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

Quick answers, with the figure behind each

Most people arrive at this page with one question. These are the questions we are asked most, each answered with the best published figure we have found and a link to the section or page that sources it. None of them is a quote.

The units those figures come in, and what a quote means by MRC, NRC, kVA and usable kW, are defined in the pricing glossary.

What a rack, cabinet or cage costs per month

The benchmarks below are mostly wholesale. Most buyers start smaller. These are the published monthly prices for one rack or cabinet, and what we see for a private cage.

Published list prices from Psychz Networks and ServerMania (January 2026). These are single provider list prices, not market averages. Half racks, quarter racks, cross-connects and setup fees are broken out on the colocation pricing page.

Wholesale asking rents by market

H1 2026 asking rents for 250+ kW at N+1/Tier III requirements. USD per kW per month; electricity-inclusive pricing is not established.

Source: CBRE H1 2026, Figures 1–2. These are market bands, not individual offers. Compare national averages by deployment size.

What operators disclose

Quarterly disclosures measure recurring revenue, new lease rent and renewal changes. These are portfolio figures, not local quotes.

What we see in real quotes. Quotes we reviewed in October 2026 for private cage deployments ran $215 to $298 per kW per month for space, committed power, cross-connects, remote hands and one-time costs, counted over the term. Providers and buyers are not named. Send us your quote and we will tell you where it sits.

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 region: in the Americas, $293 per kW below 1 MW against $156 per kW above it. That is a premium of roughly 1.9 times for taking less power. Both are GAAP base rent on new leases, meaning rent averaged over the lease term, so a first-year quote with escalators will usually start below them. If you are deciding whether to consolidate several small deployments into one commitment, that is the question to price.

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 renewal increase is made of, and what is negotiable.

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 1,000 to put it per kilowatt, divided by term in years, divided by 12. Sources: TeraWulf's announcement of the Anthropic lease, Applied Digital Delta Forge disclosure, Applied Digital Delta Forge 2 disclosure, CleanSpark Sandersville announcement and Galaxy Digital Helios investor presentation. 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. These are also averages across the whole term, not first year rent. Where a lease escalates a few percent a year, the opening rent sits well below the average: Galaxy discloses that its $10.4B assumes 3% annual inflation, which puts year one nearer $179/kW-mo than $222.

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.

The rate depends on what the number measures

CoreWeave is the tenant in several of these arrangements, but construction funding, credits and billing bases differ. Compare disclosed base fees and construction credits before using a headline rate in a budget.

The pricing ladder: every published rate on one scale

The figures on this site come from broker reports, operator earnings, SEC filings and provider price lists, and each measures something slightly different. Put on one scale, per kilowatt per month, they form a ladder, and the rung a quote sits on tells you what the quote includes before you have read a line of it.

Two things fall out of reading it as a ladder. The gap between $65 and $195 is not margin; it is what it costs to staff, maintain, power and stand behind a building, and every colocation rate has to cover it. And a quote that lands on the wrong rung for its size is the first thing to question: a 5 MW proposal priced like a sub-megawatt deployment is either including something it should not, or leaving out a concession it should be offering.

Which way prices are moving, measure by measure

A common question, usually asked by a buyer who signed two or three years ago and is about to renew, is whether colocation has got cheaper. On every published measure we track the answer is no, and the measures disagree only on how fast it is rising.

All figures appear with their full citations in the sections above. The Silicon Valley figure is for 10 MW and above and is not comparable with the 250 to 500 kW bands.

The last two rows explain the first seven. Vacancy at a record low with less capacity under construction than a year earlier is a market where the seller sets the price, and the renewal figure is where that shows up first, because a renewal is the one negotiation where the buyer's alternative costs a migration. Where the market is flat, it is flat by metro rather than by product: Dallas-Fort Worth asking rents were unchanged year over year, Phoenix roughly flat, and Atlanta up 2%. If the budget needs a market that is not repricing, those are the three to look at, and the Dallas, Phoenix and Atlanta pricing pages carry what is published for each.

What a campus costs at 1, 10, 50, 100 and 300 megawatts

The per-megawatt figures above scale in a straight line, which is not how a real project prices but is how a first budget gets built. These are JLL's 2026 averages multiplied out, before land, before compute hardware and before financing. The arithmetic is ours.

The 300 MW row is the one to sit with. The tenant will pay roughly one and a half to two times the cost of building the campus over the life of the lease, for capacity somebody else financed, permitted, energized and operates. That is the market's own price for not carrying the construction and interconnection risk, and it is consistent with the $27.1M per MW that stabilized Northern Virginia assets trade at against an $11M to $14M replacement cost. The decision on whether to pay it is worked through on colocation versus building your own.

What providers post as a list price, market by market

Almost nobody in colocation publishes a price. The operators who do are smaller regional providers, and their list prices for a cabinet or a power allocation are collected below with a link to each one's own page. They matter for one reason: they are the only retail figures anyone can check. Large operators quote every deal, so a posted price is a floor and a sanity check, not a forecast of an enterprise contract.

Across the 15 offers that state their power, the median posted price is $454 per usable kW, against a range of $220 to $748. That is well above the wholesale asking rents earlier on this page, and the gap is the point: a single cabinet on a 20 amp circuit carries under 2 kW, so space, bandwidth and support are spread across very little power. The per-kW rate falls fast as the power commitment grows, which is why a quote for real density should never be judged against a list price.

We found no cabinet price we would stand behind in Northern Virginia; Prince William; Frederick; Montgomery County; Richmond; Boston; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Charlotte; South Carolina; Nashville; Memphis; Alabama; Houston; Phoenix; Denver; Indiana; Cincinnati and Dayton; Minneapolis; Omaha; Springfield, Missouri; Oklahoma; Cheyenne; Boydton; Baltimore; Lehigh Valley; and North Carolina. In some of those a provider posts only single-server prices, and in others the only posted price list belongs to a network that failed the abuse screen. That is a finding rather than a gap: in those markets the only way to a number is a quote.

Each price was read on the provider's own page, and each market page lists the offers behind its row with links. Usable kW is 80% of the circuit rating, with a redundant A+B pair counted once, and is only worked out where the provider states both amps and volts. Providers whose networks carry spam or abuse flags are left out whatever their price. A posted price is not availability.

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.

These are asking rates, not offers. For space operators have told us they can deliver, by market and date, see available capacity now, updated as operators confirm it.