The explosion of AI across every industry has seen hundreds of water- and power-hungry server farms sprout up across the US. Already, one-third of the world's internet traffic flows through data centers in just one US state: Virginia.

However, until now, there has been no official record of the number of data centers in America, who owns them, or how much electricity they consume.

In an exclusive deep dive into the industry, Business Insider reporters cracked the code and, for the first time, revealed the true cost of the data warehouses feeding our growing appetite for cloud computing and AI.