Why Columbus belongs on the shortlist
Columbus earns a look for three reasons that have nothing to do with rank. It sits inside a one-day drive of a large share of the U.S. population, its power is delivered by a utility with a long data center track record, and land and construction costs are far below any coastal market. That combination is why the hyperscalers arrived first.
The catch is that hyperscale arrival changes a market before it grows it. The largest campuses in central Ohio were built for single tenants and are not available to a 500 kW requirement at any price. A Columbus search is therefore a search of the multi-tenant layer that grew up alongside them, and that layer is smaller than the headlines suggest.
The hyperscale layer sets land prices, utility timelines and construction labor costs. The colocation layer is what you can actually buy. Figures quoted about the first tell you almost nothing useful about the second, except that it will be tight.
What we are tracking in Franklin County right now
Columbus is unusual in one respect that makes it worth watching closely. The city publishes site compliance plans, which are the engineering approvals that land before a building permit is issued. That gives an earlier read on a project than most jurisdictions offer.
What has been announced in Columbus, Ohio
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 192 MW | Vantage Data Centers | OH1, New Albany | 70 acres, more than 1.5 million SF, three buildings, over $2bn. Announced IT capacity |
Note the wording on this one. Vantage published 192 MW of IT capacity, not 192 MW of gross or generator capacity, which is the version of the number a buyer can actually reason about. Most announcements are not this precise.
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.
Every Columbus, Ohio facility we track
47 data centers across Columbus, Ohio, from the facility database we hold as a Bridgepointe partner. It is the layer that says whether a building exists yet, which no permit record answers directly.
| Status | Facilities | What it means for a search |
|---|---|---|
| Operational | 17 | Standing and running. The only layer that can hold a requirement this year |
| Under construction | 13 | Steel is up. Reachable for a date 6 to 18 months out, and usually pre-leasing now |
| Planned | 17 | Announced or entitled, not yet built. Treat every date on these as a forecast |
| Building area on file | 3,485,620 SF | Across the 17 facilities where a size is recorded, of 47 |
| Largest single building | 1,500,000 SF | Vantage Data Centers, New Albany |
Operators with the most facilities here: Vantage Data Centers (8), Cologix (6), QTS (6), EdgeConneX (5), Expedient (3), 5C Group (2), Aligned Data Centers (2), DBT Data (2), Karis Critical (2), STACK Infrastructure (2).
Where they cluster: New Albany (20), Columbus (6), Millersport (5), Johnstown (3), Lewis Center (3), Dublin (2).
The largest buildings coming to this market
30 facilities here are under construction or planned. These are the ten largest by floor area, and a size on file is not a promise of a delivery date.
| Operator | Status | Building size | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vantage Data Centers | Under Construction | 1,500,000 SF | New Albany, OH |
| STACK Infrastructure | Under Construction | 400,000 SF | New Albany, OH |
| EdgeConneX | Under Construction | 338,000 SF | New Albany, OH |
| 5C Group | Planned | Not on file | Columbus, OH |
| Aligned Data Centers | Planned | Not on file | Conesville, OH |
| Aligned Data Centers | Planned | Not on file | Pataskala, OH |
| CENTRA | Planned | Not on file | New Albany, OH |
| Cologix | Under Construction | Not on file | Lewis Center, OH |
| Cologix | Under Construction | Not on file | Johnstown, OH |
| CyrusOne | Under Construction | Not on file | New Albany, OH |
From the Signal facility database, which we hold as a Bridgepointe partner rather than as a public record, so these rows carry no filing link and street addresses are held back. A building existing is not the same as space being available in it: every facility above may be full, pre-leased, or closed to your size. Finding out is a call, not a lookup. See how we verify capacity.
City of Columbus site engineering approvals, which land before a building permit does. 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 | 10 | Deduplicated. One source, April 2021 to August 2025 |
| Filed in the last 12 months | 1 | The live rate of construction activity, which is the number that moves |
| Distinct addresses | 3 | Separate sites in the record, not separate buildings |
| Operators we can name | 1 | 2 of 10 filings name a recognizable operator. The rest name an engineer, a builder or a holding company |
Operators appearing by name: Cologix (2).
