Columbus is a hyperscale market with an enterprise market hiding inside it.

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.

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 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 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 our verified inventory. It is the layer that says whether a building exists yet, which no permit record answers directly.

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.

From our verified inventory rather than from a public record, so these rows carry no filing link and street addresses are held back. These buildings are verified, which is not the same as their space being available: every facility above may be full, pre-leased, or closed to your size. Finding out is a call, not a lookup. See what a verified building does and does not mean.

Who is actually plugged in across Columbus, Ohio

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.

City of Columbus site engineering approvals, which land before a building permit does, plus Ohio air permits across the New Albany and Johnstown corridor. Every figure below is a count of filings we collected ourselves, and every row links to the record it came from.

Operators appearing by name: Cologix (4), QTS (2).

The most recent filings on the record

Collected from City of Columbus engineering records and 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.

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.

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

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.

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.