Data Center Statistics 2026
By Axis Intelligence Research
Co-author: James Porter (Networking & Infrastructure) | Last updated: August 27, 2026 | License: CC BY 4.0
The two largest listed colocation operators ended 2025 with 590 data centers, roughly 76 million square feet of floor area and 2,967.7 megawatts of UPS-backed IT load between them. Portfolio occupancy was 84.7%. Axis Intelligence Research finds that the world’s largest colocation estate runs at an Installed Density Ratio of 68.7 watts per rentable square foot.
Quick Answer
Digital Realty operated 310 data centers with 43.2 million net rentable square feet and 2,967.7 MW of white-space IT load as of December 31, 2025, at 84.7% occupancy. Equinix operated 280 facilities across 77 markets in 36 countries with 32.8 million gross square feet. Axis Intelligence Research calculates the resulting Installed Density Ratio at 68.7 W per rentable square foot — with a 7.5x spread between the densest and least dense metros.
Key Findings
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that the global operating colocation estate carries an Installed Density Ratio (IDR) of 68.7 watts per rentable square foot, derived from 2,967.7 MW of white-space IT load across 43,208,000 net rentable square feet as of December 31, 2025.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds a 7.5x dispersion in installed power density between data center metros, from 106.8 W per square foot in Portland to 14.3 W per square foot in Seattle, both inside the same operator’s portfolio.
- Digital Realty reported 84.7% portfolio occupancy at December 31, 2025 — 6,626,000 square feet of leasable data center space stood empty during the year the industry described itself as capacity-constrained.
- Axis Intelligence Research finds that retail colocation (0–1 MW deployments) commanded a 55.8% premium over wholesale (>1 MW) on a per-kilowatt basis for leases signed in Q4 2025, at $282 versus $181 per kilowatt per month.
- Data centres consumed 23% of all metered electricity in Ireland during 2025, up from 5% in 2015, according to the Central Statistics Office — five percentage points below every household in the country combined.
How Many Data Centers Are There in 2026?
No registry counts them. There is no licensing regime, no mandatory filing, no census line item that says “data center.” What exists instead are operator disclosures, and those are precise.
Equinix reported a footprint of 280 data centers, in 77 markets in 36 countries in its Form 10-K for fiscal 2025, serving over 10,500 customers through more than 500,000 interconnections. Digital Realty reported 310 data centers, including 89 held as investments in unconsolidated entities, across 329 buildings.
Combined: 590 facilities. That is the visible core of a market Equinix’s own filing estimates at more than 2,400 companies providing multi-tenant data center offerings worldwide — meaning the two largest operators together account for a small share of the provider count and a large share of the interconnection density.
What the U.S. establishment data shows
The Bureau of Labor Statistics counts establishments rather than buildings. Its Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages recorded 56,613 private establishments in NAICS 518 — computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting and related services — in Q4 2025, up 2.1% from 55,447 in Q1 2025.
That number is not a data center count. It includes payroll processors and web hosts operating out of offices. It is useful as a growth signal and as the denominator for sector employment, and useless as an inventory of physical halls. Anyone quoting an establishment count as a facility count has skipped the definition.
Interconnection density per facility
| Operator | Facilities | Interconnections / cross-connects | Per facility | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Equinix | 280 | 500,000+ | 1,786 | Equinix Form 10-K FY2025 |
| Digital Realty | 310 | 232,500 | 750 | Digital Realty Q4 2025 Financial Supplement |
Per-facility figures calculated by Axis Intelligence Research. As of December 31, 2025.
James Porter: Two operators of nearly identical size, and one carries 2.4x the connection density of the other. That is not an efficiency gap. It is two different products wearing the same word. Equinix sells the room because of who else is in it; Digital Realty increasingly sells the megawatt and lets the tenant worry about who is next door. Both models work. They just should not be averaged together, and most market summaries average them together.
How Much Data Center Capacity Is Installed — and How Much Sits Empty?
Digital Realty ended 2025 with 43,208,000 net rentable square feet in operation, of which 36,582,000 were occupied. That leaves 6,626,000 square feet vacant — an area larger than the operator’s entire Northern Virginia consolidated footprint, unlet, in the middle of a reported capacity crunch.
