Data centres cluster into a small number of regions rather than distributing evenly. Electricity is the reason, and it operates through both price and availability.
Power is the dominant operating cost
A facility's servers draw power continuously, and cooling that equipment consumes a further substantial share on top of the computing load.
Over a facility's life, electricity typically exceeds the cost of the building itself, which makes the local price a primary siting criterion.
A modest difference in the rate per unit compounds across constant consumption for many years, which is why operators pursue power contracts before selecting sites.
Grid connection is often the binding constraint
Securing a connection of the required size can take years, since it may need new transmission capacity and substation works.
In constrained regions, connection queues have become long enough that available capacity, rather than price, determines where a facility can be built at all.
Operators consequently favour locations with existing spare capacity, including sites of decommissioned industrial plants that already hold large connections.
Cooling makes climate a factor
Heat must be removed continuously, and cooler ambient conditions allow more hours of the year to be handled by outside air rather than mechanical refrigeration.
This reduces energy use directly, which is why cool climates with reliable power attract facilities despite being far from the users they serve.
Water availability matters for the same reason, and it has become contentious where evaporative cooling competes with other local demands.
Latency pulls in the opposite direction
Some workloads must sit close to users, because the physical time for a signal to travel is a hard limit that no equipment can remove.
This produces a split network, with large training and storage facilities placed where power is cheap and smaller edge sites placed near population centres.
The two categories have different economics, and only the first is genuinely free to follow electricity prices.
Local effects have made siting political
Large facilities employ comparatively few people once operational while drawing significant power and, in some designs, water.
Communities weighing tax revenue against those demands have increasingly imposed conditions, and some have declined new developments outright.
Operators have responded by contracting for new generation and by publishing consumption data, since access to power now depends on local consent as much as on price.