Data center boom shows no signs of slowing as vacancy hits record lows
by CORY SMITH | The National News Desk
Tue, June 23, 2026 at 3:56 PM
Updated Tue, June 23, 2026 at 4:00 PM
FILE - In an aerial view, the IAD71 Amazon Web Services data center is shown on July 17, 2024, in Ashburn, Virginia. (Photo by Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
(TNND) — Data center inventory in top U.S. markets jumped 33% from a year ago, even as vacancy hit an all-time low, illustrating the hard-charging demand that's showing no signs of slowing down.
CBRE, the world’s largest commercial real estate services and investment firm, published a new report on global data center trends, showing supply reached 16 gigawatts in the first quarter of the year across the world’s 16 largest data center markets, a 25% annual increase.
Despite the growing capacity, global data center vacancy dropped from 8.3% to 6.7%.
And vacancy is even lower in American data center hubs: 0.3% in Northern Virginia, 1% in Atlanta, 1.8% in Dallas-Fort Worth and 2.2% in Chicago. Vacancy dropped in all four top U.S. data center markets.
Pat Lynch, the executive managing director for CBRE’s Data Center Solutions, said data center developers are in “catch-up mode,” with new capacity getting scooped up before it even hits the market.
Companies are signing leases for facilities that won't be delivered for three to four years, he said. Eighty percent of space under construction in top American markets has been preleased.
“I think the stats kind of speak for themselves,” Lynch said. “So, while we're producing record inventory, it's getting taken up just as quickly.”
The U.S. has 3,000 operational data centers, with another 1,500 or so in various stages of development, according to a recent Pew Research Center report.
Lynch said counting data centers is difficult, because definitions vary.
To that point, a recent report for Congress said data centers vary in size and scope, “ranging from closets, to larger rooms within a single enterprise, to dedicated standalone structures serving the needs of multiple customers or tenants, known as colocation.”
One thing’s for certain: data centers are in high demand, driven by needs in artificial intelligence, cloud computing and more.
Power availability is a key bottleneck for data center growth, but Lynch said community resistance is also a challenge to delivering on the demand.
“There's a lot of good things that come from data centers that we candidly have not talked about and promoted as much as we should have,” Lynch said.
Northern Virginia remains the world’s data center leader.
The region got an early foothold in the data center market and never looked back. And it’s now expanding from Ashburn in Loudoun County, Virginia, north to Maryland and south to Richmond.
“It has so many unique characteristics that have developed over time, when you think about undersea cables that have come into that area, and then the emergence of some of the large cloud hubs for some of the Fortune 10 companies that really started, because you had capacity and a lot of corporate data centers, a lot of colocation sites there,” Lynch said of Northern Virginia. “So, it's a market that has built upon itself and continues to do so. And so, you've got so much existing infrastructure that is nearly impossible to replicate elsewhere.”
But Lynch said Atlanta has seen massive growth, building as a possible alternative to Northern Virginia going forward.
By the first quarter, Chicago replaced Phoenix in the top four U.S. data center markets. And Dallas-Ft. Worth jumped two spots to become the nation’s third-largest data center market.
Tennessee and West Texas are emerging markets, driven by available power, according to CBRE.
The data center industry measures availability primarily by power capacity, not by square footage.
“In the world that I live in, we don't talk about it in terms of price per square foot. It's really price per (kilowatt) or availability in terms of megawatts,” Lynch said.
SEE ALSO: Local communities can take advantage of data center boom to win long-term gains: report
FILE - In this handout provided by Amazon, a technician works at an Amazon Web Services AI data center in New Carlisle, Indiana on October 2, 2025. (Photo by Noah Berger/Getty Images via Amazon Web Services)
CBRE's report covered third-party data centers only, not data centers owned and occupied entirely by a single company.
Data center construction today is 12 times what it was in 2020, Julie Whelan, CBRE’s head of occupier research, previously told The National News Desk.
Big tech companies called hyperscalers – such as Google, Amazon and Microsoft – are projected to spend $3.7 trillion on AI infrastructure over the next five years, CBRE said last month for a report on how AI build-out could rival the historic rail expansion of the 1800s in relative scale.
Lynch said Tuesday that data centers can’t keep up with AI demand in the short-term, predominantly due to some of the limitations in power supply.
And he sees that imbalance sticking around through the end of the decade.
“My thoughts are we’re at least three years out before we catch up with the supply that equal the demand that's out there,” Lynch said.
