Colocation pricing: what a rack, a cage and a megawatt actually cost.

What the public record says colocation costs

Colocation pricing has a reputation for being unknowable. It is not. Public companies report what they charge every quarter, and commercial brokers publish asking rents by market. None of it is a quote for your requirement, but all of it is verifiable, which is more than most pricing pages can claim.

Sources: Equinix second-quarter 2026 results; Digital Realty second-quarter 2026 results; CBRE Global Data Center Trends 2026. Equinix reported its per-cabinet figure up 6% year over year. Digital Realty reported renewal rents up 25.4% on a cash basis in the quarter, which is the number to watch if you are signing a term that ends inside this cycle.

Federal contracts go further and publish the actual rate per cabinet by contract number. See what the US government pays for colocation for GSA schedule and EIS awarded rates, including cross-connect and remote-hands pricing.

Per rack and per cabinet, from providers who publish

A minority of operators post list pricing. Those prices are real, they are current, and they set the floor a broker has to beat. Two examples that publish openly:

Published list prices from Psychz Networks and ServerMania (January 2026). These are single provider list prices, not market averages. Power is usually licensed rather than metered at this size, so confirm whether your quote bills allocated or actual draw.

Why small deployments pay more per kW

Put the two datasets on the same basis and the pattern is obvious. Dividing the published cabinet prices above by their power license gives an implied rate per kW, which can be compared directly against wholesale asking rents.

A single low-density cabinet can cost roughly twice as much per kilowatt as a megawatt-scale commitment. That is the real economics of colocation, and it is why the honest answer to "what does colocation cost" always starts with how much power you are committing to.

What every headline price leaves out

The monthly space and power figure is rarely the invoice. Normalize these before comparing two providers:

• Cross-connects: a monthly charge per connection, per carrier or cloud on-ramp.
• Bandwidth: commit level, burst treatment and overage rate.
• Power overage: what happens when draw exceeds the licensed circuit, and whether billing is on allocated or metered load.
• Remote hands: included minutes, hourly rate, and the after-hours multiplier.
• One-time charges: setup, cabinet, cage build, cabling and turn-up.
• Escalators: the annual increase, plus any power cost pass-through.
• Renewal terms: the clause that decides your price in year four. Digital Realty's disclosed renewal increase shows how much this matters.

Colocation pricing by market

Asking rents move by metro, and the gap between markets is wider than the gap between providers inside one market. CBRE reported Chicago asking rents up 14.7% year over year in Q1 2026, Atlanta up 2%, and Dallas-Fort Worth unchanged.

How to compare two colocation quotes

1. Convert both to a monthly cost per usable kW, not per cabinet or per square foot.
2. State whether power is allocated, metered or usable IT load. Quotes often differ on this alone.
3. Add every recurring extra: cross-connects, bandwidth, remote hands, monitoring.
4. Add one-time charges and spread them across the term to get a true monthly figure.
5. Model the escalator and the renewal clause to the end of the term.
6. Price the exit: migration, early termination and overlap during a move.

Two quotes with the same headline rate routinely differ by a double-digit percentage once normalized. That normalization is the work, and it is what a scout does before anything reaches your shortlist.