Boston colocation: one company holds the market, and its largest building is frozen.

How much does colocation cost in Boston?

Recent quotes we received for Northeast ran $200 to $240 per kW per month for up to 500 kW, falling to $165 to $205 above 1 MW.

We have no published Boston asking-rent band to cite, so the Northeast Region quotes are the figure to plan with.

Smaller deployments cost more per kW. These are recent quotes we received, not a statement that space is available. Cross-connects, remote hands and one-time setup are extra. Operators often give 2–3 free months on a new term. See every region's quote ranges.

Boston cabinet and cage prices

Smaller deployments are priced per cabinet or per cage rather than per kW. Use these monthly ranges to set a first-pass budget. They are not provider offers, and a building on this page is not a claim that space is available in it.

Based on quotes we received in the 30 days before 21 October 2026. Taxes, cross-connects, remote hands and one-time costs are extra. Replace these ranges with a normalized written quote before approval. How power is billed is covered in how colocation power is billed.

Get Boston colocation prices for your setup

Tell us the racks, power and timing you need. A scout comes back with matching Boston options and quoted prices.

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.

The most connected buildings here

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.

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.

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 links to a published report that states it, and was checked against at least one other independent report before it was written down.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is never added to a permit count: a permit is a document a jurisdiction issued, an announcement is a plan a company published. 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 neighborhood, 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 neighborhood organized.

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 neighborhood 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

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.