Nashville colocation: a ban on data center campuses over 500,000 square feet, and power bought from a federal corporation.

How much does colocation cost in Nashville?

Recent quotes we received for Central Time Region / Midwest ran $245 to $295 per kW per month for up to 500 kW, falling to $160 to $190 above 1 MW.

We have no published Nashville asking-rent band to cite, so the Central Region quotes are the figure to plan with.

Smaller deployments cost more per kW. These are recent quotes we received, not a statement that space is available. Cross-connects, remote hands and one-time setup are extra. Operators often give 2–3 free months on a new term. See every region's quote ranges.

Nashville cabinet and cage prices

Smaller deployments are priced per cabinet or per cage rather than per kW. Use these monthly ranges to set a first-pass budget. They are not provider offers, and a building on this page is not a claim that space is available in it.

Based on quotes we received in the 30 days before 21 October 2026. Taxes, cross-connects, remote hands and one-time costs are extra. Replace these ranges with a normalized written quote before approval. How power is billed is covered in how colocation power is billed.

Get Nashville colocation prices for your setup

Tell us the racks, power and timing you need. A scout comes back with matching Nashville options and quoted prices.

Who is actually plugged in across Nashville

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. Any building below can be looked up there by name.

The most connected buildings here

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.

Why Nashville is a market at all

Nashville is a headquarters and healthcare market. HCA Healthcare is here, and with it a dense cluster of hospital operators, revenue cycle companies and clinical software businesses that between them make health information the defining workload of this metro. Vanderbilt anchors research and academic computing, Bridgestone Americas and Asurion anchor corporate IT, and Oracle's campus commitment attached a large technology employer to a city that had not previously had one at that scale.

That mix produces enterprise colocation demand with a compliance shape to it: regulated data, retention obligations, audit requirements, and a preference for a building somebody can drive to. It does not produce a wholesale market. The multi-tenant layer here is small, it is aimed at cabinets, cages and small private suites, and a requirement measured in megawatts will exhaust it quickly.

The geography helps in two specific ways. Nashville is roughly equidistant from Atlanta, Chicago and Dallas. That makes it a workable recovery site for a primary in any of them. Middle Tennessee is also low risk for natural hazards by southeastern standards. It is far enough inland to avoid hurricanes, and it lacks the earthquake exposure of the west.

The rule that changed in July 2026

On 21 July 2026 the Metro Council passed two things at once. One is Nashville's first comprehensive data center zoning framework. The other is a temporary moratorium on accepting, processing, approving and issuing zoning, building and grading permits for data centers in Davidson County. The moratorium runs to 1 December 2026.

The framework matters more than the moratorium, because the moratorium expires and the framework does not. It bans data center campuses outright: anything over 500,000 square feet or over 100 MW (Metro Planning staff report, June 2026). Large data centers, 100,000 to 500,000 square feet or 20 to 100 MW, need a special exception with a public hearing, and only in heavy industrial zones. Smaller ones are allowed in more districts. The rules also set buffers around homes, schools, hospitals and the zoo. A proposed campus beside the Nashville Zoo is what prompted the whole exercise.

Read that as a ceiling on what this market can ever become inside the county line. The campus ban takes campus-scale product off the table in Davidson County entirely. Anything larger goes to the surrounding counties, where the utility is usually a different company. For a buyer that is not necessarily bad news: it means the multi-tenant buildings inside the city are unlikely to find themselves competing with a hyperscale campus for the same substation. It does mean that any expansion plan measured in megawatts belongs in a conversation about the ring, not the core.

What it means to be in TVA territory

The Tennessee Valley Authority is a corporate agency of the United States government. It generates power and sells it wholesale to about one hundred and fifty local power companies, which are the only entities that sell electricity at retail in its service area. In Davidson County that company is Nashville Electric Service, a municipal utility. In the fast growing counties around the city it is more often an electric cooperative. Tennessee has no retail electric choice, and the valley is not part of a regional transmission organization, so there is no wholesale market price, no capacity auction and no competitive supplier at any point in the chain.

Two layers therefore sit between a data center and its energy cost, and they behave differently. TVA sets wholesale rates through its own board, not a state commission. So large load pricing is decided at the federal level. It is not the Tennessee Public Utility Commission, where a buyer might reasonably expect to look. The local power company then applies its own retail schedule on top, and those schedules differ from one utility to the next. Two buildings twenty miles apart can sit under different retail tariffs from different sellers, both buying from the same federal wholesaler.

The practical consequence for a tenant is that the answer to "what does power cost here" is genuinely building specific, and an operator who answers it at the metro level is either simplifying or does not know. It also means a large new service is negotiated with a local utility whose scale is municipal or cooperative, against a wholesale contract it does not control. Ask early, because the answer takes longer to obtain here than in a market with one investor-owned utility and one commission.

What has been announced in Nashville

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 links to a published report that states it, and was checked against at least one other independent report before it was written down.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is never added to a permit count: a permit is a document a jurisdiction issued, an announcement is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.

Where the multi-tenant buildings actually are

When Nashville is right, and when it is the wrong choice

Nashville is the right answer for a Middle Tennessee business, and it is a particularly good answer for a healthcare organization that wants regulated workloads in a building its own staff can reach. It is a credible recovery site for a primary in Atlanta, Chicago or Dallas, and the hazard profile supports that argument rather than undermining it. To the south, Alabama is a comparable enterprise market, and Huntsville is its nearest cluster.

It is the wrong choice if you need depth of supply or depth of network. The multi-tenant inventory is thin enough that two operators declining a requirement can end a search, and the interconnection ecosystem is not in the same class as the markets that exist to serve networks. Do not assume a large announced project nearby will loosen anything for you. Capacity built for one tenant does not become colocation. In this territory it may tighten the local utility's position rather than ease it.