What the signal actually is
A satellite takes a picture of the same fixed square of ground at each of 57 sites. Some of that square reads as bare ground — soil, gravel, concrete, a graded pad. Some of it reads as plants, water or cloud. Put two of our dated pictures of the same square side by side and the share reading as bare ground has either moved or it has not.
That is all of it. There is no clever part. The work is keeping the pictures dated, week after week, so that in November you can still prove what the ground looked like in June.
This is pictures, not permits. Nothing in this feed is a filing, an approval, an announcement or a contract. If you need to know why the ground changed, the county and the company are where you ask. We can hand you the two dated pictures that disagree.
We publish no megawatt figure and no percent-built figure. Ever. Neither of those things is in a satellite picture. Printing one next to a picture reading would be inventing it, and it is the single easiest lie for a feed like this to tell, so we have shut the door on it rather than trusted ourselves near it.
A move of five percentage points is our line, and we chose it. Across the 372 pairs of pictures we can compare, 281 move by less than five points and 91 move by five or more. Below five points a reading is inside the ordinary week-to-week wobble of this measure, so we do not call it a change. The number is on every page so you can check our arithmetic.
Public sample57 sites · 614 dated pictures · newest set sealed 17 Aug 2026
Between the set we sealed on 10 Aug 2026 and the set we sealed on 17 Aug 2026, the bare-ground share moved by five points or more at 11 named sites. That is all eleven, biggest move first. Nothing has been dropped and nothing has been rounded up.
| Site | Where | Bare ground, before and after | What moved | Pictures taken |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Meta Kunameta-kuna-id | Idaho | 89.4% → 64.5% | 24.8 points less bare | 28 Jul 2026 → 10 Aug 2026 |
| Meta Templemeta-temple-tx | Texas | 51.1% → 70.1% | 19.0 points more bare | 27 Jul 2026 → 16 Aug 2026 |
| Google Omahagoogle-omaha-ne | Nebraska | 29.1% → 13.8% | 15.3 points less bare | 1 Aug 2026 → 13 Aug 2026 |
| Google Lincolngoogle-lincoln-ne | Nebraska | 47.8% → 35.5% | 12.3 points less bare | 27 Jul 2026 → 11 Aug 2026 |
| Google Fort Waynegoogle-fort-wayne-in | Indiana | 42.9% → 54.1% | 11.1 points more bare | 4 Aug 2026 → 9 Aug 2026 |
| Google Midlothiangoogle-midlothian-tx | Texas | 59.9% → 70.5% | 10.7 points more bare | 3 Aug 2026 → 16 Aug 2026 |
| Stargate Abilenestargate-abilene-tx | Texas | 85.4% → 95.3% | 9.9 points more bare | 27 Jul 2026 → 16 Aug 2026 |
| Coreweave Dentoncoreweave-denton-tx | Texas | 84.3% → 92.8% | 8.6 points more bare | 1 Aug 2026 → 16 Aug 2026 |
| Stargate Shackelfordstargate-shackelford-tx | Texas | 88.8% → 80.5% | 8.3 points less bare | 4 Aug 2026 → 16 Aug 2026 |
| Google Papilliongoogle-papillion-ne | Nebraska | 60.2% → 52.8% | 7.4 points less bare | 1 Aug 2026 → 13 Aug 2026 |
| Google Red Oakgoogle-red-oak-tx | Texas | 72.1% → 79.0% | 6.9 points more bare | 3 Aug 2026 → 16 Aug 2026 |
Why the picture dates are not the sealed dates. A satellite passes when it passes and the sky has to be clear. The set we sealed on 17 Aug 2026 carries pictures taken between 3 Aug and 16 Aug 2026. Both dates are on every row, on this page and in the file, and we never present the day we sealed a picture as the day the ground looked like that. In 4 of the 91 moves we publish, the later set’s picture was in fact taken no later than the earlier set’s, because a set carries the newest clear picture rather than the newest one. Read the picture dates when you check a move.
The site name in each row is built out of the site’s own identifier in our store, which is printed underneath it. We do not attach a company’s legal name, an owner or a project title that the store does not hold.
