Hospitals, banks, manufacturers, researchers, governments, schools, and communications networks all depend on digital compute and storage. The infrastructure is economy-wide even when a campus operator is a technology company.
Cloud computing already appears across much of the private economy. This Census measure counts firms that reported cloud use in production processes. It does not identify the provider or facility.
2023 Annual Business Survey, reference years 2020–2022. Percentage of responding U.S. private employer firms in covered industries. The unit is the firm, not the establishment, and results are not weighted for nonresponse. Public institutions and several industries are outside the survey scope.
| Sector | Value (% of firms) |
|---|---|
| Manufacturing | 25.7 % of firms |
| All covered sectors | 31.4 % of firms |
| Health + social assistance | 36.6 % of firms |
| Telecommunications | 40.6 % of firms |
| Finance + insurance | 45.8 % of firms |
| Professional + technical | 50.8 % of firms |
| Information | 55.3 % of firms |
| Hospitals | 57.2 % of firms |
Cloud and colocation campuses serve institutions throughout the economy. Technology companies may operate the facilities. The workloads span social media, AI, healthcare, finance, government, and more.
These functions are representative. The diagram provides no market-share estimate. Organizations use different mixes of on-site systems, colocation, cloud, edge facilities, and third-party software.
Data centers are a physical layer beneath many cloud, transaction, communications, research, and records systems. Institutions may use their own facilities, colocation, public cloud, edge infrastructure, or a mix; national reliance does not disclose one campus's workload.
Broad sector reliance cannot show that a proposed local campus serves the surrounding hospital, school, or bank. That claim needs tenant and workload disclosure. Without it, describe the facility only as part of a wider shared infrastructure system.
Only Big Tech needs data centers.
Census reports cloud use across manufacturing, finance, healthcare, telecommunications, information, and professional services. Federal payment and scientific systems also document direct reliance on geographically dispersed data centers or computing facilities.
The cloud is virtual, so physical data centers are optional.
Cloud computing pools physical servers, storage, and networks behind an on-demand service. The delivery model still depends on buildings and equipment.
Every new campus directly serves its nearby community.
The economy-wide case is real. A specific facility's users may still be undisclosed or far away. A general hospital or bank example cannot become a local benefit claim without evidence about the tenant and workload.
Without these inputs, a project-specific verdict is incomplete. Treat missing evidence as an open question.
U.S. private employer firms reporting cloud-based computing use in production processes during 2020–2022
These are firm-level responses from covered private employer industries. The measure does not identify a provider, hosting facility, workload size, or local data-center demand. Percentages are not weighted for nonresponse.Cloud computing characteristics, service models, and deployment models
Defines cloud computing and its service models; it does not quantify facility energy, a user's marginal impact, or a particular sector's adoption.Fedwire Funds Service transfers during calendar year 2025
Fedwire transfer volume and value demonstrate one critical digital workload; they do not measure the data-center footprint of the finance sector as a whole.Fedwire applications, redundant data centers, and failover testing
Describes Fedwire's geographically dispersed infrastructure. It cannot establish the architecture or local-serving role of a proposed commercial data center.U.S. office-based physicians using electronic health records
Electronic-health-record adoption demonstrates a digital healthcare workload; it does not reveal cloud use, facility location, or energy demand.Medicare fee-for-service claims processed by contractors
Administrative-claim volume shows transaction scale. It cannot reveal hosting topology, data-center location, or the share served by commercial cloud providers.Aurora and Polaris scientific-computing use during 2025
This covers one Department of Energy computing facility. Node-hours measure allocated machine use; they do not measure electricity or the science sector's total infrastructure demand.Global data-center and AI electricity demand, efficiency, and scenarios
This global analysis uses scenarios. Per-task energy varies by model, hardware, utilization, data-center efficiency, network, and device, so the report cannot serve as a universal personal-footprint calculator.