# Seven-country evidence review All source definitions and availability limits are retained. ## United States Crowding-out is most plausible where supply cannot respond quickly. A national pool of investment can grow while one utility has no near-term connection capacity. A country's construction workforce can expand while a particular project waits for an electrical contractor. Commercial land can be plentiful nationally and scarce in an established connectivity cluster. The U.S. county evidence follows 694 counties with at least 25,000 private-sector employees in 2015. Eligibility is determined before the recent boom, not by selecting places with striking later outcomes. The annual geography is held consistent; Connecticut's changing county boundaries and U.S. territories are excluded. Suppressed QCEW wages and employment stay missing, even when their source cells contain zeros. The footprint on this map is intentionally modest in its claim. NAICS 518210 covers data processing, hosting and related infrastructure services. Establishments in that industry are neither a census of data centers nor a measure of operating megawatts. Employment and establishment counts may reflect business organization as well as physical infrastructure. The map locates selected markets; it does not pretend to inventory every campus. ## Ireland Ireland supplies a clearer electricity numerator than most countries. Data centers consumed 7.663 TWh in 2025, about 23 percent of metered electricity, compared with roughly 5 percent in 2015. That is a large reallocation of the consumption mix. Yet other metered customers also consumed more electricity over the decade. A rising share and a growing remainder can coexist. Housing adds counterevidence to a literal zero-sum story. The latest frozen dwelling-completion series reports 36,215 completions in 2025, revised from 36,284 in the initial release. Completions increased rather than collapsing. That observation does not tell us how many more homes might have been completed under a different allocation of construction and grid resources; it simply rules out treating every simultaneous increase in data-center use as an observed fall in all other activity. ## United Kingdom / Great Britain Great Britain's new meter-matched estimates make the geography unusually concrete. External-serving data centers consumed 4.46 TWh in 2024, about 1.79 percent of metered grid electricity. In Slough, the corresponding share was 65.16 percent. Hillingdon's share was 28.13 percent. None of those local figures is described adequately by the national average. The measurement remains incomplete. DESNZ labels the series Official Statistics in Development and excludes enterprise data centers used internally by their owners. ONS explains why investment cannot yet be isolated: the buildings, equipment and software can have different economic owners, and their reporting units can belong to different industries. A whole-economy hardware investment series cannot repair that missing classification by being renamed. ## Germany / EU and Netherlands Frankfurt's planning department states the land mechanism directly. Its June 2022 concept was adopted to guide data-center development while accounting for competition with other commercial uses. It distinguishes suitable, restricted and exclusion areas, with binding planning rules to follow. This is primary evidence that land competition is recognized in local policy, not an estimate of how many factories were displaced. The European reporting scheme creates an additional evidence source for energy performance, but a threshold-based reporting database is not a balanced 2015-2026 national investment panel. For the Netherlands, CBS provides a dedicated-connection electricity series: 4.58 percent in provisional 2024 data. It excludes facilities embedded in institutions such as universities and hospitals. Comparisons must preserve those definitions, not erase them for a clean ranking. ## Australia Australia makes the asset distinction visible from another direction. ABS identifies a surge in equipment investment in data services, inside the wider information industry. Its construction discussion uses commercial buildings not elsewhere classified, a broader building category. The two series describe different assets and populations; neither permits subtracting a universal data-center category from all investment. Imported servers also matter for interpretation. They add to investment and the capital stock, while their imported value is deducted in the expenditure account for GDP. Domestic construction, imported equipment and future digital-service output therefore contribute through different channels and at different times. A large capital-expenditure announcement is not the same as an equally large addition to domestic value added. ## Canada / Alberta Canada's clearest constraint in this source set is provincial and prospective. In June 2025, Alberta's system operator reported 29 proposed data-center projects requesting more than 16 GW, and announced an interim additional large-load connection limit of 1.2 GW through 2028. The operator tied the limit to reliability under a conservative supply-and-demand scenario. That is a load-connection constraint, not a generation-interconnection queue or 16 GW of operating demand. The proposals would not necessarily all be built or require connections at the same time. A comparable ERCOT history could not be verified for this edition. Alberta therefore provides a documented case of restricted access, rather than a proxy for the entire North American grid.