Data Center Agglomeration and Power Infrastructure Capacity in the United States

arXiv:2611.06737v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The continuous expansion of digital infrastructure, especially data centers, has imposed unprecedented, geographically concentrated stress on existing power grids. However, rigorous causal evidence quantifying how these facilities reshape local power-infrastructure supply remains limited. This study builds a comprehensive county-level US panel dataset spanning 2010-2024, uniquely integrating individual data center building footprints and power-plant additions. To mitigate endogeneity and high-dimensional confounding, this study deploys Double Machine Learning with five-fold cross-fitting, conditioning on county and year fixed effects alongside regional socioeconomic covariates.