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Common Ground · Trends in the making

data centers

Rising · tracked since 5 September 2026 · first seen 7 August 2026

Rising Rising: mentions in the last seven days run at 3.9× the pace of the three weeks before.

Counted every morning across Hacker News, Google News, GitHub, arXiv and Reddit, from each platform’s own search interface, with the documents the counts were read from listed below. This page is rewritten with every run; the run it stands on is .

  • Also counted as: data-centers
  • Entered the watchlist as a discovery the machine proposed and a person accepted — promoted 2026-09-05: proposed on 3 consecutive runs, 5 platforms
  • Carried in the last thirty days by: Hacker News · Google News · GitHub

Mentions per platform

The counts per platform, as a table
Documents mentioning this term per platform, over one day, seven days and thirty days, with the total excluding page views
Platform 1 day 7 days 30 days Note
Hacker News 3 18 63
Google News 67 96 96 may undercount
GitHub 2 26 100 may undercount
arXiv 0 0 0
Reddit 0 0 0
Wikipedia page views — — —
Total (page views excluded) 72 140 259

The term and each of its declared aliases are searched as one quoted phrase through every platform's own search interface, once a day; matching documents are deduplicated by URL, and each document counts once however often the phrase occurs in it. The three windows end at the run, so seven days means the seven days before this morning. A platform marked as possibly undercounting returns at most a fixed number of items per query, so its thirty-day figure is a floor rather than a count. Page views are shown where the watchlist names a Wikipedia article and are never added to a total — they are readers, not documents.

May undercount: Google News, GitHub — the feed returns at most a fixed number of items per query, so the thirty-day figure is a floor.

The arc

One bar per committed run, oldest on the left, tallest bar = 110 mentions in a day. The two brackets are the windows the status word rests on: the last seven runs, and the three weeks before them. The table below is the same data, day by day.
The arc, day by day, as a table
Mentions of this term per committed run, newest first
Run Mentions that day
2026-10-19 72
2026-10-18 36
2026-10-17 81
2026-10-16 99
2026-10-15 4
2026-10-14 97
2026-10-13 94
2026-10-12 85
2026-10-11 40
2026-10-10 69
2026-10-09 92
2026-10-08 91
2026-10-07 97
2026-10-06 102
2026-10-05 84
2026-10-04 53
2026-10-03 78
2026-10-02 94
2026-10-01 92
2026-09-30 110
2026-09-29 93
2026-09-28 70
2026-09-27 31
2026-09-26 3
2026-09-25 92
2026-09-24 100
2026-09-23 95
2026-09-22 102
2026-09-21 81
2026-09-20 41

One point per committed run, oldest on the left, read out of the dated files in src/data/trending/terms rather than from any stored series: a day the machine did not run has no bar, and a day that counted nothing is drawn as a hairline, because a measured zero is still a measurement. The strip is as long as the archive, which is why a term added recently has a short one.

Receipts

The newest documents the counts were read from — title, platform and date, nothing else. The bodies are not stored anywhere: the receipt exists so a reader can open the source and check the count themselves.

  1. Data Centers Have a New PR Plan: Your Kid's Field Trip Hacker News · 2026-10-19
  2. 3 shuttered nuclear plants could soon power homes, AI data centers Hacker News · 2026-10-19
  3. Aurora City Council to attend special meeting to discuss moratorium on data centers — CBS News Google News · 2026-10-19
  4. Aurora lawmakers to weigh moratorium on data centers in special session Monday night — Sentinel Colorado Google News · 2026-10-19
  5. Abbott raked in $9 million from data center-related donors as he called for regulations — KEYE Google News · 2026-10-19
  6. The race to power AI data centers is reshaping America's electric grid — CNBC Google News · 2026-10-19
  7. Google's head of energy and power on how AI data centers can help improve the grid — CNBC Google News · 2026-10-19
  8. November Races Put Data Centers on Ballot, Clouding Natural Gas Demand — Natural Gas Intelligence Google News · 2026-10-19
  9. syukri-radius/racmond GitHub · 2026-10-19
  10. Data Centers Are Turning Trump Voters into Democrats Hacker News · 2026-10-18
  11. Data centers are now the largest financial bet in US history Hacker News · 2026-10-18
  12. Russian Bot Activity Collapses by 84% After Strikes on Yandex Data Centers Hacker News · 2026-10-18

How this is measured

  1. A term is a phrase, not a subject: it is counted when it or one of its declared aliases occurs in the title of a document a platform returns for that quoted phrase.
  2. Each document counts once. Duplicates are removed by URL, so one story syndicated to five outlets counts as the number of distinct URLs, not as five mentions of a topic.
  3. The windows end at the run, not at midnight: one day, seven days and thirty days back from the moment the machine asked.
  4. The status compares the seven-day count with the three weeks before it against thresholds committed in the pipeline. No editorial judgement enters, and no model is called.
  5. The first sighting is the earliest receipt across this run and every committed file, so it can only move backwards — never forwards, and never to today because the archive is young.

Method sheet, section seven → This term as JSON → The whole watchlist as JSON →

No language model writes anything on this page: the count is a platform’s own answer to a quoted phrase, the status is a threshold in the pipeline, and the sentence above the numbers is assembled from them. Data CC0 1.0; cite as Frank Bültge, Common Ground — trends in the making, https://frankbueltge.de/trending/topics/data-centers/