Portfolio occupancy: 84.7%. Same-capital occupancy: 83.7%. Both figures moved less than a point across the four quarters of 2025.
Occupancy by metro
| Metro | Occupancy | White-space IT load (MW) | Net rentable sq ft | Data centers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Portland | 99.9% | 122.5 | 1,147,000 | 3 |
| São Paulo | 98.8% | 127.0 | 1,508,000 | 25 |
| Chicago (unconsolidated) | 97.0% | 94.2 | 1,118,000 | 3 |
| Northern Virginia (unconsolidated) | 97.4% | 276.5 | 3,581,000 | 15 |
| Northern Virginia (consolidated) | 95.1% | 503.7 | 5,200,000 | 16 |
| Chicago (consolidated) | 93.9% | 82.4 | 2,230,000 | 7 |
| Singapore | 89.9% | 72.2 | 810,000 | 3 |
| Paris | 84.4% | 122.6 | 1,262,000 | 12 |
| Johannesburg | 83.3% | 92.4 | 1,681,000 | 5 |
| Dallas | 82.6% | 92.3 | 2,660,000 | 16 |
| Frankfurt | 81.9% | 135.0 | 2,102,000 | 24 |
| Silicon Valley | 81.7% | 91.2 | 1,175,000 | 11 |
| Amsterdam | 81.4% | 127.2 | 1,425,000 | 13 |
| Tokyo | 77.7% | 86.1 | 1,261,000 | 5 |
| New York | 72.2% | 61.8 | 1,497,000 | 10 |
| Seattle | 67.5% | 5.9 | 412,000 | 1 |
| London | 65.4% | 97.0 | 1,348,000 | 13 |
Source: Digital Realty Trust, Q4 2025 Financial Supplement, Occupancy Analysis. As of December 31, 2025.
Read the two ends of that table together. Portland and Northern Virginia are effectively full. London is a third empty. The shortage is real and it is local — a constraint on connected, powered, permitted capacity in a handful of metros, not on data center floor space as a category.
The pipeline against the installed base
Digital Realty carried 769 MW under construction at year-end, 64% pre-leased, plus land and shell capable of supporting 4,230 MW more. That future capacity is 1.43x the entire installed white-space IT load. Under-construction capacity alone equals 25.9% of what is already running.
Expected stabilized yield on that development: 11.9%. Development capital expenditure in 2025: $2.54 billion.
James Porter: Sixty-four percent pre-leased is the number to watch, not the megawatt total. A hall that opens 100% leased was underbuilt for the market; a hall that opens 30% leased was a bet. Sixty-four percent, with an eight-month average lag between signature and commencement, is a pipeline being metered against actual demand rather than against a slide. The failure mode nobody writes up is the other one: capacity delivered at a density the arriving tenant cannot use.
What Is the Installed Density Ratio (IDR)?
Every capacity conversation in 2026 gets conducted in megawatts, and every real estate disclosure gets made in square feet. The two rarely appear in the same table. When they do, they answer a question the industry mostly avoids: how hard is the existing building stock actually being worked?
Formula and inputs
IDR = (white-space UPS-backed IT load in MW × 1,000,000) ÷ net rentable square feet of operating space
Operating space excludes square footage under active development and square footage held for future development. Both inputs come from a single disclosure table in Digital Realty’s Q4 2025 Financial Supplement, so the numerator and denominator share one definition, one operator and one snapshot date.
Portfolio calculation, as of December 31, 2025:
2,967.7 MW × 1,000,000 ÷ 43,208,000 sq ft = 68.7 W per rentable square foot
On occupied space only — 36,582,000 sq ft — IDR rises to 81.1 W per square foot.
