Why Cincinnati and Dayton are one market
These are two metros about fifty miles apart on I-75, and a requirement in either one can realistically be shopped across both. That is why this page is written for the corridor rather than for Cincinnati alone. Writing it as Cincinnati would drop the Miamisburg buildings; writing it as Dayton would drop almost everything.
Northern Kentucky is in here too, for the same reason every local usage of Greater Cincinnati includes it. The airport is in Kentucky, and so is one of the five buildings CyrusOne operates in this market. A state line running through the middle of a metro does not change what a buyer can reach in twenty minutes.
The demand base is old economy and deep. Consumer products, banking and insurance, a large aerospace and defence presence around Dayton, logistics built around the airport and the river, several large health systems and universities. That is the customer base the buildings on this page were built to serve, and it existed long before anyone was talking about AI capacity.
What this corridor is not is a hyperscale construction market. It has one project of that shape, it is thirty miles from either downtown, and it is a 2028 delivery. Read the announced section before you build a plan around new supply here.
Buying power here is not the same as buying it in Columbus
Ohio deregulated its electricity market in 2001, so generation is competitive and delivery stays with the local utility. That much is true statewide. Which utility you are behind is not, and it changes the terms materially.
Columbus is AEP Ohio. Cincinnati is Duke Energy Ohio, and Dayton is AES Ohio. The data center tariff that has shaped every conversation about Ohio, the one requiring large new data centers to pay for a high proportion of their forecast monthly energy whether or not they use it, is an AEP Ohio tariff. It does not apply in this corridor. That is not automatically good news: it means the terms here are less settled rather than more favourable, and a comparable obligation could arrive under either of these utilities.
Three questions follow, and they are worth asking in this order. Which utility serves the building. Whether the operator buys generation on a competitive contract or sits on utility default service, because that decides whose price you are being quoted. And whether any minimum-take obligation, existing or proposed, would be passed through to you.
Ask what the building's committed utility capacity is today, not what the site is designed for. Much of the stock in this corridor is established and some of it is converted, which is exactly where the design figure and the energised figure diverge. Then ask what a step up to your next increment would require and who queues for it. In a market whose only new campus is a 2028 delivery thirty miles out of town, the practical ceiling on your growth is whatever the existing buildings already have in the ground.
Three do, and they are lopsided. The interconnection layer is the strongest thing on this page, drawn from PeeringDB, which the network operators maintain themselves, so every row links to the building's own public entry. The announced layer is here, collected by hand, and is one project. The permit layer is here and is the weakest of the three: two filings, neither dated, because our Ohio source is a federal register of facilities that hold an air permit and operate rather than a stream of new applications. The fourth is not here at all: our verified facility inventory does not extend to this corridor, so there is no building count on this page and no zero standing in for one. See how we verify capacity for what each collection proves.
Who is actually plugged in across Cincinnati and Dayton
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 | 15 | Registered in PeeringDB across Cincinnati and Dayton, by 9 operators |
| Buildings with a network present | 9 | 6 carry no network presence, which usually means single tenant or simply unregistered |
| Network presences | 24 | Counted per building, so a carrier in three buildings counts three times |
| Internet exchange presences | 4 | Where you can reach many networks through one port instead of many cross-connects |
| Carrier presences | 4 | The physical transport choice you can buy without leaving the building |
| In the densest building | 33% | CyrusOne Cincinnati 7th St holds 8 of the market's network presences |
The most connected buildings here
| Networks | Building | Operator | Exchanges | Carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | CyrusOne Cincinnati 7th St | CyrusOne Inc. | 1 | 1 |
| 6 | DartPoints Cincinnati, OH - CVG1 | DartPoints, LLC | 2 | 0 |
| 2 | CyrusOne Florence | CyrusOne Inc. | 0 | 1 |
| 2 | Flexential - Cincinnati (CIN1/2) | Flexential Corp. | 1 | 1 |
| 2 | Iron Mountain Data Center - Ohio (OHS-1) | Iron Mountain Data Centers | 0 | 1 |
| 1 | CyrusOne Hamilton | CyrusOne Inc. | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | H5 Data Centers Cincinnati | H5 Data Centers | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | H5 Data Centers Cincinnati II | H5 Data Centers | 0 | 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 Cincinnati and Dayton
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.
