About
A live map of the federal and state policy shaping how data centers get built.
What this is
The Data Center Policy Tracker aggregates federal and state legislation and regulatory actions that affect data center development — energy and water use, emissions, grid interconnection, siting, tax treatment, and ratepayer impacts — and organizes them into one continuously-updated view. It is built for people working at the intersection of policy and research who need to see the whole landscape at once.
What it tracks
- Congress.gov — federal bills, sponsors, status, and actions.
- Federal Register — rules, proposed rules, and notices from DOE, EPA, FERC, and the Commerce Department.
- Regulations.gov — public comment activity on those rulemakings (how many comments a docket has drawn, and whether it is open for comment).
- State legislation — bills across all 50 states via LegiScan.
How it works
Scheduled jobs pull new and changed items from each source around the clock. Every new or changed item is sent to a large language model that classifies it against a fixed topic vocabulary and assigns a 0–1 relevance score, so the dashboard can filter out incidental mentions and surface what actually matters. Nothing is re-classified unnecessarily — only new or changed records.
How to use it
- Start with the watchlist for open comment periods, material status movements, and high-engagement dockets.
- Use state profiles to see the themes and policy levers appearing in one jurisdiction, then compare up to three states.
- Compare policies to identify differences in mechanisms such as siting, water standards, tax incentives, or utility rates.
- Check the record-quality panel and linked primary sources before relying on any individual item.
Topic taxonomy
Every item is tagged with any of these nine topics that materially apply:
Data & attribution
State legislative data is provided by LegiScan under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. Federal data comes from Congress.gov, the Federal Register, and Regulations.gov. This project is independent and not affiliated with any government agency.
Created by
Built by Nathaniel Burola, who works at the intersection of policy and research on sustainable data center development.