IDR by metro
| Metro | IDR (W/sq ft) | IT load (MW) | Net rentable sq ft |
|---|---|---|---|
| Portland | 106.8 | 122.5 | 1,147,000 |
| Paris | 97.1 | 122.6 | 1,262,000 |
| Northern Virginia (consolidated) | 96.9 | 503.7 | 5,200,000 |
| Amsterdam | 89.3 | 127.2 | 1,425,000 |
| Singapore | 89.1 | 72.2 | 810,000 |
| Chicago (unconsolidated) | 84.3 | 94.2 | 1,118,000 |
| São Paulo | 84.2 | 127.0 | 1,508,000 |
| Silicon Valley | 77.6 | 91.2 | 1,175,000 |
| Northern Virginia (unconsolidated) | 77.2 | 276.5 | 3,581,000 |
| London | 72.0 | 97.0 | 1,348,000 |
| Tokyo | 68.3 | 86.1 | 1,261,000 |
| Frankfurt | 64.2 | 135.0 | 2,102,000 |
| Johannesburg | 55.0 | 92.4 | 1,681,000 |
| New York | 41.3 | 61.8 | 1,497,000 |
| Chicago (consolidated) | 37.0 | 82.4 | 2,230,000 |
| Dallas | 34.7 | 92.3 | 2,660,000 |
| Seattle | 14.3 | 5.9 | 412,000 |
| Portfolio total | 68.7 | 2,967.7 | 43,208,000 |
IDR calculated by Axis Intelligence Research from Digital Realty Q4 2025 Financial Supplement inputs. As of December 31, 2025.
Portland to Seattle is a 7.5x spread inside one company’s books. Northern Virginia’s two pools — consolidated at 96.9 and unconsolidated at 77.2 — differ by a quarter, in the same county, under the same operator.
Combining both Northern Virginia pools gives 780.2 MW across 31 facilities and 8,781,000 square feet, an IDR of 88.9 and 26.3% of the entire portfolio’s IT load in one metro.
What IDR measures, and what it does not
IDR is a facility-level intensity, not a rack density. Net rentable square feet include support space, corridors and common area, so IDR will always read lower than the kW-per-rack figure quoted on a design spec. Its value is comparative: the same definition applied across seventeen metros on one date.
Scope: the calculation covers one operator’s portfolio, which skews toward network-dense and campus product rather than single-tenant hyperscale builds. It reflects provisioned UPS-backed capacity dedicated to operated space, not instantaneous draw. And a low IDR is not automatically an inefficient building — an older network-dense facility deliberately trades density for carrier diversity and floor flexibility.
James Porter: The number that matters here is 68.7, and what it tells you is that the installed base was built for a completely different machine. Retrofitting a 40-watt-per-square-foot hall for high-density AI racks is not a cooling upgrade. It is switchgear, riser capacity, floor loading and a utility interconnection request that will outlive the procurement cycle. This is why “just use the empty space in London” is not an answer, and why the vacancy and the shortage coexist without contradicting each other.
What Does Colocation Cost per Kilowatt in 2026?
Digital Realty is shifting its disclosure from square feet to IT load, which finally makes colocation prices comparable across deployment sizes.
For leases signed in Q4 2025 across all regions, at company share:
| Deployment size | GAAP rent ($/kW/month) | Cash rent ($/kW/month) | GAAP rent ($/sq ft/yr) | Weighted avg lease term |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0–1 MW (retail) | 282 | 278 | 352 | 4.2 years |
| >1 MW (wholesale) | 181 | 154 | 289 | 8.9 years |
| Blended | 220 | 202 | 313 | 6.1 years |
Source: Digital Realty Trust, Q4 2025 Financial Supplement, Summary of Leasing Activity. Leases signed in the quarter ended December 31, 2025.
Axis Intelligence Research finds a 55.8% retail premium over wholesale per kilowatt on Q4 2025 signings, narrowing to 40.9% on a trailing twelve-month basis ($286 versus $203). Measured per square foot instead, the same gap reads as only 21.8% — which is precisely why the industry is abandoning square-foot pricing. Power is the scarce input, and per-square-foot rent hides more than half the spread.
Renewals landed at +6.0% cash on a per-kilowatt basis over the trailing twelve months, with a 75.3% retention ratio and 5.4% churn. Top-20 customers accounted for 50.9% of annualized recurring revenue. Signed-but-not-commenced backlog stood at $817 million of annualized base rent.
James Porter: A hundred and one dollars per kilowatt per month is what the cross-connect ecosystem costs, stated plainly. The wholesale tenant brings its own network and signs for nine years; the retail tenant buys proximity and signs for four. The premium is not the room. It is everyone else in the room, plus the option to leave sooner.
