by the end of 2027 to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in the country. This is on top of the $1.25 billion already invested in building data centres in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

Water consumption isn’t the only issue. Data centres consumed approximately 415 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity in 2024, or about 1.5 percent of global electricity consumption, according to the International Energy Agency. Demand grew by 12 percent per year over each of the previous five years. The IEA’s projections suggest consumption could more than double up to 1250 TWh by 2030.

Africa, in particular, has a huge electricity deficit. The World Bank estimates around 560 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lacked electricity in 2024.

Summary

Data centres are increasingly necessary to cope with the demands of AI-containing software and to run the LLMs themselves. However, their propensity for taking over vast swathes of land and draining natural resources is of concern to many who live near them.

Governments are highly incentivised to allow data centres to be built – in the short term by investment, and in the long term by hoped-for technological advancement over their neighbours. This dynamic means growth is not evenly, or always sensibly, distributed: some of the fastest expansion is happening in countries – like Chile and South Africa – that are already under severe water stress, and where new capacity adds further pressure to an already strained resource rather than being built with abundance to spare.

The tendency to pile data centre upon data centre also leads to areas of extreme concentration. In the UK, there are 40 large-scale data centres in the town of Slough alone – the majority housed within a single 2km² business park (Slough Trading Estate).

This kind of clustering brings clear efficiency advantages for power and connectivity, but it also concentrates risk: strained local resources, single points of failure, and – as facilities become more central to national economies and AI infrastructure – more attractive targets.

The damage to AWS facilities in the UAE and Bahrain during the 2026 US/Iran conflict, as well as the Russian attacks on a data centre in Kyiv, demonstrates how data centres are increasingly treated as strategic assets rather than just commercial ones. This is a risk that grows as more of the world’s digital infrastructure clusters into fewer, denser hubs.

Methodology and sources

For data centre numbers, we primarily sourced figures from Cloudscene, a connectivity directory for colocation data centres. It relies on information provided by industry users and data centre operators – and so will inevitably under-report. Many companies are understandably reticent about making their data centre locations public.

We compared Cloudscene’s data-centre listings from archived pages captured in 2023 with listings available in September 2026. The difference represents the change in facilities listed by Cloudscene, rather than a definitive count of newly constructed facilities. Changes may therefore reflect new construction, database additions, removals or changes in Cloudscene’s coverage.

Archived Cloudscene pages for the African countries in our list contained no data. The 2026 and 2023 data centre counts for Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, and Morocco were sourced from current and archived pages of the Data Center Map. The Data Centre Map sources its listings from data centre operators, end-user tips, and third-party databases. Like Cloudscene, the total numbers are likely under-reported.

We carried out an initial analysis of 143 countries. The 22 countries with the largest changes in numbers between 2023 and 2026 were analysed further.

Water stress scores are drawn from the World Resources Institute’s Aqueduct tool, which rates countries on a 0–5 scale based on the ratio of total water withdrawals to available renewable supply; “extremely high” denotes a score of 4–5 (where over 80% of the available supply is regularly withdrawn).

Population figures used to calculate the number of data centres per one million people were drawn from 2025 World Bank Group data where available. Land area figures used to calculate the number of data centres per 1,000 square kilometers were sourced from 2023 World Bank Group data. Internet penetration figures were sourced from 2024 World Bank Group data. Encyclopedia Britannica figures were used where World Bank Group data was unavailable.