The cables come ashore here, so the networks do too
South Florida is not a power market that grew networks. It is a landing point that grew a small power market around itself. Subsea systems from Latin America and the Caribbean come ashore in Florida, and that traffic has to be handed off to terrestrial carriers somewhere. That somewhere is a short list of buildings in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.
The NAP of the Americas, now Equinix MI1, is the anchor. It is a purpose-built carrier hotel in downtown Miami, and it is the reason a network operator in Bogota or Sao Paulo buys space in Florida at all. Our own interconnection data shows how tight the concentration is: 19 buildings across the metro, roughly 152 networks, with Miami proper alone carrying 135 networks and 18 internet exchanges inside 15 buildings. That is the asset. Everything else in this market is downstream of it.
The cable landings are spread wider than the colocation is. Boca Raton is the terminal station for the SAm-1 system to South America. Hollywood, between Miami and Fort Lauderdale, is a landing point for MAYA-1, which serves Central America and the Caribbean and is being upgraded as MAYA-1.2. Those stations are not colocation space and you cannot buy a cabinet in them. They are the reason colocation exists a few miles inland.
What the market does not have is scale. Bisnow, citing datacenterHawk, put Miami inventory at 69 MW in late 2024 with a 16.4 percent vacancy rate, against Atlanta at 310 MW with 1,289 MW under construction. Other counts run higher, into the 90s, depending on whether you measure design capacity or something closer to delivered load. Every one of those figures is small. None of them is wrong.
Every capacity number on this page is small by national standards, and that is not a defect in the research. A buyer who ranks South Florida against Dallas or Ashburn on megawatts will conclude it is losing, and that conclusion will be correct and useless. Rank it on which networks you can reach from the cage and the picture inverts. The question is not how much power is here. It is how many of the networks you depend on terminate in the specific building you are being shown.
Who is actually plugged in across South Florida
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 | 30 | Registered in PeeringDB across South Florida, by 22 operators |
| Buildings with a network present | 23 | 7 carry no network presence, which usually means single tenant or simply unregistered |
| Network presences | 567 | Counted per building, so a carrier in three buildings counts three times |
| Internet exchange presences | 39 | Where you can reach many networks through one port instead of many cross-connects |
| Carrier presences | 42 | The physical transport choice you can buy without leaving the building |
| In the densest building | 58% | Equinix MI1 - Miami, NOTA holds 327 of the market's network presences |
The most connected buildings here
| Networks | Building | Operator | Exchanges | Carriers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 327 | Equinix MI1 - Miami, NOTA | Equinix, Inc. | 9 | 16 |
| 43 | ColoHouse Miami | ColoHouse Premier Datacenter | 3 | 1 |
| 31 | Digital Realty MIA (36 NE 2nd St) | Digital Realty | 4 | 1 |
| 27 | Equinix MI2 - Miami | Equinix, Inc. | 3 | 2 |
| 21 | CoreSite - Miami (MI1) | CoreSite | 2 | 2 |
| 21 | DataBank Miami (MIA1) | DataBank, Ltd. | 2 | 0 |
| 17 | iM Critical Miami | iM Critical | 1 | 2 |
| 16 | Equinix MI3 - Miami, Boca Raton | Equinix, Inc. | 2 | 4 |
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 South Florida
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16 MW | Iron Mountain | MIA-1 | 150,000 SF on a 3.4 acre former records site in northwest Miami-Dade, ground broken February 2025 and topped out that August. Under construction |
| 9.2 MW | RadiusDC | Miami I expansion | A roughly 170,000 SF building in Sweetwater acquired from NextStream, with a meet-me-room serving 11 network providers. Announced expansion of an existing building |
Two rows is the entire verifiable list, and the larger of them is 16 MW. That is not a gap in the research, it is the market: we looked for a South Florida project with a published megawatt figure at the scale other metros announce as routine, and no operator has published one. Note what neither row is. Iron Mountain's own material describes MIA-1 as phasing up to 16 MW rather than delivering it, and RadiusDC's first construction phase was scheduled for the first half of 2026. Both are capacity on a schedule. Neither is space you can contract today, and no public source anywhere discloses what is actually contractible in this metro.
