Why Boston is a market at all
Boston is a demand market that never became a supply market. It has the research universities, the hospitals, the biotech cluster, the financial services firms and the venture capital, and it has almost nowhere to put a large data center. Massachusetts has around 44 data centers in total, drawing roughly 188 megawatts between them. A single mid-sized campus in Northern Virginia carries more.
What it does have is a genuine carrier hotel. One Summer Street in downtown Boston is 920,000 square feet, carries up to 30 megawatts, and is the interconnection anchor for New England. Around it sits a real but thin ecosystem: CoreSite and a cluster of smaller operators in Somerville, Lumen in Cambridge, Digital Realty in Needham, and then a long tail scattered across five other states.
We treat New England as one market on this page rather than pretending Boston is separate from it. Outside Boston no single New England metro carries enough interconnection to stand alone, and a buyer whose requirement is regional rather than metropolitan is genuinely choosing between Providence, Springfield, Portland and Hartford. Connecticut is counted here rather than under New York, so that every building is counted once.
Every megawatt figure on this page is one of two things: capacity a builder says it delivered, or capacity a builder announced. Those are different, and neither one is space you can lease. Nothing published anywhere discloses contractible capacity in this market. A number on a brochure is a marketing position, not an inventory.
Who is actually plugged in across Boston and New England
A building existing and a building being connected are different facts, and only one of them decides whether your traffic can get where it needs to go cheaply. These figures come from PeeringDB, which the network operators themselves maintain, so every row below links to the building's own public entry.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Buildings listed | 67 | Registered in PeeringDB across Boston and New England, by 38 operators |
| Buildings with a network present | 55 | 12 carry no network presence, which usually means single tenant or simply unregistered |
| Network presences | 282 | Counted per building, so a carrier in three buildings counts three times |
| Internet exchange presences | 15 | Where you can reach many networks through one port instead of many cross-connects |
| Carrier presences | 23 | The physical transport choice you can buy without leaving the building |
| In the densest building | 29% | Markley Group One Summer Street Boston holds 81 of the market's network presences |
The most connected buildings here
| Networks | Building | Operator | Exchanges | Carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 81 | Markley Group One Summer Street Boston | Markley Group, LLC | 1 | 3 |
| 40 | CoreSite - Boston (BO1) | CoreSite | 2 | 3 |
| 19 | Lumen Boston | Lumen Technologies Inc | 1 | 2 |
| 9 | Lightboard ★ Massachusetts | RJ Greeley Company | 1 | 0 |
| 9 | Hub Express System | TOWARDEX Technologies International, Inc. | 1 | 1 |
| 9 | Evocative BOS1 | VPLS | 1 | 2 |
| 8 | Digital Realty BOS14 - Boston | Digital Realty | 1 | 2 |
| 7 | CENTRA PWM1 - Portland, Maine (340 Cumberland) | CENTRA Digital Interconnect | 1 | 0 |
From PeeringDB, which is maintained by the network operators present in these buildings rather than by the landlords, which is what makes it worth more than a directory. Two limits. Entries are voluntary, so a building showing no networks may be single tenant or may simply never have registered. And a network being present says nothing about whether the building has space, power or a price for you: that is still a call.
What has been announced in Boston and New England
Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below was read on the page it links to.
| Capacity | Operator | Project | What was announced |
|---|---|---|---|
| 50 MW | Markley Group | Lowell data center | A 350,000 square foot former Prince Pasta factory converted into what is now the largest data center in Massachusetts, on 14 acres with 18 foot ceilings |
| 30 MW | Markley Group | One Summer Street | The 920,000 square foot Boston carrier hotel, which the operator describes as carrying up to 30 megawatts. Delivered capacity |
Both rows belong to one company, which tells you most of what you need to know about how concentrated this market is. Massachusetts has around 44 data centers in total and they draw roughly 188 megawatts between them. Against that, the state’s investor owned utilities have received requests from proposed data centers for an additional 2 gigawatts, which state officials put at the annual electricity use of 2.4 million Massachusetts households. Almost none of it has been built, and the first real test went badly for the developer: Lowell banned data center construction for up to a year with an option to extend by a further 180 days, aimed squarely at the largest facility in the state, and Markley sued the city and then agreed to drop the case. Read the reporting.
Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.
Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and every figure links to the report it came from and was read in that report before it was written down. It is never added to the interconnection count above: one is a plan a company published, the other is a building a network registered itself into. Neither is availability.
What happened in Lowell, and why it decides the next two years
Markley converted a former Prince Pasta factory in Lowell's Sacred Heart neighbourhood, a state-designated environmental justice community, into what is now the largest data center in Massachusetts: 350,000 square feet on 14 acres, built out toward 50 megawatts. Then the neighbourhood organised.
