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 Q2 2026 earnings presentation, page 24, alongside the second-quarter results release; Digital Realty second-quarter 2026 results; CBRE Global Data Center Trends 2026. Equinix reported its per-cabinet figure up 6% year over year and ended the quarter at 78% cabinet utilization worldwide, 81% in the Americas, on 307,600 billed cabinets. 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. How that rate is billed, committed against metered and the derating that shrinks a circuit, is covered in how colocation power is billed.

Read these two the right way. Equinix's per-cabinet number is realized revenue, not a price list: it is total recurring revenue divided by billed cabinets, so interconnection and other recurring charges sit inside it. Digital Realty's per-kW figures are rent on leases actually signed in the quarter, which makes them the closest thing in this table to a transaction price. CBRE's are asking rents, which is what a landlord opens at.

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 large signed contracts actually cost per kW

Above a few megawatts, colocation stops being a price list and becomes a negotiated contract. Those contracts are not secret. When a public company signs one it has to tell its investors, and the filing usually gives the contract value, the megawatts of IT load and the term. Three numbers are enough to work out the rate.

Two filings go further and simply state the rate. Core Scientific's April 2026 disclosure prints the per-kW figure as a term of the agreement, and Digi Power X printed its own rate in a quarterly report filed on 14 August 2026. Between them they are the only published wholesale colocation rates we have found anywhere in the US market. The second one earns its place twice over, because it also lets us check the arithmetic behind every derived figure further down this page.

Source: Core Scientific, Exhibit 99.2 filed April 21, 2026. Read the caveat below before quoting the $100.

The second published rate, and what it proves

Digi Power X agreed to build a 40 MW facility in Columbiana, Alabama for Cerebras Systems. The signed agreement redacted the rate, and for three months the only way to get at it was to divide the announced contract value by the megawatts and the term. Then the company's quarterly report stated it outright.

Source: Digi Power X, quarterly report filed August 14, 2026, note 20, cross-checked against the May 8, 2026 announcement of the same agreement. Both stated monthly amounts divide back to exactly $195.00 per kW.

Everything in the next table is arithmetic, not a published rate. Contract value divided by kilowatts divided by months. We label it derived because that is what it is.

Primary filings, all on sec.gov: Applied Digital, Cipher Black Pearl, Cipher Barber Lake and its expansion, Hut 8 Beacon Point, Cipher Stingray, Hut 8 River Bend, CleanCore, WhiteFiber, TeraWulf, Galaxy Digital. Every rate uses critical IT load, not gross site capacity, and disclosed values are rounded by the filers, so treat these as approximate to within about five dollars.

Three things to hold on to before you compare any of this to your own quote. First, a triple net lease excludes power and a colocation agreement usually includes it, so the $139 and the $229 are not the same product. Second, these are averages across a whole term, and that is now proven rather than assumed: Digi Power X published $195.00 for a deal this same method values at $229. Back out a disclosed 3% annual increase and the triple net deals start nearer $114 to $130 per kW per month in year one, and the Galaxy Digital lease starts nearer $180 than the $222 its total implies. Third, the tenants here are Amazon and investment-grade AI companies committing hundreds of megawatts for fifteen years. Nobody signing for one megawatt gets this rate.

Two operators also published what they assume Tier III wholesale will fetch when they plan new capacity. HIVE Digital and Digi Power X both used about $150 per kW per month in filings this year. That is a forecast rather than a transaction, but two independent companies landing on the same planning number tells you where the industry thinks the market sits.

The floor: what the building and the power cost without the service

One more filing is worth reading next to all of these, because it is not colocation at all. Ionic Digital leases land and finished buildings at Barstow, Texas to Nscale on a net basis. The tenant takes the shell and the power capacity and carries everything else itself: operating the plant, taxes, insurance and opex.

Source: Ionic Digital, net lease agreement filed June 29, 2026, executed 14 October 2025 and amended 27 February 2026. The lease redacts its per-kW rate, but five separate monthly dollar amounts are printed in full and every one of them divides to exactly $65.00 per kW.

Read that as the bottom of the ladder. Land and a powered building are worth about a third of a triple net wholesale rate, and under a third of an all-in colocation rate. The difference between $65 and $195 is not a margin somebody is taking. It is what it costs to run the plant, staff the site, carry the power contract and stand behind an uptime commitment.

The one colocation price list filed with a regulator

There is a corner of the market where colocation pricing is not just published but legally required to be. The NYSE exchanges must file their colocation fee schedules with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the SEC prints the fee tables verbatim in the Federal Register. Space sits in the ICE-operated Mahwah, New Jersey data center. The rates are uniform by rule and cannot be negotiated.

Sources: SR-NYSENAT-2026-18, Release 34-105702, 91 FR 37155 (June 22 2026) and SR-NYSEAMER-2026-62, Release 34-105947, 91 FR 46490 (July 23 2026). Parallel filings exist for NYSE, NYSE American, NYSE Arca and NYSE Texas. Option A is the rate in force today; Option B was filed June 2 2026 and is proposed until it becomes operative. To qualify for either bundle a firm and its affiliates must hold no more than 2 kW of total cabinet footprint for Option A, or 4 kW for Option B, and may hold only one bundle at a time.

Do not read this as a comparable. At $16,500 a month for 2 kW the implied rate is roughly $8,250 per kW per month, about forty times CBRE's wholesale asking band. You are buying microseconds of proximity to a matching engine, with network connections bundled in, not commodity space and power.

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.

For the full sourced reference set, including asking rents across eight markets, what a stabilized megawatt sold for, and the land, power and interconnect costs behind each metro, see the data center pricing benchmarks.

Equinix appears throughout this page as a source for market averages rather than as a vendor with a price. For a page that answers the vendor question directly, using its reported revenue per cabinet, its published draw cap rules and its stated billing terms, see Equinix colocation pricing.

If your requirement crosses a border, the same CBRE report prices the major international markets on the identical 250 to 500 kW basis, which makes them directly comparable to the US bands above.

Source: CBRE Global Data Center Trends 2026, published June 17 2026. Frankfurt was the most expensive European market; Europe's four majors ranged $165 to $265/kW-mo overall. Asking rents, not signed rents.

The emerging four

These four have pricing pages too, with one important difference. Only Phoenix has a published asking-rate band behind it. The other three carry planning bands we derived, labeled as derived on the page, because no research house publishes a rate for them.

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.