Why Omaha is a market at all
Omaha is a hyperscale story with a small multi-tenant story tucked inside it. Meta broke ground on a Papillion campus in 2017 and has kept building since, and Google has three Nebraska data centers of its own with a proposed fourth beside them. Neither of those stories is colocation. Both of them are the reason a colocation buyer looks at Omaha at all, because the same power and the same fibre routes that brought the hyperscalers here are what the multi-tenant buildings are plugged into.
The second reason is power. The Omaha Public Power District and the Nebraska Public Power District are the two publicly owned utilities in this market, and both of them have historically served industrial load at rates that read cheap next to the coastal markets. That combination, cheap electricity next to a workforce a hyperscaler will move into, is what put Meta and Google on the map in Papillion. It is also what makes the smaller multi-tenant buildings around them attractive to enterprise and financial-services buyers who do not need a gigawatt.
The third reason is geography. Omaha sits at the western edge of the eastern power interconnection, on the Union Pacific main line, and on fibre routes that cross the country. For an organisation looking for a site that is not correlated with a coastal failure domain and is closer to the Denver and Chicago carriers than the Iowa cluster on the other side of the river, that geography is worth more than it looks on a map.
The last thing worth being blunt about is what this market is not. The two big campuses in Sarpy County are single tenant. Neither of them will offer a square foot to a colocation buyer, and treating their combined footprint as market supply would be the largest mistake available here. Strip them out and what remains is a real but modest market, and that smaller market is what this page is about.
All four. The permit layer is here and is the strongest of the four: Sarpy County publishes a building permit portal, and Nebraska's air permit records are a second independent layer that names the operating buildings the county portal cannot see. The two collectors independently agree on two of them, which is what makes the pair worth splitting Omaha out of the Iowa page for. 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 facility inventory is here too, recut by city so Council Bluffs stays on the Iowa page. Kearney is outside the metro and is counted here rather than vanishing. 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 Omaha and Sarpy County
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 GW | Google, with Tenaska and Tallgrass | The proposed Nebraska mega-campus (Project Tenaska) | A privately proposed fourth Google campus in the Papillion area, paired with a privately built, utility-scale natural gas power plant developed by Omaha-based Tenaska and pipeline partner Tallgrass. Reporting in March 2026 put the data center's power requirement at 1,000 to 3,000 megawatts. An industry index has cited 2.7 GW for the campus specifically. This row carries the low end so the figure understates rather than overstates, and reports disagree at whether the design point sits at the low or the high end of the range. The gas plant beside the campus is the figure most headlines quote and is not the same number as the data center's load. Developer materials describe possible service in 2029, and Google has not confirmed a tenant date. Low end of the reported power requirement |
| 5 MW | 1623 Farnam | Second Omaha interconnection facility | 1623 Farnam, the operator of the 49-network carrier hotel at 1623 Farnam Street, announced in January 2026 that it had closed on a second Omaha interconnection building. The company said it would deliver at least 5 MW when the new site opens in mid-2028. The existing building carried 8 MW across 75,000 SF at that announcement and was itself undergoing a further 1.5 MW and roughly $45 million expansion. This is the only multi-tenant capacity announcement on the page whose figure has been quoted by the operator itself in a company release. Announced first-phase capacity |
Two operators dominate what is being built in Sarpy County today, and neither publishes a per-campus megawatt figure. Meta has committed more than $1.5 billion to a nine-building, roughly four-million-square-foot campus in Papillion and Springfield since 2017, backed by more than 500 acres of new land in Springfield and a company-supported renewable portfolio; the campus is self-built and is not for lease. Google's three existing Nebraska data centers, in Papillion, Omaha and Lincoln, have drawn more than $3.5 billion since 2019 by the state's own count, and Google has published dollars and square feet rather than megawatts for them. That absence is the market's shape, not a gap in the research: the hyperscale sites here are self-builds, and the megawatt figures they would carry belong to buildings a tenant cannot lease. What a colocation buyer can reach is the interconnection cluster around 1623 Farnam, the TierPoint and LightEdge buildings around it, and the 5 MW Oppidan build the permit record proves. 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.
Every Omaha and Sarpy County facility we track
9 data centers across Omaha and Sarpy County, from our verified inventory. It is the layer that says whether a building exists yet, which no permit record answers directly.
| Status | Facilities | What it means for a search |
|---|---|---|
| Operational | 7 | Standing and running. The only layer that can hold a requirement this year |
| Planned | 2 | Announced or entitled, not yet built. Treat every date on these as a forecast |
| Building area on file | 896,879 SF | Across the 9 facilities where a size is recorded, of 9 |
| Largest single building | 234,500 SF | H5 Data Centers, La Vista |
Operators with the most facilities here: TierPoint (2), 1623 Farnam, LLC (1), Connect Data Centers (1), First National Technology Solutions (1), H5 Data Centers (1), LightEdge (1), Scott Data Center (1), Sequitor Edge (1).
Where they cluster: Omaha (3), Papillion (3), Bellevue (1), Kearney (1), La Vista (1).
