Who Has The Biggest Data Center In The World?

Data centers come in an array of sizes. Micro data centers, for example, can be the size of a fridge. When we picture vast, windowless buildings in the desert dominating the landscape and causing water scarcity for local people, then what we're thinking of is a Hyperscale Data Center. These are the data centers that are over 10,000 square feet and house more than 5,000 servers. There are around 1,200 of them worldwide, and more than half of them are located in the U.S. However, the very biggest data center of all isn't in the U.S., and it isn't owned by Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.

China Telecom Inner Mongolia Information Park is widely reported to be the world's largest data center. It covers more than 10.7 million square feet and is situated in Hohhot in Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region within China. China Telecom is the country's largest state-owned telecommunications company, with hundreds of data centers across mainland China and internationally, offering colocation facilities, secure hosting, and cloud services to enterprises and cloud providers.

Although most sources state that China Telecom Inner Mongolia Information Park is the biggest data center, it's actually quite a difficult thing to verify. In 2022, Sebastian Moss of Data Center Dynamics tried to find a definitive answer to the question. He found the China Telecom campus using Google Earth satellite images, measured the dimensions, and discovered that it appeared to be considerably smaller than the official figures. In fact, even accounting for its six buildings, each with four floors, he concluded it was about a tenth of the widely reported figure, so a million square feet, which is still pretty large. Moss concluded that the Information Park is likely unfinished and that "development was either abandoned mid-way, or is still ongoing a decade after the campus began." 

Businesses in China are not keen to let Western journalists explore their facilities, so the reported dimensions are based on those provided by sources like China Daily, a newspaper owned by the Chinese Communist Party. Even if you set aside the possibility of overly optimistic official stats, there's also the question of how much of the space on a data center campus is actually used as a data center. The China Telecom site in Inner Mongolia is reported to include warehouses, offices, and on-site living quarters, as well as data center facilities. 

Guinness World Records lists the Switch data center in Las Vegas as the largest data center campus, with a total floor area of 2.2 million square feet. But that record hasn't been updated since 2014, so maybe owners of data centers, especially in China, aren't that bothered about getting their projects verified by Guinness.

There are two other data centers in China that also make online Top 10 lists. China Mobile's data center in Heilongjiang Province is reported to have a square footage of 7.1 million square feet, and Range International Information Hub in Langfang supposedly has 6.3 million square feet. Although, as with the Inner Mongolia Campus, these stats are hard to verify

Trying to work out which data center is the largest in the U.S. is also confusing. On a promotional video on its website, data center operator Switch claims its Reno site is "The largest, most powerful data center campus in the world." However, the data center buildings at the Reno site currently only cover 1.4 million square feet, although it has space for much more, with four more data centers already under construction and more planned. Estimates for the eventual size of the data center campus range from 7.2 million to 10 million square feet. Currently, though, far from being the biggest data center in the world, Reno isn't even Switch's largest. That honor belongs to its Las Vegas Core campus, which covers over 2 million square feet.

Another noteworthy data center in the U.S. is the one that belongs to the National Security Agency (NSA) in Utah, which covers 1.5 million square feet. Exactly what data is stored there is highly classified, although it's likely to be information collected from surveillance and spy satellite cameras. Data centers haven't always been this big. The very first hyperscale data center in the world is thought to be Google's Dalles data center near Portland, Oregon. Compared to the other campuses mentioned, this one is relatively compact, at a mere 94,000 square feet.