What is a data center, and how big is 'big'?

Hyperscale — giant facilities built and run by a single tech company (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta). Individual buildings commonly draw 100–300 megawatts (MW); campuses can exceed 1,000 MW. There were about 1,136 hyperscale data centers worldwide in early 2025, with the U.S. holding 54% of total capacity.⁶⁵

Colocation (“colo”) — facilities that rent space and power to many customers. Whole buildings typically run 5–50 MW.⁵

Enterprise— a single company’s own facility (a bank, hospital system, or university), usually 1–10 MW.⁵

Edge / micro — small sites (a fraction of a MW up to ~2 MW) placed close to users for speed.⁵

AI facilities — the newest and largest category. AI trainingcampuses concentrate near cheap power and can reach staggering sizes: the OpenAI/Oracle “Stargate” site in Abilene, TX is being built to 1,200 MW, and Meta’s Louisiana campus is planned to scale to 5,000 MW.⁵ AI inference (answering users) spreads across many smaller sites.

Crypto mining— warehouses of specialized Bitcoin-mining computers cooled by walls of fans. They’re cheaper, simpler, and historically much louder than conventional data centers, with minimal staffing. The U.S. Energy Information Administration identified 137 U.S. bitcoin-mining facilities using an estimated 0.6%–2.3% of all U.S. electricity.²⁴ Pike County already has one: Blockware Solutions opened a ~20 MW mining facility at a former coal processing site in Belfry in 2022 (since grown to roughly 30 MW),¹⁸¹²⁷ announcing 5–10 full-time jobs at about $23/hour — and a 2023 regulatory filing reported about 10 employees hired with 3 more planned across its Pike County operations, roughly as promised. The announced expansion to 75–100 MW, however, never materialized.¹⁹¹²⁹

The Pikeville proposal’s initial phase is 25–30 MW, with developer interest in 75–100 MW if more power becomes available.²On the industry spectrum, that’s a mid-size facility — bigger than a typical enterprise data center, in the middle of the colocation range, and roughly one-tenth the size of a single typical hyperscale building.⁵

Sources: facility figures cited in the surrounding text.²⁰²¹¹⁸

Kentucky is part of the boom. Beyond the existing ~28 small commercial facilities (mostly Louisville colocation sites), the state has seen a wave of announcements: the 402 MW PowerHouse campus in Louisville,²⁰TeraWulf’s 1,000+ MW campus at EastPark Industrial Park near Ashland — Eastern Kentucky, on a former strip mine, served by Kentucky Power,²¹ and a proposed 2,200 MW hyperscale campus near Maysville backed by an unnamed Fortune 100 company.²²Kentucky’s 2024–2025 legislation (HB 8 and HB 775) created 50-year sales-tax exemptions for data center equipment — in counties under 50,000 people, including Pike County, the investment threshold is just $25 million.²⁵

A data center campus is mostly windowless buildings plus the infrastructure to power and cool them: an electrical substation, rows of backup diesel generators with fuel storage, a cooling plant (chillers, cooling towers, or dry coolers depending on design), security fencing, and fiber lines. For scale, the Louisville PowerHouse campus plans up to 6 buildings and 1.8 million sq ft on 154 acres for 402 MW — roughly 4,500 sq ft per MW.²⁰Reliability is rated by Uptime Institute “Tiers” (I–IV); most commercial builds target Tier III, meaning equipment can be serviced without shutting down.¹³

Data centers are capital-intensive, not labor-intensive. The most thorough independent study — by JLARC, the Virginia legislature’s research agency — found a typical data center employs about 50 people during operations, versus up to 1,500 on-site during construction.¹⁴ Highly automated campuses run roughly 25–40 permanent staff per 100 MW.¹⁷Real examples: Meta’s DeKalb, IL center reports ~200 permanent jobs; Google’s 500 MW Kansas City campus, 200 permanent and 1,000 construction;²⁶ and the 20 MW Belfry crypto mine, 5–10 jobs.¹⁹

The developer projects 40 permanent jobs and 190+ construction jobs for Pikeville’s initial phase¹ — within the documented range for a facility this size, on the optimistic side if the end user turns out to be a highly automated operation. The city has said it wants enforceable job commitments, not projections.²

Two honest framings from the research: subsidy-watchdog Good Jobs First calculates that subsidized data centers have averaged about $2 million in subsidies per permanent job¹⁵ — while a 2025 Brookings analysis found counties that landed their first large data center saw total private employment grow 4–5% over five to six years, with gains concentrated around hyperscale (not colocation) facilities.¹⁶ The real economic case for data centers is usually tax revenue, not payroll — Loudoun County collects roughly $900 million a year from them.⁹⁰Pikeville’s city government says it will not waive local taxes as an incentive.²