The largest buildings coming to this market
2 facilities here are under construction or planned. These are the ten largest by floor area, and a size on file is not a promise of a delivery date.
| Operator | Status | Building size | Where |
|---|---|---|---|
| Connect Data Centers | Planned | 61,550 SF | Papillion, NE |
| Sequitor Edge | Planned | 40,000 SF | Kearney, NE |
From our verified inventory rather than from a public record, so these rows carry no filing link and street addresses are held back. These buildings are verified, which is not the same as their space being available: every facility above may be full, pre-leased, or closed to your size. Finding out is a call, not a lookup. See what a verified building does and does not mean.
Who is actually plugged in across Omaha and Sarpy County
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 | 8 | Registered in PeeringDB across Omaha and Sarpy County, by 7 operators |
| Buildings with a network present | 7 | 1 carries no network presence, which usually means single tenant or simply unregistered |
| Network presences | 64 | Counted per building, so a carrier in three buildings counts three times |
| Internet exchange presences | 1 | Where you can reach many networks through one port instead of many cross-connects |
| Carrier presences | 12 | The physical transport choice you can buy without leaving the building |
| In the densest building | 77% | 1623 Farnam - Omaha holds 49 of the market's network presences |
The most connected buildings here
| Networks | Building | Operator | Exchanges | Carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 49 | 1623 Farnam - Omaha | 1623 Farnam, LLC | 1 | 7 |
| 5 | TierPoint Omaha - Bellevue | TierPoint, LLC | 0 | 1 |
| 4 | TierPoint Omaha - Midlands | TierPoint, LLC | 0 | 1 |
| 2 | 1623 Farmam | Farmers Mutual Telephone Company Stanton | 0 | 0 |
| 2 | Scott Data Center Omaha | Scott Managed Services | 0 | 1 |
| 1 | LightEdge Omaha (OMA1) | LightEdge Solutions | 0 | 1 |
| 1 | Level(3) Bellevue | Lumen Technologies Inc | 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 the public construction record shows in Omaha
Sarpy County's building portal is the strongest local record in this market, and the Nebraska ECHO air source is the second layer that catches the buildings already operating. Read together, they name every campus in the county at street-address detail: Meta at the Friend Plaza addresses in Springfield, Google on Gold Coast Road in Papillion, Fidelity on Cornhusker Road, LightEdge on American Parkway, Yahoo's planned site at 10917 Harry Watanabe Parkway in La Vista, and the Oppidan 5 MW build on 158th Street whose grading, foundation, commercial-new and fire-alarm permits all landed on the same site.
Sarpy County building permits across Papillion, La Vista, Gretna and Springfield, plus Nebraska air permits at the Omaha and Sarpy County operating buildings. 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 | 86 | Deduplicated. Across 2 sources, January 2009 to August 2026 |
| Filed in the last 12 months | 6 | The live rate of construction activity, which is the number that moves |
| Tenant fit-out filings | 10 | A customer is landing in a named building. The strongest signal in the set |
| New building filings | 6 | Shell and site work, which is capacity two years out, not now |
| Distinct addresses | 48 | Separate sites in the record, not separate buildings |
| Largest capacity in the record | 5 MW | Stated on 2 of 86 filings. Capacity is rarely published, so this is a floor, not a market total |
| Operators we can name | 2 | 7 of 86 filings name a recognizable operator. The rest name an engineer, a builder or a holding company |
| Filings with no date published | 20 | The source publishes the facility, not the filing date |
Operators appearing by name: Meta (6), Google (1).
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 |
|---|---|---|
| 5 MW | Capacity stated in the filing | OPPIDAN - 5 MW Papillion Data Center |
| 5 MW | Capacity stated in the filing | Oppidan - 5 MW Papillion Data Center |
The most recent filings on the record
| Filed | Named on the filing | What it says | Type |
|---|---|---|---|
| 31 August 2026 | Not an identifiable operator | Oppidan Papillion - Data Center Phase 2-5 | Expansion or phase |
| 12 August 2026 | Not an identifiable operator | Data Center T.I | Type not stated |
| 12 August 2026 | Not an identifiable operator | LaVista - Data Center T.I | Type not stated |
| 5 August 2026 | Not an identifiable operator | El - 59119 - Outage for Fidelity Data Center | Power and cooling |
| 25 November 2025 | Not an identifiable operator | OPPIDAN - 5 MW Papillion Data Center | Type not stated |
| 9 September 2025 | Not an identifiable operator | Oppidan Data Center Permit | Type not stated |
| 7 July 2025 | Not an identifiable operator | Fidelity Data Center | Power and cooling |
| 30 May 2025 | Not an identifiable operator | Fidelity Data Center Expansion | Expansion or phase |
Collected from Sarpy County building permits (City of Papillion Accela) and EPA ECHO air facility records for Nebraska. 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, submarket by submarket
Downtown Omaha and the Farnam corridor
1623 Farnam is the single busiest interconnection point in the metro, ahead of anything in Iowa. Forty-nine networks are physically present in the building, seven carriers hand off inside it, and the operator has publicly announced a second Omaha interconnection facility and an ongoing expansion at the existing site. If your requirement is network led, this is where you start, and the room to grow is on the record rather than a promise.
