Santa Clara County now has 75 data centers, enough to rank second among all U.S. counties, and its 23% growth rate from 2025 to 2026 was the fastest among the five U.S. counties with the most data centers. The surge comes as the county's median home price hit $2.05 million as of mid-2026, and as new data-center proposals keep piling up around downtown San Jose and beyond.
The numbers come from a National Association of Realtors survey covering the first half of 2026, as reported by The Mercury News. Nationally, the survey counted an estimated 1,474 operating data centers, with Loudoun County, Virginia still the clear leader at 213 facilities. Santa Clara County's growth rate outpaced Maricopa County, Arizona (up 16.7%), Loudoun County (up 7%), Prince William County, Virginia (up 8.6%), and Grand County, Washington (up 2.6%) — all counties that also saw meaningful data-center expansion over the same year.
One downtown San Jose address highlighted in the Mercury News report, 55 South Market Street, itself houses a data center — a small but telling sign of how deeply the industry has embedded itself into the region's commercial core. That local footprint is part of a broader pattern: counties with more data centers, according to the same survey data, tend to have higher home values, higher incomes, more college-educated residents, and younger populations.
A National Snapshot That Puts Santa Clara in Rare Company
Just how unusual is Santa Clara County's position? According to a September report from the Commercial Observer, 92% of U.S. counties contain no mapped data centers at all, while just 10 counties account for 42% of all data center development nationwide. That extreme concentration reflects the reality that data centers require massive power networks and fiber infrastructure that naturally cluster around a handful of established tech hubs.
Regional data compiled by Real Estate News shows Loudoun and Prince William counties together account for roughly 19% of all mapped U.S. data centers, while Silicon Valley in Santa Clara County and Franklin and Licking counties in central Ohio together account for around 10%. The historical valuation gap is stark, too: the Commercial Observer's analysis found that counties with 10 or more data centers saw median home values surge 95% between 2014 and 2024, reaching $431,750, compared to just $174,500 in counties with none.
Lawrence Yun, addressing the survey's findings, cautioned against reading too much into raw data-center counts. “There is no single data-center effect,” Yun said, noting that local-market outcomes vary significantly and that the number of data centers alone does not determine effects on home values, jobs, or utility costs. The survey of 885 real estate professionals in data-center markets, detailed by CoStar, found that 50% saw increased nearby commercial property values, while residential impacts were split — 25% reported higher nearby home values and 22% reported lower ones. Rising demand tied to data centers, per the same survey, particularly affected industrial properties and land rather than housing broadly.
Surveyed agents also flagged a mix of client concerns tied to the boom: worries about environmental contamination, water usage, and energy prices, along with concerns about power and water costs more generally. Those anxieties echoed in reported client experiences that were, in some cases, negative for local home values even as others reported positive effects — a split that lines up with Yun's point that outcomes differ market by market.
The Power Squeeze Behind Santa Clara's Boom
Santa Clara's growth hasn't come without strain on the city's own infrastructure. Data centers consume roughly 60% of all electricity sold by Silicon Valley Power, the city's municipal utility, whose total power sales grew from 2,400 gigawatt-hours in 2002 to 4,500 gigawatt-hours in 2024, according to The Silicon Valley Voice. That load has intensified scrutiny of the grid and the infrastructure needed to support Santa Clara's data centers.
In July 2026, the Santa Clara City Council approved a $350 million revolving credit line for Silicon Valley Power to finance major receiving-station upgrades, the Voice reported. To help bridge the gap in the meantime, the utility had launched a pilot program more than six months before the Voice article's May 2026 publication with Emerald AI and Nvidia at a Santa Clara facility, testing dynamic GPU power management that can temporarily reduce a data center's energy draw during peak demand without halting AI computing tasks, according to the City of Santa Clara.
The financial upside for the city is significant: data-center facilities now generate approximately 13% of Santa Clara's general fund revenue, according to municipal disclosures reported by the Voice. That revenue helps explain why local officials continue courting data-center development even as they scramble to fund the power infrastructure needed to support it — a tension playing out across nearby projects, including Prologis's San Jose data-center proposal.
Water Use Remains Largely Undisclosed
Beyond power, water consumption is emerging as another flashpoint. A May 2026 statewide study by the think tank Next 10 and researchers at Santa Clara University found that the vast majority of operating and planned data centers in California provide no publicly accessible documentation of their cooling water consumption, a gap the study's authors say is fueling growing environmental and regulatory debate across Silicon Valley.
That transparency gap has become part of a broader regional reckoning over data centers' water footprint. For now, Santa Clara County's dual identity — as both a fiscal winner and an infrastructure bottleneck — looks set to define its data-center boom for years to come.
