Why Memphis is a market at all
Memphis is a logistics city. The FedEx superhub is here, the airport has been among the busiest cargo airports in the world for decades, and the industrial building stock that grew up around all of it is large, cheap and structurally sound. That stock is the reason the city has a data center market: several of the buildings a buyer would look at were warehouses first, and the conversions are still happening.
The second reason is power. Memphis Light, Gas and Water is a municipal utility, it is one of the largest in the country, and industrial power here has historically been cheap by national standards. That combination, cheap electricity next to a million square feet of warehouse, is what brought the AI buildout to this city rather than to a market with more colocation in it.
It is worth being blunt about the consequence, because Memphis is now easy to misread. The headline capacity in this market is a single company's own training campus. It is not colocation, it will not be offered to a tenant, and it does not add a square foot anyone can lease. Strip it out and what remains is a modest enterprise market that is growing on the back of building conversions. That smaller market is the one this page is about.
Position is the third argument and the most durable one. Memphis sits in the middle of the country, roughly a day's drive from Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago and Nashville, and it is a genuinely different failure domain from the coastal markets and from the Northern Virginia concentration. For an organisation looking for a third site that is not correlated with the first two, that is worth more than it looks.
Buying power from a municipal utility
This part does not travel from other markets. Tennessee has no retail electric choice, and in Memphis the distributor is not an investor-owned utility at all. Memphis Light, Gas and Water is owned by the city, and its wholesale supply has come from the Tennessee Valley Authority throughout its history. There is no competitive supplier to shop and no wholesale market price a contract can track.
Two things follow for a tenant. Your operator's power cost is a published rate schedule rather than a negotiated supply contract, so ask which schedule the building is served under and ask to see it. And the timeline for a large new service is a utility construction timeline set by a municipal utility and its wholesale supplier, which no amount of willingness to pay compresses. MLGW has publicly studied alternatives to that supply in recent years without changing it. If your term is long, treat the supply arrangement as a question to ask rather than a settled fact.
Ask whether the capacity being offered to you is energised at the building today, or is contingent on a utility upgrade that has not been completed. In a market where a single campus has absorbed an unusual amount of the local utility's attention and new substation work, that distinction is the whole risk. An operator with energised capacity is unaffected by the queue. An operator waiting on a service upgrade is in a line whose length is set by a construction schedule, and no clause in your contract shortens it.
Three do. The permit layer is here and is the strongest of the three, because the City of Memphis publishes its building permits and two of the filings state a capacity in the permit text itself. The interconnection layer is here, drawn from PeeringDB, and every row in it links to the building's own public entry. The announced layer is here and is collected by hand. The fourth is not: our verified facility inventory does not extend to Memphis, so there is no building count on this page and you will not find a zero standing in for one. Announced is not built, built is not available, and a permit is not either. See how we verify capacity for what each collection proves.
What has been announced in Memphis
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 GW | xAI | Colossus, the Memphis campus | Two buildings running and a third bought in January 2026, which Elon Musk said takes the campus to 2 GW of training capacity. Reporting puts roughly 555,000 Nvidia GPUs on the site at about $18 billion. The 2 GW is a design figure for the campus rather than a load anyone has confirmed is energised, and the campus is xAI's own, so none of it is space a tenant can lease. Design capacity across three buildings |
| 15 MW | 5C | MEM01, the former Fred's headquarters on Getwell Road | A million square foot warehouse and office at 4300 Getwell Road converted to a data center. Reports disagree about the scale and the row carries the smallest of them: the plans filed with Shelby County were reported at a 15 MW first-phase IT load, facility listings describe 20 MW today rising to 60 MW by 2027, and the building permits we hold for this address state a 2.5 MW initial deployment for phase one. All three may be true of different things, and none of them has been confirmed to us by the operator. Announced first-phase IT load |
Both rows need reading carefully, and for opposite reasons. The 2 GW at Colossus is the largest announced figure in any market on this site, and it is the least useful to a buyer: it is one company's own training campus, it is not colocation, and no part of it will be offered to a tenant. Strip it out and what is left in Memphis is a modest multi-tenant market where the largest announced first phase is 15 MW. The second row is the one worth calling on, and it is the one whose figure we are least sure of. Memphis is also the market where our permit collector names nobody: the city's building permit feed publishes no applicant, owner or contractor column, so the filings below prove that construction is happening at an address and say nothing about who is doing it. 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.
Who is actually plugged in across Memphis
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 | 4 | Registered in PeeringDB across Memphis, by 4 operators |
| Buildings with a network present | 4 | Every listed building has at least one network in it |
| Network presences | 15 | Counted per building, so a carrier in three buildings counts three times |
| Internet exchange presences | 0 | Where you can reach many networks through one port instead of many cross-connects |
| Carrier presences | 4 | The physical transport choice you can buy without leaving the building |
| In the densest building | 40% | EdgeConneX Memphis (EDCMEM01) holds 6 of the market's network presences |
The most connected buildings here
| Networks | Building | Operator | Exchanges | Carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6 | EdgeConneX Memphis (EDCMEM01) | EdgeConneX Inc. | 0 | 2 |
| 5 | DataBank Memphis (MEM1) | DataBank, Ltd. | 0 | 1 |
| 2 | Expedient Memphis | Expedient | 0 | 1 |
| 2 | Level(3) Memphis | Lumen Technologies Inc | 0 | 0 |
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 the public construction record shows, and what it will not tell you
Memphis is the market where our permit collector is most and least useful at the same time. Most, because the city publishes a building permit layer with the applicant's own description attached, and descriptions are where capacity figures hide: two of the filings below state a capacity in plain text, one as megawatts and one as transformer rating, which almost no public record anywhere does. Least, because that same feed carries no applicant column, no owner, no contractor and no filing date. Every figure below is therefore a count of construction at an address, with nobody's name on it and no date attached, and the table says so rather than inferring either.