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.
FPL, a new state law, and a building code that assumes a Category 5
Florida Power and Light serves the entire metro. Its commercial rates sit near the national average rather than below it, which removes the cheap power argument that drives siting decisions in Texas or the Midwest. FPL's own public position through 2025 was that large scale data centers had not really arrived in Florida yet. That is now changing, but the change is happening inland, not on the coast.
The regulator's numbers make the current scale plain. In its review of the 2025 Ten Year Site Plans, the Florida Public Service Commission reported 62 existing data centers on FPL's system consuming 283 GWh in 2024 and contributing 30.2 MW to summer peak demand. Statewide the total was 86 facilities and 62 MW. The Commission described those existing data centers as relatively small, served by existing generation, with no known negative impacts on reliability. That is the regulator saying the quiet part out loud.
The forecasts are enormous and they are not about South Florida. The same PSC review records FPL projecting data center peak demand growing from 172 MW in 2028 to 732 MW in 2034. NextEra has since raised expected data center and large load demand at FPL to 8 GW by 2032, against roughly 21 GW of interest in the pipeline and 12 GW in advanced discussions. Loads at that scale need cheap land and open acreage next to transmission. Miami-Dade has neither, and the available industrial land in southwest Miami-Dade is projected to run out around 2030.
SB 484 took effect on 1 July 2026 and reset the rules. It defines a large-scale data center as a single location with an anticipated monthly peak load of 50 megawatts or more, measured as the highest average load over a 15 minute interval, and it bars utilities from putting the cost of serving those customers onto the general body of ratepayers. Public utilities had to file updated large load tariffs by 1 October 2026. It also states that a large load customer may not be treated as an electric substation under section 163.3208, which closes a permitting shortcut developers elsewhere have leaned on, and it preserves local government authority to condition or deny projects outright.
Then read that 50 MW threshold against this metro. Nothing in South Florida comes close to 50 MW at a single site, so almost no colocation building here falls under the large load regime at all. That is convenient for operators. It is also the clearest single measure of how small this market is relative to the ones the law was written for.
Resilience is the other cost driver, and here it is structural rather than optional. Miami-Dade and Broward are the two counties inside the High Velocity Hurricane Zone of the Florida Building Code. Design wind speeds for a Risk Category IV building reach 195 mph in Miami-Dade and 185 mph in Broward. That means impact rated envelopes, enhanced structural connections, hardened generator yards and protected fuel storage on every megawatt built. Operators sell that hardening as a feature, and for a disaster recovery buyer it genuinely is one. Bisnow reported in December 2024 that a hyperscaler dropped Miami expansion plans after a second hurricane passed, which tells you how the same trait reads to a different buyer.
Water is the one input this region is not short of. The Biscayne aquifer is shallow and productive, and consumptive use permits run through the South Florida Water Management District. SB 484 now allows water management districts to require large-scale data centers to take part of their supply as reclaimed water through the permit process. At the sizes actually built here, water is a permitting detail rather than a constraint, which is the opposite of the situation in Phoenix.
Florida's data center sales tax exemption used to require a 15 MW critical IT load and 150 million dollars of cumulative investment, and it covered electricity as well as equipment. HB 7031, signed on 30 June 2025, raised the critical IT load threshold to 100 megawatts effective 1 August 2025 and extended the programme to 2037. Greenberg Traurig's reading is that the amendment provides no grandfather rule for existing sub-100 MW data centers. Nothing in South Florida clears 100 MW, and nothing is close. So an incentive written to attract data centers to Florida now excludes every facility in the state's most interconnected metro, and the sales tax on electricity came back for operators who had been exempt. Ask directly how that is being handled in your rate.
