North America built more data center capacity in the first half of 2026 than in any half-year on record, and vacancy went down.
CBRE published its North America Data Center Trends report for H1 2026 on August 27. Capacity under construction across the eight primary markets rose 24.8% in the first half to 7,481 MW, past the prior peak set in 2024. Total primary-market supply grew 33.7% year over year to a record 10,903 MW. Net absorption rose about 12% to 1,456 MW. And vacancy fell to 1.4% from 1.6% a year earlier, which is the lowest CBRE has recorded.
The market is contracted, not speculative
Preleasing hit 80.4% of all capacity under construction, up from 74.3% a year ago. That leaves under 1,500 MW genuinely available, which CBRE puts at roughly six months of demand at the current absorption pace.
For a contractor, an 80% preleased pipeline is a different risk profile than a speculative one. This is contracted revenue behind the backlog, and it doesn’t get cancelled because rates moved. It’s also the clearest available answer to the question of whether the segment is a bubble: a bubble shows up as vacancy, and there isn’t any.
Asking rates rose in every deployment size, led by 8.3% in the 3 MW to 10 MW band, 7.9% for 500 kW to 3 MW, 6.7% for 10 MW and above, and 4.3% for 250 to 500 kW. In the 10 MW-plus segment, New York Tri-State rates rose 19%, Atlanta 14.5% and Chicago 9.7%, while Silicon Valley and Hillsboro were flat and Northern Virginia moved 1.5%.
Atlanta is now the biggest construction market in North America
This is the operational headline. Atlanta passed Northern Virginia as the largest market by capacity under construction for the first time, up 52.3% year over year to about 2,882 MW. Northern Virginia is still the largest by inventory at 4,496.5 MW, still absorbed the most at 467.6 MW, and is down to 0.2% vacancy with 2,420.2 MW building.
A market that moves to the top of the construction table pulls subcontractor capacity, switchgear lead times and prefab shop scheduling with it. Electrical and mechanical firms deciding where to put their next crew have a clear answer, and firms already staffed in Atlanta have leverage they didn’t have last year.
Read the dates on the data
Everything here is CBRE Research’s own market data and its own definitions, so “primary markets,” “preleased” and “available for prelease” are the firm’s constructs. The report is branded H1 2026, and its market table is sourced to Q2 2026, meaning the underlying data is roughly two to eight months old at publication. The six-months-of-supply figure and the outlook on power constraints are forecasts, not observations. CBRE’s press release also prints total supply as “10.9 megawatts,” an evident typo for 10,903 MW.
The constraint CBRE describes has moved off the construction side entirely. At 0.2% vacancy with 4,496 MW building, Northern Virginia’s bottleneck is power and community approval, which the firm now weighs alongside power availability in site selection. That pushes entitlement risk onto preconstruction schedules, where it’s harder to price. For the contractor-side read, see T5’s construction arm going independent as EverOn.
Source: CBRE.