| Capacity | Operator | Project | What was announced |
|---|---|---|---|
| 250 MW | Prologis | Project Mila, Trenton Industrial Park, Butler County | Four buildings of about 220,000 square feet each plus a utility building and a security building, totalling roughly 899,065 square feet, with its own electrical substation. Reports give the site as 140 and as 141 acres and the row does not pick between them. The Trenton Planning Commission approved the site plan unanimously on 30 March 2026, in a meeting that lasted about ten minutes and carried no public hearing requirement because the land was already zoned industrial. Prologis has said it would fund the required power system upgrades and utility costs in full. The city approved a fifteen year tax abatement for the project in July 2026. The stated schedule is a first building starting later in 2026 for a 2028 launch, with all four complete by 2029. There is organised local opposition, and the projected water use of roughly 15 to 16 million gallons a year is the point it has concentrated on. Campus capacity stated in the reporting on the approved site plan |
One project, and it is bigger on its own than everything else with a published figure in this market put together. Two things follow that a buyer should hold onto. First, Trenton is Butler County, about thirty miles north of downtown Cincinnati and about the same distance south of Dayton, which is why it appears on a page written for both. It is not a downtown option and it will not serve a requirement that needs to sit next to the carrier hotels on West Seventh Street. Second, it is a 2028 delivery at the earliest on the developer's own schedule, so it is not supply for anything you are buying this year. Nothing else in Cincinnati or Dayton has a published megawatt figure attached to it. The market a buyer can actually reach today is the fifteen interconnected buildings below, which is enterprise and network colocation rather than hyperscale, and Project Mila does not change that. 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.
What the public construction record shows, and why there is so little of it
Two filings. That is a property of the source rather than a measure of the market. Our Ohio permit layer comes from the federal air facility register, which lists sites that hold an air permit and operate, not applications as they are made, so it carries no filing date. What makes these two worth having anyway is which buildings they are. One is the CyrusOne building in Lebanon and one is the Encore building in Miamisburg, and both of those operators also appear in the interconnection table above. Two independent public sources naming the same operators is the cross-confirmation worth more than either count on its own.
Ohio air permits in the Cincinnati and Dayton corridor, at the CyrusOne building in Lebanon and the Encore building in Miamisburg. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Filings we track | 2 | Deduplicated. One source, no dated record to no dated record |
| Distinct addresses | 2 | Separate sites in the record, not separate buildings |
| Operators we can name | 1 | 1 of 2 filings name a recognizable operator. The rest name an engineer, a builder or a holding company |
| Filings with no date published | 2 | The source publishes the facility, not the filing date |
Operators appearing by name: CyrusOne (1).
Collected from EPA ECHO air facility records for Ohio. A permit proves that construction is happening. It does not prove that space is available, and no public filing anywhere discloses what is contractible at a named building. That answer comes from an operator call, which is the part we do by hand. See how we verify capacity.
Where the market actually is
Downtown Cincinnati
The carrier hotel core, on and around West Seventh Street. The densest building in the corridor is here and holds a third of its network presences on its own, with a second building carrying two exchange presences alongside it, and H5, Lumen and T5 all holding listed buildings in the city. A network led requirement starts here.
The northern suburbs and Northern Kentucky
West Chester, Mason, Hamilton, Lebanon and Florence. This is where CyrusOne's footprint sits and where Flexential's Cincinnati buildings are. Lower network counts than downtown, more room, and close enough to the airport to matter for a logistics or distribution requirement.
Dayton and Miamisburg
Thin but not empty, and worth scoping if you have people or plant around Dayton. Iron Mountain and Encore both hold listed buildings in Miamisburg, and the Encore building is one of the two in our permit record. It will not carry a requirement on interconnection alone.
Trenton, in Butler County
Where the one campus is going, about thirty miles from either downtown. Approved on site plan, not built, and on the developer's own schedule not delivering before 2028. Relevant to a 2028 or 2029 requirement and to nothing sooner.
When this corridor is right, and when it is the wrong choice
It is right when your requirement is network led or enterprise sized and you have a reason to be in southwest Ohio. Twenty four network presences across nine operators is a working ecosystem, the buildings are established, and pricing here has never had to compete with hyperscale demand for the same halls. It is also a sound second site for an organisation already in Columbus, Chicago or Indianapolis: close enough to manage, far enough to be independent, and on a different utility.
It is the wrong choice if you need scale on a near term date. There is one campus scale project in this corridor, it is approved rather than built, and 2028 is the earliest anything comes out of it. A requirement that needs tens of megawatts in one hall with room to double should be tested against Columbus first, which is ninety minutes northeast and is one of the largest construction markets in the country.
It is also the wrong choice if you were planning to buy on the assumption that Ohio means the AEP tariff and the terms that come with it. It does not, here. That cuts both ways, and it is a term to read rather than a reason to prefer or avoid the corridor.
Ask whether the building is behind Duke Energy Ohio or AES Ohio, how the operator buys generation, and whether any minimum-take obligation could be passed to you. Ask for committed and energised capacity separately from design capacity. Because some of the good space here is older stock, ask about floor loading, clear height and what the cooling can actually sustain rather than what it is rated for. If interconnection is why you are here, name the networks you need and make the operator confirm they are present in that building rather than somewhere in the metro, because the concentration in this market is high and the second most connected building is a long way behind the first. And if anyone offers the Butler County campus as available capacity, ask them for its energisation date.