Why Kansas City is a market at all
Kansas City is two markets wearing one name. There is the interconnection market, which is small, old and heavily concentrated in a handful of downtown and North Kansas City buildings. And there is the hyperscale land market, which is enormous, mostly announced rather than built, and spread across two states and a dozen jurisdictions that do not share a rulebook. Buyers get into trouble by reading a headline from one and shopping in the other.
The interconnection side is genuinely useful. It gives you a central US position with roughly equal latency to Chicago, Dallas and Denver, on land and power that cost a fraction of any coastal market. It is a real answer for disaster recovery, for content caching aimed at the middle of the country, and for enterprises that want a second site far enough from their first one to matter.
The hyperscale side is why everyone is suddenly talking about this metro, and it is almost entirely forward-looking. Evergy told investors it is carrying a large load pipeline of roughly 15 GW across Kansas and Missouri, about 5 GW of it in advanced stages. Pipeline is not capacity. None of it is space you can lease this year.
Every megawatt figure on this page is one of two things: capacity a builder says it delivered, or power a builder asked a utility for. Those are different, and neither one is space you can lease. Nothing published anywhere discloses contractible capacity in this metro. A number on a brochure is a marketing position, not an inventory.
Who is actually plugged in across Kansas City
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.
| Measure | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Buildings listed | 22 | Registered in PeeringDB across Kansas City, by 17 operators |
| Buildings with a network present | 17 | 5 carry no network presence, which usually means single tenant or simply unregistered |
| Network presences | 303 | Counted per building, so a carrier in three buildings counts three times |
| Internet exchange presences | 21 | Where you can reach many networks through one port instead of many cross-connects |
| Carrier presences | 16 | The physical transport choice you can buy without leaving the building |
| In the densest building | 51% | 1530 SWIFT - NOCIX holds 156 of the market's network presences |
The most connected buildings here
| Networks | Building | Operator | Exchanges | Carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 156 | 1530 SWIFT - NOCIX | NOCIX, LLC | 15 | 4 |
| 81 | Netrality Kansas City - 1102 Grand | Netrality Data Centers | 2 | 5 |
| 16 | NOCIX Clay Facility | NOCIX, LLC | 1 | 1 |
| 14 | Level(3) Kansas City | Lumen Technologies Inc | 0 | 1 |
| 7 | LightEdge Kansas City Subtropolis (KCI1) | LightEdge Solutions | 1 | 0 |
| 7 | Patmos KC1 | Patmos Hosting, INC | 1 | 0 |
| 4 | DataBank Kansas City (MCI3) | DataBank, Ltd. | 0 | 0 |
| 3 | DataBank Kansas City (MCI2) | DataBank, Ltd. | 0 | 1 |
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.
What has been announced in Kansas City
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 26 MW | Edged Energy | Edged Kansas City | Waterless cooled facility at 3420 North Arlington Avenue near downtown Kansas City, opened 12 December 2024 on a $143 million initial investment. Delivered capacity |
One row, and it is not the project this metro is known for. Google confirmed in February 2026 that it is behind Project Mica, a five building hyperscale campus on roughly 500 acres at Interstate 435 and Highway 169 in the Northland, financed by $10 billion in taxable revenue bonds Port KC authorised in 2025 and carrying a 25 year, 75 percent property tax abatement. Google has published no megawatt figure for it, and neither has anyone else, so it gets no row here. Two very large Kansas numbers also belong nowhere near a Kansas City search: the 800 MW Nebius campus is in Independence, Kansas, which is 150 miles south of this metro, and reading it as local capacity is the single most common mistake made about this market. Read the reporting.
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.
Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and every figure links to the report it came from and was read in that report before it was written down. It is never added to the interconnection count above: one is a plan a company published, the other is a building a network registered itself into. Neither is availability.
The rule change that matters more than any announcement
On 15 January 2026 the Kansas City, Missouri, City Council adopted a stricter zoning code for data centers. The ordinance reclassifies them as industrial facilities rather than commercial ones, limits them to specific zoning districts, and requires larger data centers to obtain City Council approval along with will-serve letters from both Evergy and Kansas City Water confirming that those utilities have the capacity and the intent to serve. The city's chief environmental officer noted that data centers in Kansas City already use six times as much energy as the municipal government does.
