The need for data centers to drive 21st century cloud computing and win the AI race with China is a matter of such national urgency that Energy Secretary Chris Wright describes it as America’s “next Manhattan Project.”

But assessing how many data centers—a ubiquitous yet vague term for “server farms,” supercomputer networks, bitcoin and crypto “mines”—exist right now in the United States is, in itself, a foray into quixotic cloudy computing.