Data center pricing benchmarks: per kW, per megawatt, by market.

Wholesale asking rents by market

Asking rents are published by market for a defined requirement size, which makes them the only colocation figures that compare cleanly across metros. The band below is for a 250 to 500 kW requirement unless noted. A larger or smaller requirement in the same building will price differently, so read the size band before quoting a number.

Source: CBRE Global Data Center Trends 2026 and CBRE North America Data Center Trends H2 2025. Year over year figures are Q1 2026. The Silicon Valley increase is a 10 MW and above figure from H1 2025 and is not directly comparable to the 250 to 500 kW bands above. CBRE does not publish a numeric band for every market, and we do not substitute an estimate where it does not.

National context for the bands above

Source: CBRE, North American data center pricing nears record highs and CBRE, Fast-growing North American data center market set records in 2025. Note that CBRE has published the H2 2025 average as both $195.94 per kW-mo at 6.5% growth and $196.25 per kW-mo at 6.6% growth in different releases, most likely a revision. We cite the higher figure and flag the discrepancy rather than presenting one as settled.

What the two largest operators report

Asking rents are what a market advertises. These are what a landlord actually collected, reported quarterly and audited. They are global or regional rather than per metro, which is the tradeoff for the precision.

Sources: Equinix second-quarter 2026 results; Digital Realty second-quarter 2026 results. Equinix reported its per-cabinet figure up 6% year over year.

The two Digital Realty rows are the most useful pair of numbers in colocation. Same landlord, same quarter, same reporting basis: $293 per kW below 1 MW against $157 per kW above it. That is a premium of roughly 1.87 times for taking less power, with no vendor spin in between. If you are deciding whether to consolidate several small deployments into one commitment, that ratio is the size of the prize.

The renewal figure deserves equal weight. Rents on renewal rose 25.4% on a cash basis in a single quarter. If your term expires inside this cycle, the renewal clause is worth more attention than the headline rate you are negotiating today.

What a megawatt actually costs to buy or build

Per megawatt pricing runs on three different tracks, and mixing them produces nonsense. A stabilized leased asset, a greenfield build and a platform acquisition are not the same product.

Sources: Digital Realty purchase of Blackstone interest in three Northern Virginia data centers; JLL 2026 Global Data Center Market Outlook; Macquarie Asset Management on the Aligned Data Centers sale; KKR-led consortium to fully acquire STT GDC. Platform figures divide enterprise value by total capacity including capacity that is not yet built, so they understate the price of an operating megawatt, in some cases substantially. Only the Northern Virginia row is a clean operating-asset comparison.

Land, power and interconnect by market

Asking rents differ by market by perhaps 20%. The inputs behind them differ by far more, and that is where a market decision is actually made. A shorter interconnect queue is often worth more than a lower rate.

The Phoenix land figure is the premium commanded by parcels near substations and fiber routes, and the Chicago figure applies to established corridors. Northern Virginia land is anchored on two disclosed 2026 transactions: Amazon at about $427.3M for roughly 122 acres, and Starwood Capital at $166.8M for 42 acres in Fairfax County, a county record at close to $4M per acre. See CRE Daily on the Fairfax County record and reporting on the Amazon purchase. CBRE has noted recent and pending Northern Virginia and Northeast site costs above $8M per acre for the best powered sites. Dallas business electricity is reported at about 23% below the national average.

The Northern Virginia and Phoenix comparison is the one worth internalizing. Phoenix power runs roughly 40% cheaper per kWh and its interconnect queue is measured in months rather than years, while its asking rent band sits only about 10% below Northern Virginia. If your requirement does not depend on Ashburn's network density, that gap is the strongest argument in the market for looking west.

Implied rent from announced AI leases

Several very large AI capacity agreements were announced with both a contract value and a megawatt figure, which makes it possible to work backward to an approximate monthly rent per kW. These are our calculations, not reported rates, and we show the arithmetic so you can check it.

Method: announced contract value divided by megawatts, divided by term in years, divided by 12. Sources: CoinDesk on the TeraWulf and Anthropic lease and Applied Digital Delta Forge disclosure. Treat these as approximate. Announced contract values may include power and services that a colocation rate would bill separately, and a stated megawatt figure may be gross rather than critical IT load. Both would push the true rent below our figure.

The comparison worth drawing is against the top of this page. A 401 MW tenant signing a 20 year term lands within a dollar or two of the $196.25 national average for a 250 to 500 kW requirement. Even at gigawatt scale, on the longest terms being signed, the volume discount has largely disappeared. That is the clearest evidence available that pricing power currently sits with supply.

How to use these benchmarks

1. Match the size band before you quote a number. A 250 to 500 kW asking rent is not a 5 MW rate and not a single cabinet rate. Most bad budgets come from crossing bands.
2. Separate asking from transacting. Asking rents are advertised. Operator disclosures are collected. In a 1.4% vacancy market the gap between them is small, which has not always been true.
3. Convert everything to cost per usable kW. Per cabinet and per square foot hide density assumptions.
4. Price the renewal, not just the term. A disclosed 25.4% cash renewal increase is the single largest budget risk on a multiyear commitment.
5. Put the interconnect date in the comparison. Where power timing differs by years, it dominates a rate difference of a few percent.
6. Do not use per megawatt capital comps as lease benchmarks. A $27M per MW asset sale and a $196 per kW-mo rent describe different transactions.

None of this is a quote. It is the reference set we normalize against before anything reaches a shortlist, and it is published here so you can hold a proposal up against something verifiable. For what a specific configuration costs, the colocation pricing page carries per rack and per cabinet list prices, and each market guide carries planning bands for that metro.