What the whole feed holdscounted at build time, 22 Aug 2026
- 57 sites, on a list frozen before the first readNothing has been added since. A site that is not on the list is one we hold no picture of at all, and the coverage page names every one that is.
- 11 weekly sets sealed, 9 Jun 2026 to 17 Aug 2026614 dated pictures inside them. 12 collection runs produced those 11 sets, because the first day ran twice.
- 488 of those pictures are clear enough to compare, 126 are notA picture is only compared when at least half of it is readable and no more than two fifths of it is cloud. The 126 we could not use are kept, counted and named, not quietly dropped.
- 372 pairs of pictures we can compare, 91 real moves42 of those moves were the ground getting barer and 49 were it getting less bare, across 34 of the 57 sites.
- 23 sites have not moved five points in any pair we can compareThat is a finding, not a gap, and it gets its own page rather than being left as a silence.
What a change in bare ground does not mean
The square is bigger than the site. Every picture covers the same fixed square, 65,536 pixels of it, centred on the site. That square takes in whatever else is around — fields, roads, a car park, a neighbour’s land. A move here is a move across the whole square. It is not a measurement inside a fence line, because we do not have the fence line.
Summer moves this reading on its own. Bare ground falls when grass and crops grow back, and rises when a field beside the site is harvested or ploughed. We do not separate weather and farming from work on the site, and we will not pretend to. On a site ringed by farmland, read a summer fall as the season before you read it as anything else.
Ground getting barer is not building going up. From this height, fresh concrete, cleared soil and a ploughed field look much alike. And a flat reading does not mean an idle site: steel going up inside a pad that was already cleared, or a fit-out under a finished roof, leaves this reading exactly where it was.
A new picture every week is not a change every week. Every one of our 614 pictures is a different file from the last one, because it is a different pass on a different day. That proves nothing on its own. Only the reading moving proves anything, and only above our five-point line.
Doing this yourself
The pictures are free and public. Anyone can go and get today’s. What you cannot go and get is the unbroken weekly run of them for a fixed list of sites, read the same way every week, starting on a day before anybody knew which of those sites would matter.
To build this yourself you would have to pick the sites and freeze the list, then read every one of them every week without missing a week, then decide what counts as a real move and hold that decision still. The reading is the easy half. Not changing your mind about the method halfway through is the work.
What is in the file
- Every site whose bare-ground share moved five points or moreWith both readings, both sealed dates, both picture dates and both satellite scene identifiers, so you can go and pull the same pictures yourself.
- The weeks the sky took off us, named site by siteA cloudy week is a gap, not a reading, and we would rather name it than let the feed look more complete than it is.
- The sites that did not moveCounted the same way as the ones that did.
- The sites or states you name, not all 57And we tell you what we hold for each one. Nothing here is for sale yet.
- Nothing to cancelThere is no subscription behind this page, because we are not selling one yet.
How it works
- You email us and name the sites or the states you follow.
- We tell you which weeks we hold for them, and which weeks the cloud took off us. There is no checkout link, because this feed is not for sale yet.
- A person emails you the file, with the dates of the sealed sets it was built from.
See the file we hold
You do not have to take our word for what is in the file. Here are 25 rows of the real thing, carrying all 12 of its columns, cut out of the dated copies we sealed ourselves. Nothing in it is made up and nothing in it is tidied up.
- Open the 25 rows as a CSVA plain spreadsheet file. It saves to your machine rather than painting itself into a browser tab, and it opens in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets.
- The same 25 rows as JSONThe same rows again, laid out for reading with code.
Nothing on this page is for sale. The sample file is free to read, and so is every row on the page above it.
These 25 rows are a slice of the file, not the whole of it. What we cannot show you here is how far back it goes: the file goes back further than these rows do.
Start the thread
No pay button on this one yet. Email operations@ustechautomations.com. Name the sites or states you follow. We reply with which weeks we hold for them, and which weeks we could not read, before you spend anything. There is nothing to buy here yet, so nothing comes back but the answer.
Email us about the pictures we holdIf a site you follow is not on our frozen list of 57, we will tell you that rather than sell you one that is.