The Lowell City Council banned data center construction, development and expansion in the city for up to a year, with an option to extend the ban by a further 180 days. Markley Lowell LLC and Tanner Street Investco LLC, the entity through which the company's chief executive had acquired a retired generating station and adjacent industrial parcels nearby, sued the city over the ban and subsequently agreed to dismiss the case. A separate environmental justice claim from a neighbourhood coalition, concerning noise and diesel emissions, has run alongside it.
The commercial reading is straightforward. The single largest source of new capacity in this market has stopped expanding, by municipal order, for at least a year. Nothing else in the state is positioned to absorb what it would have taken. If your requirement is Boston and it is large, your timeline problem is not a negotiation problem.
The gap between what has been asked for and what exists
Massachusetts investor owned utilities, including Eversource and National Grid, have received requests from proposed data centers for an additional 2 gigawatts of electricity. State officials put that, at full capacity, at the annual electricity usage of 2.4 million Massachusetts households. Serving it has been estimated to require roughly a billion dollars in upgrades. Against that, the built base is 188 megawatts.
Regionally, the projection is more modest and more credible: around 400 megawatts of new data center demand entering the region by 2040. Requests are not commitments, and a developer can lodge an interconnection request in several territories at once for a project it will build in only one of them. Treat the 2 gigawatt figure as an indication of interest and the 400 megawatt figure as an indication of what the grid expects to actually carry.
The state's incentive picture is unsettled in a way that matters to a tenant. A sales and use tax exemption for data centers passed in the November 2024 economic development law, but proposed regulations were still not final well over a year later, and amendments under discussion would require qualifying facilities to be powered by at least 80 percent clean power and to employ a minimum of 100 permanent full-time staff. That second condition is the one to watch: a headcount floor of 100 excludes most colocation facilities outright, and the exemption you are told about may not survive in a form that reaches your deployment.
Where the market actually is, submarket by submarket
Downtown Boston and One Summer Street
The carrier hotel and the interconnection anchor for all of New England, carrying close to three in ten of the region's network presences on its own. You come here for carriers, exchanges and cross-connects. It is a 920,000 square foot building with 30 megawatts, which is a ratio that tells you what it was designed for.
Somerville and Cambridge
The second cluster, and the more interesting one for network buyers. CoreSite's BO1 in Somerville sits alongside Evocative and TOWARDEX, with Lumen across the river in Cambridge. Dense, well connected, physically constrained, and priced accordingly.
The 128 belt and Needham
Digital Realty in Needham and a scattering of suburban facilities through Waltham, Billerica and Marlborough. This is where enterprise colocation for Boston companies actually lives, with better space economics than downtown and a fraction of the network.
Lowell and the Merrimack Valley
The only place in the state with real scale, and currently the only place in the state with a construction ban. Worth watching rather than shopping until the moratorium and the litigation resolve.
When this market is right, and when it is the wrong choice
Boston is the right answer when the requirement is here: a hospital system, a university, a biotech, a hedge fund, anyone whose users and regulators sit inside Route 128 and who needs a handful of racks to a couple of megawatts with real carrier choice. For that shape of deal the market works well, and One Summer Street is a genuinely good building for network-led requirements.
It is the wrong choice for scale on a schedule. There is no wholesale supply here, the largest facility is under a construction ban, the utilities are holding an order of magnitude more requests than the region expects to build, and the state's tax treatment is unfinished. If your requirement is measured in tens of megawatts, the honest comparison is New Jersey or Northern Virginia, and the latency penalty from Boston to either is small enough that most workloads will not notice it.
New England's power costs are among the highest in the country and its winter peak is constrained, which is not going to improve while 2 gigawatts of requests sit in the queue. Price your power assumption conservatively, and ask what the operator's own supply contract looks like rather than accepting a headline rate.
Ask first whether the capacity you need already exists and is energised in the specific building, because in this market the answer is frequently no and the alternative is a queue rather than a date. If you are being offered anything in Lowell, ask directly how the moratorium applies to your deployment, whether it counts as an expansion under the ordinance, and what happens if the ban is extended by the further 180 days the council reserved. Ask for the building's own carrier and network list, not a regional figure: this page counts all of New England, and a facility in Providence or Portland has a very different fabric from One Summer Street. If a sales tax exemption is part of the pitch, ask which version of the regulations it relies on and whether the proposed 100 employee minimum would disqualify the facility, then confirm it with your own accountant rather than the landlord. Get the power price mechanism in writing, including how a winter peak is passed through. And if your requirement is large, ask the operator plainly what it can deliver in this region in the next eighteen months, then compare that answer against New Jersey before you commit.