I wanted to share some important research that Realtor.com just published about data centers and how they're reshaping housing markets across America. This is something we're starting to feel the effects of here in the Bay Area, so it's worth understanding what's happening nationally.
According to Realtor.com Research, data center capacity in the United States has exploded over the past decade, growing nearly fivefold from 2015 to 2025. These massive facilities, which power cloud computing and artificial intelligence, have spread far beyond the traditional tech hubs. Virginia remains the biggest hub by far, but you're now seeing substantial data center development in places like Iowa, Indiana, Georgia, and even Mississippi and Louisiana. What was once concentrated on the coasts has truly become a national phenomenon.
The geographic reach of this buildout is striking. The number of ZIP codes hosting large data centers jumped from just twelve in 2015 to over one hundred by mid-2026, and that number keeps climbing. What this means is that communities that have never dealt with industrial facilities of this scale are now finding them in their backyards. The percentage of American home sales happening within five miles of a large data center has more than doubled since 2018, and if all the projects currently in the pipeline come through, that figure could nearly triple.
Here's something interesting about where these facilities are being sited. The industry initially concentrated near cities to tap into power grids and fiber networks, but it's been steadily moving outward. New data centers approved for 2027 activation are sitting roughly thirty-four miles from major city centers, significantly farther than their 2026 counterparts. Even more telling, they're being built in increasingly rural areas with much lower housing density. In 2017, typical new data center locations had about one hundred sixteen residential units per square mile nearby, but by 2026 that had dropped to thirty-two units per square mile.
What's also shifted is the income profile of communities receiving these facilities. Before 2020, data centers tended to locate in lower-income rural areas where land was cheap. But as artificial intelligence investments accelerated, hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon started concentrating new capacity in affluent suburbs. Northern Virginia communities like Aldie and Haymarket now host major data center clusters and have median household incomes exceeding two hundred thousand dollars.
What I am seeing locally is that this national trend toward data center expansion puts our region at an interesting crossroads. The Bay Area already has deep data center infrastructure, but as the industry spreads across America and consolidates in higher-income areas, we need to be thinking about how this industrial shift affects housing availability, property values, and community character in different parts of the East Bay and Fremont. Whether new facilities bring economic benefit or strain on local resources really depends on how individual communities approach the development and what protections they put in place upfront.