Papillion and the Gold Coast Road campus corridor
The permit record is thickest here. Google's Papillion buildings sit on Gold Coast Road, and the campus has drawn separate substation, plumbing, mechanical and fire-alarm filings across several years. TierPoint's Midlands building is here too, and the Oppidan 5 MW build is at 11684 South 158th Street. This is where the county's building layer names most of the operators it names.
Springfield and the Friend Plaza campus
Meta's Sarpy County buildings sit on Friend Plaza, and the permit record traces them across two decades of filings under three descriptions the operator has used, from the original Facebook Data Center name through the expansion sequence. This corridor is single tenant and nothing in it will be leased, so read it as pressure on the utility rather than as inventory.
Bellevue and the Sarpy periphery
TierPoint's Bellevue building is on Fort Crook Road, LightEdge's is on American Parkway in Papillion, and the county's ECHO record names Pinnacle Bank's data center in Gretna. Between them these buildings are the second layer of the multi-tenant market, and they carry more capacity than the network counts on their own suggest. Treat this ring as the fallback for a Farnam-first requirement that outgrows the downtown building.
Buying power from a public utility
This is one of the market's real strengths, and it also does not travel from other places. Omaha's distributor is the Omaha Public Power District, and Sarpy County is served by the Omaha and Nebraska Public Power Districts depending on where you are. Both are publicly owned, both have historically posted industrial rate schedules that read cheap by national standards, and neither is an investor-owned utility. There is no retail electric choice in Nebraska; the schedule is the price.
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 read it. And the timeline for a large new service is a utility construction timeline, which Sarpy County's hyperscale queue has been growing for years and Google's proposed fourth campus would extend further. An operator with energised capacity is unaffected by that queue. An operator waiting on a substation upgrade is in a line whose length is set by the utility's own build schedule, which no contract clause shortens.
The hyperscale story is real and it is not for lease
It is worth naming what is coming to this market and being explicit about how none of it changes what you can rent. Meta's Sarpy Data Center campus is a nine-building, roughly four-million-square-foot investment that the operator itself has valued at more than 1.5 billion dollars, backed by more than five hundred acres of new land in Springfield and by a company-supported renewable energy portfolio. Google has three existing Nebraska campuses, has invested more than 3.5 billion dollars in the state since 2019 by the state's own count, and has privately proposed a fourth campus whose reported power requirement is between 1 and 3 gigawatts. Every one of these figures is a self-built site. Not one of them is inventory a colocation buyer can touch.
The one number worth carrying out of that paragraph is the effect on the utility queue rather than on the market. Sarpy County's hyperscale load has been the largest single new draw on the local utility for years, and if the Google Tenaska proposal is built it will be by an order of magnitude the largest again. That queue is real, it is measurable, and it will reach the delivery date on any new service in this metro. Ask your operator where the building sits in that queue, and expect the honest answer to be a date rather than a reassurance.
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 two hyperscalers have absorbed most of the local utility's new substation work and a third campus at up to 3 gigawatts is being proposed, 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.
When Omaha is right, and when it is the wrong choice
Omaha is the right answer when your requirement is network led or when you want a genuinely independent third site for an enterprise footprint. 1623 Farnam is a real carrier hotel by the count of what is plugged into it, and its published expansion pipeline says the room to grow is not speculative. For a Midwest financial-services buyer, a health system, a manufacturer or a regional retailer with people in this metro, the smaller multi-tenant buildings around the county are enterprise-grade at cheap public-utility power, and the staff access is straightforward.
It is the wrong choice if you are buying on the strength of the headline. The campuses that put Omaha in the news are hyperscaler self-builds, and treating their combined footprint as market supply would be the single largest mistake available in this market. Read them as pressure on the utility, which is real and will reach the delivery date on a new service, rather than as inventory.
It is also the wrong choice if your requirement needs to grow in wholesale steps inside one building. The largest multi-tenant capacity anyone has announced here is the 1623 Farnam second facility at at least 5 megawatts for mid-2028, and the largest stated capacity in the current permit record is the Oppidan 5 megawatt Papillion build. A requirement that needs tens of megawatts in one hall, with room to double, should be tested against Northern Virginia, Dallas or Chicago before it is tested here.
Ask which OPPD or NPPD rate schedule the building is served under and get the schedule itself, because in a market with no retail electric choice that document is the cost basis of everything you will be quoted. Ask whether the space is energised today or is waiting on a substation upgrade, and get the delivery date in writing. Ask where the building sits in the utility queue behind the hyperscaler builds, because that queue is what moves your date. If a proposal leans on the scale of the Meta or Google campuses in this county, ask what those projects change about the building you would occupy, and expect the honest answer to be nothing except the utility's workload. And because 1623 Farnam is the interconnection anchor for this whole metro, ask what a cross-connect to your carrier costs there and whether the building you are considering is on-net to it: the answer decides whether you are buying a downtown network room or a Sarpy County space room.