Where Is Data Center Capacity Concentrated?
Northern Virginia
Thirty-one facilities. 780.2 MW of white-space IT load. 95.1% and 97.4% occupancy across the two ownership pools. Over 1,000 additional megawatts developable on land the operator already controls.
One county cluster holds 26.3% of a global portfolio’s installed IT load. Concentration at that level is a grid-planning fact before it is a real estate fact.
Ireland, where the national grid keeps the score
Ireland is the only country publishing an official, audited annual series on data centre electricity, which makes it the cleanest window anywhere into what this industry does to a national system.
Data centres consumed 7,663 GWh in 2025, or 23% of all metered electricity, up 9.9% year over year while every other class of customer grew 2%.
| Year | Data centre (GWh) | All other customers (GWh) | Data centre share |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2015 | 1,240 | 23,360 | 5% |
| 2017 | 1,762 | 23,963 | 7% |
| 2019 | 2,490 | 24,015 | 9% |
| 2021 | 4,012 | 24,493 | 14% |
| 2023 | 6,339 | 24,242 | 21% |
| 2024 | 6,973 | 24,930 | 22% |
| 2025 | 7,663 | 25,324 | 23% |
Source: Central Statistics Office Ireland, Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025.
Residential consumption — every home in the country — accounted for 28%. Large energy users, a category that includes the bigger data centres, reached 33% at 10,812 GWh.
Axis Intelligence Research estimates Ireland’s average continuous data centre load at 874.8 MW (7,663 GWh ÷ 8,760 hours). Set against Digital Realty’s 2,967.7 MW of contracted white-space IT load, a single mid-sized European country draws average power equal to 29.5% of the largest listed colocation portfolio on earth. The two figures are built differently — one is metered average draw, the other is provisioned UPS-backed capacity — and they are presented side by side rather than merged for exactly that reason.
James Porter: Look at the “all other customers” column. It moved from 23,360 to 25,324 GWh in a decade — 8%. The data centre column went up 518%. Ireland’s electricity system did not grow because Ireland grew. It grew because a dozen campuses arrived, and the country is now the control experiment everyone else’s grid planners are reading.
How Many People Work in Data Centers?
Employment in NAICS 518 stood at 463,500 jobs in July 2026, preliminary and seasonally adjusted, down from 465,700 in May. The series has been flat to slightly negative across 2026 even as capital expenditure set records — the tell that this build-out is capital-intensive rather than labour-intensive.
Pay is high. Average hourly earnings reached $59.66 in June 2026 across a 38.3-hour week, which annualizes to $118,819. Production and non-supervisory staff averaged $50.03 across 37.8 hours, or $98,339 annualized.
| Measure | Value | Period | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sector employment, all employees | 463,500 | July 2026 (p) | BLS Current Employment Statistics |
| Average hourly earnings, all employees | $59.66 | June 2026 (p) | BLS Current Employment Statistics |
| Annualized earnings, all employees | $118,819 | June 2026 | Axis Intelligence Research calculation |
| Computer support specialists in sector | 24,940 | May 2025 | BLS OEWS |
| Median wage, computer support specialists | $66,400 | May 2025 | BLS OEWS |
| Median wage, computer systems analysts | $97,930 | May 2025 | BLS OEWS |
| Recordable injury rate per 100 FTE | 0.3 | 2024 | BLS Injuries, Illnesses and Fatalities |
Staffing per facility
Equinix employed 13,716 people worldwide at the end of 2025 — 5,917 in the Americas, 4,706 in EMEA, 3,093 in Asia-Pacific — with 44% in engineering and operations.
Axis Intelligence Research calculates 49.0 employees per data center on a total-workforce basis, falling to 21.6 engineering and operations staff per facility once sales, finance and administration are stripped out. That second figure is the one that belongs in any local economic impact debate: a large multi-tenant facility is staffed like a substation with a security desk, not like a factory.
Uptime Institute’s 16th Annual Global Data Center Survey, published July 2026, reports more than half of operators struggling to fill open positions, with staff routinely poached by other data center companies. Ten percent of outages are still classified as serious or severe.
