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What datacenterpermits.org is

A data center announces a project in a press release. The real commitments show up later, in permits: how many diesel generators, how many megawatts, how much water, how many tons of emissions a year. State agencies post those permits in different places, in different formats, often weeks late.

datacenterpermits.org pulls those filings into one record. Each site gets a page. Each permit gets a row, a status and a link to the agency document. Each figure carries a label that says where it came from. When the record changes, the News page logs the date and the reason.

The site is independent. No agency, developer, utility or advocacy group funds it or edits it.

What you can do here

• Map every site by state, with its permits, figures and open comment deadlines
• Near you data centers within 25 miles of a town, county or ZIP code
• Companies one page per developer, operator or project LLC: its sites, permits and filings
• Who decides the boards, owners, applicants and dockets behind a project, with pending votes
• Data Center Pulse what people in the watched states are saying about data centers on Reddit, matched against the record
• Reports graded, sourced analyses, such as PA-01 on every project on Pennsylvania DEP's tracker
• Filings Wire each week's new and changed permit actions, with documents and figures
• Downloads the curated air ledger, companies and relationships as CSV and JSON, free
• Data access the whole record in bulk, with status history and same-day changes
• For agents llms.txt, file schemas and IDs for scripts and AI assistants

Who uses it

• Residents find out what is planned nearby, what the permit allows, and when the comment period closes.
• Local officials read what a project filed with the state before the township vote.
• Reporters cite the permit, not the press release, and check a developer's numbers against the record.
• Vendors and contractors see a project at the permit stage, when it has a budget and no vendor yet.
• Developers, utilities and investors track competing sites, load, on-site power and time-in-permitting across states.
• Researchers and AI tools pull clean, cited rows instead of scraping six agency portals.

Get the data

The map stays free. Teams that need the rows on a schedule pay for assembly and speed, not for access.

Need a state, a permit type or a format the site doesn't cover yet? Email research@datacenterpermits.org and say what your team needs.

Who runs it

datacenterpermits.org is operated by Harrison Johnson, an independent researcher based in Pennsylvania. The site has no affiliation with DEP, the PUC, any developer, utility, or advocacy organization, and takes no funding from government or industry.

Mission

Find the public record behind data-center projects, state by state, and say plainly what it establishes.

The same record is here for residents, reporters, local officials, and industry. Nobody gets a different version.

Funding

Self-funded: the operator's time and a few dollars a month of hosting. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, and no funding from government or industry. Two products cost money, both to cover that time: the Filings Wire, a paid weekly delivery of the same public permit actions this site shows, assembled with their documents and figures (a free summary goes to anyone who asks; each full issue is posted publicly two weeks later), and Data access, the whole record in bulk, machine-readable, with history. Neither buys a first look at the ledger or a say in what it records; every site record, figure and document link is public the day it is verified. Subscriber emails are used only to deliver what was bought. The Wire was first offered paid on 2026-09-17, made free on 2026-09-18, and priced again on 2026-09-21 with the summary kept free.

Method

Sources. The Pennsylvania Bulletin; DEP plan approvals, technical review memos, and the Data Center Permit Tracker CSVs; SRBC and DRBC dockets; NPDES notices; the text of Executive Order 2026-05 and the DEP template Consent Order and Agreement; PUC orders; and named press. Every figure on the map and in a report links to the document it came from.

Evidence labels. Each value carries one of seven labels:

Permit figure

Stated in a DEP permit, plan approval, or review memo.

Official tracker

Stated in DEP's Data Center Permit Tracker or another agency dataset.

Developer statement

Stated by the company in a release, filing, hearing, or its own site.

Press report

Stated in a named news report, with the outlet and date.

Calculated

Derived from other labeled values (for example, units times rating); the arithmetic is shown.

Not published

No public document states it. Blank cells mean this.

Not yet reviewed

A document exists but has not been read into the record.

Measurements. The site tracks six kinds of number: generator count, generator megawatts, on-site plant megawatts, permitted NOx in tons per year, water in gallons per day, and facility load in megawatts. Each is reported with its label and its source.

Grades. Reports grade projects by which of three kinds of public evidence exist on the date shown — a DEP filing, a local approval, and financing or a named end user. Established means all three are on the record. Partial means one or two, and the reason names the missing leg. Announced only means a DEP row, a press mention, or a land position, and nothing else. A grade is not a forecast. It states what the record contains on the date shown, and it changes when the record changes.

Blanks. A blank means "not published." It does not mean zero, and it does not mean the project is small.

Verified. A permit counts as verified when its figures have been read out of the permit document itself and entered in the ledger with a quote from that document — the ledger's verification column says document or figures. Every other permit is on record but not yet verified; its row says so.

Updates

Automated checks pull the sources daily. A human reviews every change before it enters the record. Every change is logged with its date and reason on the News page, and the ledger sheet the map reads from is public.

Corrections

We correct the record when a source shows we are wrong. Send the project, the claim, and the document to corrections@datacenterpermits.org or use the form. We acknowledge within three working days, check the claim against the cited source, and either change the record and log the change on the News page with the date and reason, or explain why not. Grade disputes are answered on the report page under Revisions. We do not remove sourced public-record facts because a party dislikes them; we do correct errors of fact, attribution, or date.

Who did the work

AI agents do the legwork here: they pull the DEP files, read the Bulletin, draft summaries, and check links on a fixed overnight schedule with no ability to publish. Every grade, every sentence on a report page, and every correction is reviewed and decided by the operator, who is responsible for it. If an AI-produced summary is wrong, the error is ours, and the correction path above applies.

Limits

• Pennsylvania, Virginia and Texas by daily agency feed. Oregon: 21 sources from DEQ's older permit search, three read in full (Report OR-01); nothing issued after 2024-11-20 yet.
• The DEP tracker is larger than the graded set. Projects added to the tracker after a report's grade date are not graded until the next version.
• The Department of Revenue does not publish the names of certified data-center facilities, so no row says whether a project holds the equipment tax exemption.
• Megawatts are not published for about half the rows. DEP's tracker has no capacity field and many developers never state one.
• Absence from the map is not proof that no project exists. It means no permit or tracker row has been found yet. Tell us what we missed below.

Report a missing project or document

Contact

• research@datacenterpermits.org — requests for the working research behind a report, or use the request form.
• corrections@datacenterpermits.org — corrections and grade disputes, or use the dispute form.
• hello@datacenterpermits.org — everything else, including missing projects or documents.
• The public ledger sheet — the source of truth the map reads from.