City of Memphis building permits, the only layer we hold here and the one that carries a stated capacity twice. 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 | 13 | Deduplicated. One source, no dated record to no dated record |
| Tenant fit-out filings | 5 | A customer is landing in a named building. The strongest signal in the set |
| Distinct addresses | 9 | Separate sites in the record, not separate buildings |
| Largest capacity in the record | 3.25 MW | Stated on 2 of 13 filings. Capacity is rarely published, so this is a floor, not a market total |
| Largest floor area filed | 2,822 SF | One permit, not a campus total. Floor area is published far more often than capacity |
| Operators we can name | None | Every filing names an engineer, a builder or a holding company |
| Filings with no date published | 13 | The source publishes the facility, not the filing date |
The filings that state a capacity
Most permits never mention megawatts. These do, and the basis matters: a figure the applicant stated for the project is a different claim from a generator nameplate, which is backup plant rather than sellable load.
| Capacity | Basis | The filing |
|---|---|---|
| 3.25 MW | Capacity stated in the filing | Install data centers. This will include a new service that will power 20 transformers (3,250kva) that supplies power to twenty se... |
| 2.5 MW | Capacity stated in the filing | ...phase 1: Initial deployment of 2.5 MW, the plans below describe the site and layout. You will see |
Collected from City of Memphis DPD building permit 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.
Where the market actually is
The Getwell Road corridor
Large warehouse and office stock near the airport, and the location of the biggest multi-tenant conversion in the market. The permit record carries four filings at one address here, running from a first phase to a third, which is the clearest sign in the whole set that a building is being filled rather than merely started.
Southeast Memphis and Mendenhall Road
Two of the nine addresses in the record sit on Mendenhall Road, carrying three filings between them, and the largest stated capacity in the market, 3.25 MW of new transformer service, is one of them. One filing here names a developer in its own description, which is the only place in the Memphis record where a name appears at all.
The Tulane Road side
Public reporting places the second building of the AI training campus on Tulane Road, and our record carries two filings there. Neither of them names anyone, because the city feed never does. Treat this corridor as information about the utility and about local politics rather than as inventory: it is single tenant and nothing in it will be leased.
The interconnection addresses
Four buildings in Memphis carry a PeeringDB entry, and they are named with links in the table above. That is where a network-led requirement starts, and it is a small enough set that you can reasonably test all of it. It is not a carrier hotel market, and a workload that needs the densest possible interconnection should be measured against Dallas, Atlanta or Chicago first.
Seismic risk is a real diligence item here, and it is answerable
Memphis sits near the New Madrid seismic zone, which is the one structural question this market raises that most others do not. It is not a reason to rule the city out, and it should not be treated as one. It is a reason to ask three specific questions and to expect documented answers.
Ask which seismic design category the building was designed to and under which edition of the code, because a warehouse conversion and a purpose-built hall can sit on the same street with very different answers. Ask how the racks, the containment, the batteries and the generator sets are anchored and braced, since equipment anchorage is where damage actually occurs at the shaking levels this region is likely to see. And ask what the operator's recovery position is: a building that survives intact is not the same as a building whose utility feed, fuel deliveries and staff can reach it in the days afterwards. An operator that has these answers ready has done the work. An operator that treats the question as unusual has told you something.
When Memphis is right, and when it is the wrong choice
Memphis is the right answer when your business is here or your logistics are. For a distribution operation, a manufacturer, a health system or a regional financial institution with people in this metro, the market has real enterprise-grade buildings, cheap industrial power and straightforward staff access. It is also a sound third site for an organisation already in the eastern and central markets, because it is genuinely independent of both without being far away.
It is the wrong choice if you are buying on the strength of the headline. The campus that put Memphis in the news is one company's own, it is not colocation, and treating its two gigawatts as market supply would be the single largest mistake available in this market. Read it as pressure on the utility, which is real and will reach your bill, rather than as inventory.
It is also the wrong choice if your requirement is network led or if you need to grow in large steps. Four interconnected buildings is a small ecosystem, and the largest announced first phase for leasable space here is 15 MW. A requirement that needs tens of megawatts inside one campus, with room to double, should be tested against a larger market before it is tested here.
Ask which MLGW rate schedule the building is served under and get the schedule itself, because in a market with no retail choice that document is the cost basis of everything you will be quoted. Ask whether the space is energised today or waiting on a service upgrade, and get the date in writing. Ask the seismic questions above and expect drawings, not reassurance. If a proposal leans on the scale of the AI campus in this city, ask what that project changes about the building you would occupy, and expect the honest answer to be nothing except the utility's workload. And because much of the good space here is converted warehouse, ask about floor loading, slab condition and clear height before you talk about price: those three decide whether the room can take your density at all.