James Porter: Twenty-two operations people per facility, a 0.3 injury rate, six-figure median pay, and a hiring pipeline that mostly recirculates the same technicians between competitors. Every one of those facts points the same direction. The constraint on opening a hall in 2026 is a utility interconnection and a shift roster, in that order, and the roster is getting harder faster than anyone budgeted for.
What Does It Cost to Run the Floor?
Digital Realty booked $6.11 billion of total operating revenue in 2025 against $1.43 billion of utilities expense — 23.3% of revenue spent on electricity, most of it recovered through tenant reimbursements that ran $1.25 billion.
Axis Intelligence Research finds revenue of $167.10 per occupied square foot and utilities cost of $39.00 per occupied square foot for the year.
On efficiency: Equinix reported an annual average operational PUE of 1.39 for 2024, a 6% improvement on 2023, with 96% of global electricity consumption covered by renewable sources and 100% coverage in the U.S. and Europe. Portfolio energy consumption rose 7.9% year over year to 8,868,053 MWh — an implied average continuous load of 1,009.6 MW and 270.4 kWh per gross square foot per year.
Reported operational uptime across that estate in 2025: 99.9999% or better.
Methodology
Data collection. Every statistic in this report was retrieved from primary sources fetched during the production session of August 27, 2026. Each figure has a corresponding row in the downloadable CSV carrying its source organisation, source document, source URL, retrieval date, as-of date and, where applicable, the calculation method.
Primary sources fetched:
- Equinix, Inc., Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended December 31, 2025, filed February 11, 2026 (SEC EDGAR)
- Digital Realty Trust, Inc., Fourth Quarter 2025 Financial Supplement, released February 5, 2026
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Industries at a Glance: NAICS 518, data extracted August 21, 2026 (Current Employment Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, Injuries Illnesses and Fatalities)
- Central Statistics Office Ireland, Data Centres Metered Electricity Consumption 2025, released July 7, 2026
- Uptime Institute, 16th Annual Global Data Center Survey 2026, released July 28, 2026
Formulas disclosed.
- Installed Density Ratio (IDR) = (white-space UPS-backed IT load in MW × 1,000,000) ÷ net rentable square feet of operating space, excluding space under active development and space held for future development.
- Retail premium = (retail GAAP rent per kW − wholesale GAAP rent per kW) ÷ wholesale GAAP rent per kW.
- Implied average continuous load = annual energy consumption in GWh × 1,000 ÷ hours in the period (8,760 for a standard year; 8,784 for 2024).
- Employees per data center = total reported headcount ÷ reported facility count. Operations basis applies the disclosed 44% engineering and operations share.
- Annualized earnings = average hourly earnings × average weekly hours × 52.
Arithmetic verification. Every calculation was run twice independently — once in floating point, once in exact rational arithmetic — before any figure entered this text. Every numeric token in the prose was then matched back against a CSV row.
Scope. IDR is computed from one operator’s disclosures because that operator is the only one publishing IT load and rentable area on the same date under the same definitions. It therefore describes the multi-tenant colocation estate, not single-tenant hyperscale campuses, which disclose neither. Employment figures cover NAICS 518, a classification broader than data center operations. Irish consumption reflects the CSO’s own identification method for data centre customers, described in its background notes, since data centres are not separately classified in the source meter data. Equinix efficiency and energy metrics are reported on a 2024 calendar-year basis; the operator states 2025 figures publish separately in its sustainability reporting.
About This Dataset
Title: Data Center Statistics 2026 — Capacity, Occupancy, Installed Density, Pricing and Employment
Creator and publisher: Axis Intelligence Research
Coverage: 2015–2026, global with metro-level detail across 17 markets in 11 countries
Rows: 248 observations, each with full provenance columns
File: data-center-statistics-2026.csv
License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0). You may copy, adapt and redistribute this data in any medium for any purpose, including commercially, provided you credit Axis Intelligence Research and link to axis-intelligence.com/data-center-statistics/.
Citation
APA: Axis Intelligence Research, & Porter, J. (2026, August 27). Data center statistics 2026: Capacity, occupancy, density, pricing and jobs. Axis Intelligence. https://axis-intelligence.com/data-center-statistics/
MLA: Axis Intelligence Research and James Porter. “Data Center Statistics 2026: Capacity, Occupancy, Density, Pricing and Jobs.” Axis Intelligence, 27 Aug. 2026, axis-intelligence.com/data-center-statistics/.
