The first-half numbers
CBRE's North America Data Center Trends report for the first half of 2026, published August 27, put primary-market supply at a record 10,903 megawatts, up 33.7 percent year over year, with vacancy at a record-low 1.4 percent — down from 1.6 percent in the first half of 2025. Net absorption was 1,456.2 MW, 11.7 percent higher than a year earlier.
Capacity under construction rose 24.8 percent to a record 7,481.1 MW, surpassing the previous peak of 6,350.1 MW set in the second half of 2024. Atlanta overtook Northern Virginia in construction volume at 2,882 MW, up 52.3 percent, while Northern Virginia remained the largest market by existing inventory at 4,496.5 MW.
Supply growing 34% while vacancy falls
The combination is unusual in commercial real estate: a third more space delivered and less of it empty than before. It means demand absorbed the entire increase and then some.
The mechanism is preleasing. Data Center Frontier's coverage of the CBRE report notes that 80.4 percent of capacity under construction was already preleased. Tenants are committing to space years before it exists, which is why delivery does not translate into available inventory.
Pricing moved with scarcity
Asking rates rose across every deployment size in the first half. Requirements of 3 to 10 megawatts saw rates rise 8.3 percent, 500 kilowatts to 3 MW rose 7.9 percent, deployments above 10 MW rose 6.7 percent, and the smallest bracket, 250 to 500 kW, rose 4.3 percent.
The ordering is the interesting part. Mid-size and small requirements priced up faster than the largest ones, which is the opposite of normal volume discounting behaviour and suggests that hyperscale tenants signing very large blocks still command terms that smaller enterprise users cannot.
Northern Virginia illustrates the extreme. Vacancy there was 0.24 percent, leaving roughly 10.8 MW available in a 4,496.5 MW market — effectively nothing. CBRE tracks eight primary markets: Northern Virginia, Dallas-Fort Worth, Silicon Valley, Chicago, Phoenix, the New York tri-state area, Atlanta and Hillsboro, Oregon.
Six months of headroom
With 80.4 percent of the 7,481 MW under construction already preleased, under 1,500 MW remains uncommitted across all primary markets. Against a half-year absorption pace of roughly 1,456 MW, that is about six months of supply — for capacity that takes years to build and energise.
Analysis: the binding constraint is power delivery and grid interconnection rather than capital or land, which is why the pipeline has shifted toward markets with available generation and why Atlanta could overtake Northern Virginia in construction volume. Nothing in the report quantifies any effect on local residential construction costs, and Estate Wire does not assert one.
Caveat: CBRE's report was not directly retrievable from the company's site; the figures here come from CBRE's own text as reproduced in dated trade coverage. Estate Wire was unable to verify the contents of JLL's separate midyear report and therefore reports no figures from it.