That will-serve requirement is the part to care about commercially. It moves the power question to the front of the process, in writing, from the utility rather than the developer. If you are being offered space in a building that is still working through approvals, the will-serve letter is a document you can ask to see, and its absence tells you the project has not cleared the gate the city now puts first.
Evergy's large load tariff, and the threshold that decides whether it applies to you
Evergy's Large Load Power Service tariff was approved by the Missouri Public Service Commission in November 2025 and received unanimous approval from the Kansas Corporation Commission. It applies to customers expected to have demand of 75 megawatts or more. Below that number you are an ordinary large commercial customer; at or above it you enter a different regime entirely.
The terms are demanding by design. A customer may take up to five years of ramp-up and must then take service for at least twelve years. The minimum monthly bill is based on 80 percent of contract demand whether or not the power is used. Transmission upgrades needed to serve the facility are paid for by the customer. Missouri's commissioners said the tariff "contains strong safeguards to ensure that large new loads pay their fair share while enabling growth that benefits Missouri," which is a fair description of a rate designed to stop cost-shifting onto households.
Most colocation tenants never touch this tariff, because the operator is the utility customer, not you. It still shapes your price. An operator signing a twelve year contract with an 80 percent minimum bill has a fixed floor under its own costs, and that floor eventually appears in your power rate. Ask how your power is billed and whether any of it passes through at the operator's contracted rate.
Where the market actually is, submarket by submarket
Downtown and 1102 Grand
The carrier hotel core. Netrality's building at 1102 Grand is the traditional meet-me point for the metro and carries the second largest concentration of networks in it. You come here for carrier choice and cross-connects, not for density or for cheap kilowatts.
North Kansas City and the Northland
The single densest interconnection point in the metro sits here rather than downtown, and so does Google's Project Mica site at Interstate 435 and Highway 169. This is where new supply is aimed, and where the will-serve process will be tested first.
Johnson County, Kansas
Overland Park, Lenexa and De Soto sit on the Kansas side under a different commission, different incentives and different municipal politics. DataBank operates two facilities here. Crossing the state line changes your regulator, not your latency.
SubTropolis and the underground space
LightEdge operates inside the limestone caves under the Northland, which is a genuinely unusual physical envelope: stable temperature, natural mass shielding, no tornado exposure. It is a niche answer that suits some compliance and archival requirements very well and suits high-density AI racks poorly.
When this market is right, and when it is the wrong choice
Kansas City is the right answer when you want central US latency at Midwest cost, when you need a disaster recovery site meaningfully distant from a coastal primary, or when your requirement is a few racks to a couple of megawatts in an energised building today. Power is cheap by national standards, land is cheap, and the operators here are used to enterprise-sized deals rather than only hyperscale ones.
It is the wrong choice if you need deep network optionality. Just over half of this metro's interconnection sits in one building, and if that building is not right for you the market thins out very quickly. Compare it honestly against Chicago and Dallas, both of which are a short fibre run away and carry many times the network count.
It is also the wrong choice if you are buying on the strength of the announcements. The largest project in the metro has published no capacity figure at all, and the largest number anyone quotes in connection with this region, the 800 MW Nebius campus, is in Independence, Kansas, which is 150 miles south of here and on a different set of utilities and roads. Confusing the two is the most common error made about this market.
Start with the will-serve letter. Under the January 2026 ordinance a larger data center inside Kansas City needs one from Evergy and one from Kansas City Water, so ask to see them for the specific building you are being shown, and treat their absence as an unfinished project rather than a formality. Then ask which side of the state line the building is on and confirm it in the contract, because the incentive package, the regulator and the property tax treatment all change at that line while the marketing rarely mentions it. Ask whether the operator is on Evergy's Large Load Power Service tariff, and if it is, ask how the twelve year term and the 80 percent minimum bill are reflected in what you are quoted. Ask for the building's own network list rather than a metro-wide figure, because more than half of this market's interconnection sits in a single facility and a metro number flatters everywhere else. Finally, if anyone quotes you the 800 MW Independence project or a central Kansas campus in a Kansas City conversation, ask for the address. Distance is the answer.