That's the land allocation rather than the building-size / data-centre size.

The average data centre is 10,000 square metres (2.5 acres).

As well as compute and network facilities, DCs also need to accommodate parking, personnel areas, cooling, fire-suppression, power substations, power redundancy (generators), ground-security…

244 acres is absolutely at the upper end of any DC site.

Caledonia is an exurb of Milwaukee, so it's pretty sparse and spread out. There isn't that much demand for land on the outskirts of Milwaukee and most of the demand out there is industrial. Compared to the other industrial uses you'd get, data centers are almost certainly preferable.

I assume you mean AWS us-east-1. It isn't a single data center. It is a cluster of data centers around Northern Virginia.

us-east-1 is a region. That means that it is 3 to 6 “availability zones” within a 100 km or so. Each of these availability zones consists of a cluster of data centers. Each cluster is perhaps 3-5 that are a few km from each other. The data centers will have tens of thousands of servers each.

So that is the mental model you should have for “how big is us-east-1”. But also, the data centers are not going to be, individually, anything like 244 acres. Best guess is that individual data centers are between 200,000 and 400,000 square feet. That is 5 to 10 acres.

Do the math above and us-east-1 may be 300 acres of floor space spread over a very large area.

Based on a majority of games regions, US-East-1 is scattered properties in a <100 square mile area near Dulles Airport in Virginia, associated with an Internet backbone junction and former AOL campus in small town called Ashburn.

Almost all of the site would have been open space, existing transmission corridors, an electric substation, and two flood control ponds they threw in to try to sweeten the deal by offsetting the new impermeable surfaces. The data halls are a small portion of the site.

[dead]

My data center is bigger than yours.