How the Rapid Expansion of Data Centers Is Reshaping Local Housing Markets

The Seattle Angle

The count of such facilities has surged sevenfold to 350, with 200+ additional projects in the pipeline. For Seattle, the trajectory is academic: the city has imposed a moratorium on new data centers, joining Nashville, Cleveland, and Durham on the regulatory sidelines.

The National Footprint

The buildout has expanded ninefold by ZIP code, from 12 in 2015 to 108 by June 2026, with the full-year count on pace for 125. Combined power capacity across 36 states now exceeds 43,000 megawatts — a fivefold increase from 9,600 MW a decade earlier. Virginia anchors the market at 13,300 MW, roughly one-fifth of projected national capacity. New construction is migrating from established tech hubs to lower-density, lower-cost regions. Mississippi and Louisiana, which had minimal presence as recently as 2022, are on track to add thousands of megawatts over the next two years.

Glen Morgenstern, the report's author, notes that home values near recently opened facilities have not registered major price changes to date. His forward read: the next 12–24 months carry materially different risk. The upcoming fleet is larger, more power-intensive, and sited in markets without prior exposure to the asset class. Price discovery, he projects, becomes highly directional — either local sentiment around noise, water, and grid strain compresses values, or absorption holds.

Where Seattle Sits

The moratorium positions the city ahead of the regulatory curve but freezes it out of the tax-base expansion other jurisdictions are pursuing. New York Governor Kathy Hochul instituted a one-year pause on large data center construction pending environmental review. Ohio halted tax incentives that previously attracted the industry. In Georgia, ratepayer backlash forced OpenAI to pledge that its $30 billion Effingham County campus would not raise local electricity bills. Opposition, moratorium, renegotiation — the cycle is becoming standard.

For Seattle buyers and sellers, the binding variable is whether the moratorium survives the next budget cycle. If it holds, the local housing market remains insulated from the absorption dynamics now flagged in 108 ZIP codes. If it lifts, Seattle values enter the same dispersion pattern the Realtor.com data identifies elsewhere.