The most recent filings on the record
| Filed | Named on the filing | What it says | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 26 August 2025 | Not an identifiable operator | Magellan 6A | Expansion or phase |
| 12 June 2025 | Not an identifiable operator | Magellan 10 & 11 - Storm CC | Type not stated |
| 26 March 2025 | Not an identifiable operator | Magellan | Expansion or phase |
| 16 January 2024 | Not an identifiable operator | Magellan | Expansion or phase |
| 19 June 2023 | Not an identifiable operator | Magellan-FSCP | Expansion or phase |
| 1 August 2022 | Cologix | Cologix COL4 | Type not stated |
| 6 June 2022 | Not an identifiable operator | Magellen DC02 | Type not stated |
| 8 October 2021 | Not an identifiable operator | AEP Cyprus Station | Power and cooling |
Collected from City of Columbus engineering records. 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.
The Rathmell Road campus, and why nobody's name is on it
Seven of the ten filings we track describe one site at 225 Rathmell Road, filed under the project name Magellan. The sequence reads like a campus master plan executed over four years: an initial single-story building in April 2021, a substation approval in October 2021, a second building in June 2022, then westward expansion in 2023 and northward expansion in 2024, 2025 and again in August 2025 with buildings 10, 11 and 6A.
The applicant on nearly every one of those filings is an engineering firm, not an owner. That is entirely normal and it is also the practical problem with public records in this market: the filing proves construction, names the acreage, and tells you nothing about who will occupy it. A project name and a repeating expansion pattern is what you get, and for a buyer that is still worth more than a press release, because it is dated and it is continuous.
The AEP Cyprus Station approval filed in October 2021 is the single most informative record in the Columbus set. A dedicated substation filed alongside a data center site plan means the power was solved at the start. Campuses without one are relying on existing distribution, which is where delivery dates slip.
Power is the whole Columbus question
Central Ohio's utility has served large data center load for over a decade, which is an advantage, and it has also absorbed a great deal of it, which is the constraint. Large-load tariff structures and queue position have become live commercial issues in the region rather than administrative ones.
For a colocation buyer this rarely appears as a refusal. It appears as a delivery date that assumes a substation upgrade, or a phase that is quoted at an attractive rate because its power is not yet firm. The questions that matter are the same everywhere, but the answers move faster here than the marketing does.
- Is the power for this hall energized, under construction, or queued?
- Which substation serves it, and does the campus have a dedicated one?
- What tariff class applies, and is there a large-load rider that changes the economics at my size?
- If the date slips because of utility work, what does my contract say?
- How much of the phase is preleased, and to how many tenants?
Where the market is, submarket by submarket
South Columbus and Rathmell Road
Where the sustained campus development is. Large footprints, dedicated substation, and a four-year continuous build record in the public filings.
Downtown and the carrier hotels
The interconnection layer. Cologix filed a 91,000 SF facility on 7.5 acres in 2022, following an earlier building with its own substation and parking structure. This is where network-facing capacity lives.
New Albany and the northeast
The hyperscale corridor that made Columbus a data center market. Almost entirely single-tenant, and not a colocation option at enterprise scale.
Western suburbs
Where newer land assembly is happening. Longer timelines, thinner carrier choice, and the submarket most exposed to utility upgrade scheduling.
When Columbus is the right answer
Columbus fits when Midwest user proximity matters, when disaster recovery design wants distance from a coastal primary, when the workload is compute-heavy rather than network-heavy, and when construction and operating cost pressure is real. It is a particularly good second site for an East Coast primary, because the latency is workable and the risk profiles genuinely differ.
It is the wrong answer when you need deep carrier and cloud on-ramp choice, which belongs to Chicago in this region, or when your requirement is large and urgent, because the multi-tenant layer here is thin enough that two operators saying no ends the search.
Run Columbus in parallel with Chicago rather than against it. Chicago prices the interconnection and Columbus prices the megawatts, and seeing both quotes is the only way to know what the network depth is costing you.
What we cannot tell you from public records
This is a thinner data set than the one we hold for Phoenix or Dallas, and it is worth being precise about the limits. Ohio site plans carry acreage and square footage but never megawatts, so nothing in our Columbus record supports a capacity claim. Owner names are largely absent. And a completed site plan is not an occupancy date.
What the record does support is a timeline: which sites are being expanded, in which direction, and how recently. That is a reason to call a specific operator this quarter rather than next. The number that decides your deployment, how many kilowatts an operator will commit to a named hall on your date, is not published by anyone. See how we verify capacity for what getting that answer involves.