Data Sources & Attribution

Last reviewed 10 August 2026

DC Hub exists to aggregate public infrastructure data into one place, so that nobody has to rebuild the same picture from forty scattered sources. If you rely on a number we publish, you should be able to see where it came from and what you are allowed to do with it. This page is that answer, in full.

The licence therefore differs by layer. A single answer across all four layers would necessarily be false about at least one of them, so we publish four.

1. DCPI — scores, verdicts and methodology

CC-BY-4.0

The DC Hub Power Index in full: excess_power_score, constraint_score, composite_score, the BUILD / CAUTION / AVOID verdicts and their band thresholds, time_to_power_months, per-market rankings, and the published methodology.

Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. Republish it, chart it, build on it, put it in a client report, train on it. Just attribute it.

This is our own derived analytical work: the inputs are public, the transform is ours, and a third party with no access to our database can reproduce it from published inputs. We would rather be cited than paid for this layer — an index nobody may quote is worthless.

2. Grid telemetry — public system operators

our analysis CC-BY-4.0 raw readings: operator's terms

Live and historical grid conditions come directly from the system operators who publish them. Our normalisation and the rankings and headroom analysis built on top are ours, and are CC-BY-4.0 on the same terms as §1. The underlying readings are not ours to relicense — if you want the raw feed, take it from the operator. Several are one HTTP call away.

3. Physical infrastructure layers

mostly US federal, public domain

4. Facility inventory

attribution required no redistribution grant

The facility inventory is a composite. It contains data from OpenStreetMap — © OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0 — plus PeeringDB, Wikidata (CC0), operator disclosure and operator websites, regulatory filings and press releases, third-party directories, and our own curation.

You may read, query and cite it — through the product, the API and the MCP tools, including in published work with attribution.

DC Hub does not currently grant redistribution of this corpus as a dataset, and we would rather say so than claim otherwise. Two honest reasons:

• ODbL 1.0 is share-alike. That obligation would pass to anyone we granted redistribution to, and waiving it is not within our gift.
• Parts of the corpus come from compilations whose terms we have not confirmed in writing. Individual facts are not protectable; a compilation generally is. A robots.txt saying Allow: / means a crawler may fetch a page — it grants nothing about reusing a compiled directory, and we are not going to treat it as if it did.

That review runs per source, and sources clear individually rather than all at once. It is ordinary data hygiene, not a hold on the product.

Want to cite DC Hub?

Please do — no agreement needed for §1 or §2. Cite the index, the methodology or our grid analysis as described above, and tell us if you would like us to link your work back.

Redistributing the facility corpus as a dataset needs a written agreement, because it needs per-source clearance we do not yet have across the board. Ask: info@dchub.cloud.

The machine-readable version of this statement ships in the DC Hub repository as DATA-LICENSE.md, and the per-layer licence is emitted on every API response in the provenance block.