Data centers vary significantly in size, from compact micro facilities to expansive hyperscale centers. The latter category includes facilities over 10,000 square feet that house upwards of 5,000 servers. Currently, there are around 1,200 hyperscale data centers worldwide, with over half located in the United States. Notably, the largest data center in the world is the China Telecom Inner Mongolia Information Park, which reportedly spans more than 10.7 million square feet in Hohhot, an autonomous region in China.
China Telecom, the country’s largest state-owned telecommunications company, operates hundreds of data centers across mainland China and globally. These facilities provide colocation, secure hosting, and cloud services to various enterprises and cloud providers. Despite widespread reports labeling the Inner Mongolia Information Park as the largest data center, verifying its size remains a challenge.
In 2022, Sebastian Moss from Data Center Dynamics sought to clarify the center’s dimensions. Using Google Earth satellite images, he assessed the site and concluded that it appeared significantly smaller than the claimed size. Moss estimated the facility’s actual area at approximately one million square feet, suggesting that it may be unfinished or that development has stalled. “Development was either abandoned mid-way, or is still ongoing a decade after the campus began,” he noted.
Many reported statistics are based on information from sources such as China Daily, a publication owned by the Chinese Communist Party, which raises questions about their accuracy. Furthermore, not all of the space at the Inner Mongolia site is dedicated to data center operations. The campus reportedly includes warehouses, office space, and living quarters, complicating attempts to assess its actual data processing capacity.
While the Inner Mongolia Information Park garners attention, other significant data centers exist in China. The China Mobile facility in Heilongjiang Province boasts an estimated 7.1 million square feet, while the Range International Information Hub in Langfang claims approximately 6.3 million square feet. Similar to the Inner Mongolia site, the validity of these figures is difficult to confirm.
In the United States, determining the largest data center is equally complex. Data center operator Switch promotes its Reno site as the “largest, most powerful data center campus in the world.” However, the current footprint of the Reno location is only 1.4 million square feet, with plans for expansion that could eventually reach between 7.2 million and 10 million square feet. At present, Switch’s largest facility is its Las Vegas Core campus, covering over 2 million square feet.
Another notable facility is the National Security Agency (NSA) data center in Utah, which spans 1.5 million square feet. The nature of the data stored there is highly classified, likely involving information from surveillance operations.
Historically, data centers have not always been this expansive. The first hyperscale data center is often considered to be Google’s facility in The Dalles, Oregon, which measures only 94,000 square feet compared to the massive structures of today.
As the demand for data storage and processing continues to grow, the landscape of data centers evolves. The competition for the title of the largest facility highlights the complexities of verifying size and capacity in an industry that is both rapidly advancing and shrouded in secrecy.