Where the market actually is, submarket by submarket
Downtown Miami and the NAP of the Americas
This is the carrier hotel, and it is the reason the metro appears on anyone's map. Equinix MI1 and MI2 sit here, the Latin American subsea traffic is handed off here, and network density per cabinet is the highest in the southeast. There is effectively no room to grow, so you are buying position rather than a growth path, and the pricing reflects that.
Doral and west Miami-Dade
The working colocation corridor, built on industrial land west of the airport. CoreSite, Equinix MI6, Cogent, EdgeConneX and RadiusDC's Sweetwater building all sit in this belt. This is where most enterprise cabinets in the metro actually live, and where you get serious network reach without paying downtown rates.
Northwest Miami-Dade: Westview, Opa-locka and Medley
Where new supply is going, because it holds the last industrial parcels with room for a purpose-built shell. Iron Mountain's MIA-1 is here, on a 3.4 acre site that was previously a records warehouse. Miami-Dade code treats these as telecommunications hubs permitted by right in IU-1 and IU-2 industrial zoning, which is why the project advanced without a rezoning, a special exception or a public hearing.
Broward and Boca Raton
Fort Lauderdale and Boca Raton serve a separate enterprise base, and Boca is the terminal station for the SAm-1 cable to South America. Boca sits in Palm Beach County, outside the High Velocity Hurricane Zone that covers Miami-Dade and Broward, so the building code changes a few miles north of the county line. Broward is also where local politics is hardening: Pembroke Park's planning board heard a draft ordinance in April 2026 proposing impact fees of one million dollars per megawatt, half a million per acre in water fees and a ten million dollar performance bond.
When South Florida is the right answer, and when it is not
It is the right answer when your users, your counterparties or your regulators are south of the United States. If you serve Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, the Caribbean or Central America, the network path almost certainly touches Miami already. Putting your equipment where the handoff happens removes a hop and a transit bill, and it does so permanently. No amount of cheap power in Ohio substitutes for that.
It is right for regional disaster recovery, for latency-sensitive trading and media work inside the metro, and for any Latin America facing business that needs its infrastructure in a United States legal jurisdiction. Trade finance, logistics and cross-border payments cluster here for exactly that reason. It is also a reasonable choice for a hurricane-hardened production site, because the code here forces a standard of construction that other markets treat as an upgrade.
It is the wrong answer for large scale compute. If you need 10 MW or more in a single hall you are asking for a meaningful fraction of the metro's entire inventory, and you will be priced accordingly if anyone can serve you at all. Training clusters, bulk storage and any workload where power is the dominant line item belong in Atlanta, Dallas, Columbus or Phoenix. This is not a close call.
It is also the wrong answer if your procurement process ranks markets on dollars per kW. South Florida will lose that comparison every time, and the loss will be accurate. There is a signal in the capital flows too: Digital Realty sold its Miami data center for 8 million dollars in the third quarter of 2025, in the same quarter it was buying land in Los Angeles and Chicago. Read that as a statement about where scale is going, not as a verdict on the market's interconnection value, which is real and is not for sale anywhere else.
Negotiate this market on interconnection terms first, because interconnection is the scarce good and power is the commodity. Get cross connect pricing, the full meet-me-room provider list and any renewal escalators in writing before you discuss a rack rate. Confirm that the specific networks you need terminate in the building you are being shown, not in the operator's other building across town, because in this metro that distinction is the entire value of the deal. On capacity, treat every megawatt figure you are quoted as a schedule rather than an inventory. Both projects on this page are phasing up, so ask which hall is energised today, what the utility service date is, and what happens to your rate and your term if a phase slips. Then ask three questions most South Florida buyers skip. What is this building's Risk Category and design wind speed under the High Velocity Hurricane Zone code, and does the answer differ from the marketing claim of Category 5 construction. How many hours of on-site fuel are contracted, with whom, and what is the replenishment priority for a storm that closes Port Everglades or PortMiami. And how is the operator absorbing the loss of the state sales tax exemption on electricity since August 2025, because if that cost is being passed through you want it named in the contract rather than discovered in month three.