Chicago: Axis Intelligence Research and James Porter. “Data Center Statistics 2026: Capacity, Occupancy, Density, Pricing and Jobs.” Axis Intelligence. August 27, 2026. https://axis-intelligence.com/data-center-statistics/.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is there vacant colocation space while operators say capacity is sold out?
Because “capacity” means connected megawatts in a specific metro, and vacancy is measured in square feet across all metros. Digital Realty had 6,626,000 square feet unlet at the end of 2025 while running Portland at 99.9% and Northern Virginia at 95.1%. The empty space sits in London (65.4%), New York (72.2%) and Seattle (67.5%), in halls whose power and cooling were designed for a workload profile that no longer arrives.
What is a normal power density for an existing data center, in watts per square foot?
The operating multi-tenant estate reads at 68.7 W per rentable square foot on the Installed Density Ratio, rising to 81.1 W when measured against occupied space only. Individual metros range from 14.3 to 106.8. Design specifications for new AI halls are quoted per rack rather than per square foot and sit far above these figures, which is the retrofit problem stated in one line.
Why are operators switching from square-foot to kilowatt disclosure?
Because square feet hide the price. The same Q4 2025 leases showed a 55.8% retail-over-wholesale premium per kilowatt and only 21.8% per square foot. Digital Realty confirmed it is moving occupancy reporting onto an IT-load basis. Any comparison of colocation pricing across deployment sizes that uses square feet understates the gap by more than half.
How much does a cross-connect ecosystem actually cost a tenant?
$101 per kilowatt per month, on Q4 2025 signings — the difference between $282 retail and $181 wholesale. Retail tenants also sign shorter: 4.2 years weighted average against 8.9 for wholesale. The premium buys adjacency to 500,000-plus interconnections and the ability to exit sooner.
Which country’s grid is most exposed to data centre load?
Ireland, on the available official evidence. Data centres took 23% of all metered electricity in 2025 against 28% for every household combined, up from 5% in 2015. Irish consumption grew 518% over the decade while all other customers grew about 8%. No other national statistics office publishes an equivalent audited annual series, so cross-country ranking beyond Ireland is not currently supportable from primary data.
How many staff does a multi-tenant data center actually need?
Around 22 engineering and operations personnel per facility, derived from Equinix’s 13,716 employees, its disclosed 44% engineering and operations share, and 280 facilities. Total headcount per facility including corporate functions is 49.0. Sector-wide, U.S. NAICS 518 employment was 463,500 in July 2026 and has been flat through the year despite record construction.
What share of colocation revenue goes to electricity?
23.3% of Digital Realty’s 2025 total operating revenue, or $1.43 billion against $6.11 billion. Most is passed through: tenant utility reimbursements totalled $1.25 billion. Per occupied square foot, that works out to $39.00 of utilities against $167.10 of revenue.
How much new capacity is committed but not yet built?
Digital Realty alone held 769 MW under construction at 64% pre-leased, plus land and shell supporting 4,230 MW more — together 1.43 times its entire installed white-space IT load of 2,967.7 MW. Expected stabilized yield on that development is 11.9%.
How reliable are data centers in 2026?
Equinix reported 99.9999% or better operational uptime across its estate in 2025. Uptime Institute’s 2026 survey finds 10% of outages still classified as serious or severe, with power availability and falling grid reliability cited among operators’ rising concerns alongside a worsening staffing shortage.
Can the Installed Density Ratio be reproduced independently?
Yes. Both inputs sit in one public table — the Occupancy Analysis page of Digital Realty’s Q4 2025 Financial Supplement, which lists white-space IT load and net rentable square feet per metro. Divide load in watts by square feet. Every value in the IDR tables above, and the underlying inputs, ship in the CC BY 4.0 CSV.
Related Axis Intelligence Research:
AI Data Center Statistics · Data Center Construction Cost Statistics · AI Data Center Energy Consumption Statistics · Data Center Electricity Cost by State · Nuclear Energy for Data Centers · AI Data Center Water Usage Statistics