North American data center vacancy fell to 1.4% in the first half of 2026, an all-time low, while new construction across major U.S. markets rose almost 25%. Those two numbers shouldn’t sit together. The reason they do is power.
CBRE‘s latest North American Data Center Trends report puts total power up by a third year over year. Net absorption rose almost 12%. Supply has roughly tripled against where it stood five years ago, and vacancy still went down.
Why record construction isn’t loosening the market
Vacancy in this report measures the share of power capacity available for lease, not empty floor space. That distinction carries the whole finding. Shells get built. Grid interconnection and long-lead electrical gear can’t be compressed the same way, so landlords like Equinix and Digital Realty lease faster than developers can energize.
“The scale at which we’re building today is significantly larger than what it was five years ago, and completely different than what it was ten or 15 years ago,” Pat Lynch, CBRE’s global executive managing director for its data solutions group, told Channel Dive. “It is unlike any other industry in my lifetime, where you can triple supply, yet still have vacancy rates going down.”
Rents follow the same curve. Gordon Dolven, head of Americas data center research at CBRE, said pricing and vacancy have been “perfectly inversely correlated” in the report for years running. His advice to tenants: start looking three years ahead and stay flexible about location.
Atlanta passed Data Center Alley
Northern Virginia remains the largest market by inventory, but Atlanta is now the top market in North America for total construction, with development up more than 50% year over year in the first half. Dolven’s framing is geographic scatter: Reno competing with Silicon Valley, Atlanta competing with Northern Virginia, new markets appearing wherever power is available.
For contractors that’s a siting signal more than a demand signal. The work goes where interconnection queues are shortest, which isn’t where the historical expertise sits.
The overbuild question
Lynch, who worked through the telecom bubble of the early 2000s, offered an argument worth holding onto: limited power has throttled the buildout, and that throttle may be the thing that prevents an overbuild.
It cuts against the anxiety now attached to the sector over land use, water and community opposition. It also means the binding constraint is external to the industry. Exchange has covered how concentrated this growth has become: ConstructConnect’s autumn forecast put $77.4 billion of data centers inside a $78 billion commercial increase. A sector expanding that fast, gated by substations rather than by capital, is one where the schedule risk sits with the utility.