Why the Twin Cities is a market at all
Minneapolis and Saint Paul are a corporate headquarters market. Target, UnitedHealth, Best Buy, 3M, US Bancorp, General Mills and Cargill are all here, and so is the enterprise IT demand that comes with them. That demand has always been served by a small, well connected colocation market rather than by campuses, and until very recently nobody was proposing anything larger.
The climate is the physical argument. A Minnesota winter allows free cooling for a large share of the year, which is a real operating cost advantage over Dallas or Phoenix and one that does not depend on anybody's roadmap. The land is flat, cheap and seismically quiet, and the fibre routes east to Chicago are short.
What the metro does not have is depth of choice. Two in five network presences in this market sit in a single downtown building, and one operator holds four of the six most connected addresses. That is a market where the shortlist writes itself, and where a no from one landlord is most of your options gone.
There is no announced capacity table on this page, because no operator has published a megawatt figure for a project in this metro. The largest projects here are published in dollars and square feet instead. That absence is the finding, not a gap in our research.
Who is actually plugged in across Minneapolis and Saint Paul
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 | 25 | Registered in PeeringDB across Minneapolis and Saint Paul, by 18 operators |
| Buildings with a network present | 18 | 7 carry no network presence, which usually means single tenant or simply unregistered |
| Network presences | 205 | Counted per building, so a carrier in three buildings counts three times |
| Internet exchange presences | 17 | Where you can reach many networks through one port instead of many cross-connects |
| Carrier presences | 38 | The physical transport choice you can buy without leaving the building |
| In the densest building | 40% | Cologix MIN1 holds 81 of the market's network presences |
The most connected buildings here
| Networks | Building | Operator | Exchanges | Carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 81 | Cologix MIN1 | Cologix, Inc. | 6 | 9 |
| 23 | Cologix MIN3 | Cologix, Inc. | 3 | 4 |
| 17 | Cologix MIN2 | Cologix, Inc. | 3 | 6 |
| 16 | Ridgeview Minnetonka | Ridgeview | 1 | 6 |
| 11 | DataBank Minneapolis (MSP2) | DataBank, Ltd. | 0 | 1 |
| 9 | Cologix MIN4 | Cologix, Inc. | 2 | 4 |
| 7 | US Internet - Minnetonka | US Internet | 0 | 2 |
| 6 | DataBank Minneapolis (MSP4) | DataBank, Ltd. | 2 | 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 has been announced in Minneapolis and Saint Paul
There is no table here because no operator has published a megawatt figure for a project in this metro, and the three that matter are published in dollars and square feet instead: Tract at Farmington at $5 billion, Meta at Rosemount at $800 million, and CloudHQ at Chaska at $1 billion. What is on the record is the scale of the gap. As of January 2026 Minnesota had 13 operating data centers holding 43 MW of capacity between them, and 12 publicly known planned projects that would add 1,120 MW. The utilities have said the same thing from the other side: Xcel anticipates supplying data centers with 1,300 megawatts across Minnesota and the Dakotas over the next seven years, and Great River Energy is planning 1,000 megawatts in a similar time frame. Read that as a market whose entire existing colocation base is smaller than the smallest project now proposed. 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 2025 law, and why it matters more here than the tax break
Minnesota rewrote its data center rules in 2025, and the two halves of that law point in opposite directions. On tax, the state repealed the existing sales tax exemption for electricity purchases while extending the exemption on enterprise IT equipment and software from 2042 to as late as 2077. Those exemptions were already worth about $100 million a year to data center companies before the extension.
On power, the law does something more consequential for a tenant. It requires data centers to pay for all incremental costs attributable to them, including the electricity infrastructure upgrades needed to serve them, and it allows the Public Utilities Commission to require utilities to place data center costs in a category separate from other ratepayers. Xcel filed a tariff for very large customers in July 2025 and the Commission has been working through what belongs in that bucket ever since. In December 2025 it required Dakota Electric to file an additional tariff of its own.
The shape of the very large customer proposal is the part to read before you sign anything downstream of it. It requires a minimum contract length and an exit fee if the facility goes offline before that contract ends. An operator carrying that obligation has a cost floor, and cost floors travel down the stack into what you are quoted.
Where the capacity is going, and why none of it is for you
The projects that changed this market's story are all single tenant. Meta is building the state's first mega data center in Rosemount at a construction cost of $800 million. Tract has a campus at Farmington that would be a $5 billion project. CloudHQ put its Chaska data center at $1 billion. Amazon and Microsoft bought land near Xcel's retiring coal plant at Becker. Google is going to Pine Island with Xcel supplying the power.
Not one of those is colocation, and not one of them has published a megawatt figure. What that means practically is that the arrival of a gigawatt of demand in this state will change your power price and your utility's queue without ever adding a square foot you can rent. Treat the hyperscale news as weather, not as supply.
Where the market actually is, submarket by submarket
Downtown Minneapolis and the 511 Building
The carrier hotel and the centre of gravity for the whole state. Cologix operates several floors and adjacent sites here, and between them they hold most of the metro's network presences, its internet exchanges and its carrier choice. If your requirement is network led, the conversation starts here.
Minnetonka and the western suburbs
The second cluster, and a genuinely different product: suburban floor plates, better power economics, easier loading and parking, materially less network. It suits enterprise production and back office loads that do not need to sit on the exchange.
Eagan and the southern suburbs
DataBank and others hold positions south of the river, closer to the Meta and Tract sites and to the utility infrastructure being built for them. Worth watching as the hyperscale build changes what is available locally.
Rosemount, Farmington and Chaska
Where the billions are going, and where none of it is leasable. These are single tenant campuses in outer Dakota and Carver counties. They matter to you as a signal about power and politics, not as an inventory.
When this market is right, and when it is the wrong choice
The Twin Cities is the right answer when your business is here. For a Minnesota headquarters, a regional health system, an insurer or a manufacturer that needs low latency to its own offices, real carrier choice downtown and a provider that will pick up the phone, this market works and the free cooling economics are a genuine advantage.
It is also a sound disaster recovery position for a Chicago primary: far enough to be independently exposed, close enough on fibre that replication is not a problem, and cheaper on both space and power.
It is the wrong choice if you need depth. The entire operating base in this state is 43 MW, which is smaller than a single building in most Tier 1 markets, and the concentration means that if the densest building will not take you, the market thins out immediately. It is also the wrong choice if you are buying on the strength of the hyperscale announcements, because none of that capacity is colocation and none of it has a published megawatt figure to plan against.
Ask for the specific building's network and carrier list rather than a metro figure, because two in five of this market's network presences sit in one downtown address and a metro number flatters everywhere else. Ask what a cross-connect back to that building costs and how long it takes to provision if you are being shown a suburban site, because that circuit is often the real product. On power, ask which utility serves the building and whether the operator is inside a very large customer tariff, and if it is, ask how the minimum contract term and the exit fee are reflected in your quote. Ask specifically whether any part of your power cost was previously covered by the electricity sales tax exemption that the 2025 law repealed, and whether that change has already been passed through or is still coming. And do not let a hyperscale announcement do work in a proposal: Meta at Rosemount and Tract at Farmington are single tenant campuses, so if either is mentioned in a pitch, ask what it changes about the building you would actually occupy.