What it costs to build a data center, per megawatt

The published benchmarks

There is no single price for a data center. Each publisher measures a different scope. Read the scope column before comparing numbers.

The gap between $17.6 million and $10 to $13 million is mostly scope, not disagreement. Turner & Townsend's index covers the building and its electrical and mechanical systems, with contractor fees and contingency. It leaves out land, utility works, unusual groundworks, site works, professional fees and the owner's own costs (Turner & Townsend methodology). Cushman & Wakefield counts the whole project.

What a whole project costs

Per-MW figures are easier to use once they are multiplied out. The table applies Cushman & Wakefield's 2026 range and its average for the most modern facilities to three project sizes. It is our arithmetic, not a quote.

Three things move a real project away from these numbers:

• Scale. The benchmarks describe large facilities. A 5 MW building still needs much of the same site, security and power infrastructure as a larger one. We would expect it to cost more per MW, not less, though no cost guide we checked prices small builds separately.
• Redundancy. Fully redundant 2N design sits at the top of the range. AI training halls often need less, which is one reason they can land lower.
• The hardware. None of these totals includes servers. For AI, JLL says technology fit-out can add up to $25 million per MW. On that figure, the hardware in a 20 MW AI hall could cost up to $500 million on top of the building.

Why cost is quoted per MW, not per square foot

The expensive parts of a data center are sized to power, not floor area. Switchgear, UPS systems, generators, transformers and chillers scale with the megawatts the building can deliver and cool. Two halls with the same power and very different rack densities cost about the same to equip, even if one is twice the size of the other.

A cost per square foot hides that. A dense AI hall looks expensive per square foot and a low-density enterprise hall looks cheap, when the cost per unit of useful capacity may be similar. Rent follows the same logic. Wholesale space is leased per kW per month, which is why our lease rate guide quotes rents that way. The main exception is the powered shell, which is often still rented per square foot because the tenant installs the power systems.

Where the money goes

The building shell is the smaller part of the bill. The CRE Finance Council puts mechanical, electrical and plumbing systems at 60 to 70% of development cost. The same primer, citing KBRA, puts the building shell at 20 to 30% (CREFC, January 2026). Turner & Townsend's survey splits construction cost like this:

Cushman & Wakefield splits the whole project, including land and the tenant's own equipment, for a typical greenfield build:

Contingency is the second largest line. That tells you how much builders expect to go wrong on equipment deliveries and schedules. Site acquisition is only 7%. Cushman & Wakefield puts powered land in primary US markets at $584,000 per MW so far in 2026, up 51% in a year (2026 Development Cost Guide). That is a small share of a $17.6 million project. It is not small for a landowner, and our powered land guide covers what drives it.

Construction cost by US market

Turner & Townsend publishes construction-only costs for a set of US markets. Multiply dollars per watt by one million to get dollars per MW.

Cushman & Wakefield's all-in figures rank the markets the same way. Its five most expensive are Silicon Valley, Chicago, New York and Northern New Jersey, Toronto and Los Angeles. Texas markets, led by Austin and San Antonio, are the cheapest, and Virginia is in the middle of the pack (2026 Development Cost Guide).

Northern Virginia, the largest market, sits in the middle of the range on construction cost. Land is where it differs most. In Ashburn, recent powered land sales ran from $3.5 to $9.4 million per acre, against well under $2 million in parts of Arizona and Georgia (see the sales table in our land guide). Turner & Townsend does not publish figures for Reno, Hillsboro, Salt Lake City or San Antonio.

What AI and liquid cooling add

Turner & Townsend finds that liquid-cooled AI facilities in the US cost 7 to 10% more to build than air-cooled facilities of similar IT capacity (November 2025). The money moves as well as grows. Cooling goes from about a fifth of construction cost to a third, as the table above shows. Turner & Townsend also notes that AI halls often need less redundancy, which can offset part of the premium.

You will see claims that AI data centers cost $20 million or more per MW to build. We could not find that figure in any cost index we checked. Large AI totals usually include the GPUs and network, which belong in the fit-out budget, not the building.

The bigger cost of AI is often time, not money. Converting an existing air-cooled hall to liquid cooling can delay fit-out by more than six months (CBRE, H1 2026). Our AI capacity guide covers density and cooling requirements.

Why costs keep rising

• All-in cost is up 21% per MW between Cushman & Wakefield's late-2024 and 2026 guides. The firm cites equipment lead times, wages, material inflation and land (September 2026).
• Construction cost rose 5.5% in a year globally for an air-cooled build, after 9.0% the year before (Turner & Townsend, November 2025). JLL expects shell and core cost to rise another 6% in 2026.
• Transformers are scarce. In the second quarter of 2025, US power transformers took about 128 weeks to arrive. Their unit prices were up 77% since 2019 (Wood Mackenzie, reported by POWER, January 2026).
• Other electrical gear followed. Cushman & Wakefield's 2026 guide, using Bureau of Labor Statistics producer prices, reports switchgear up 60%, copper up 46%, generators up 33% and cooling equipment up 32% since December 2021. Our powered shell guide lists current lead times for each piece of equipment.

For a builder, lead times are a cost in their own right. Every month a finished building waits for a transformer is a month of financing with no rent.

The grid connection: substations and who pays

The benchmarks above count power infrastructure inside the building. The connection to the grid is harder to price. We found no published survey of what a new high-voltage substation and transmission line cost per MW for a data center. Anyone quoting a single number for it is estimating. What is published is the cost of the largest single component, the rules on who pays, and how long it takes.

The equipment

A large power transformer, above 100 MVA, costs roughly $15,000 to $21,000 per MVA, or about $1.5 to $2.1 million for a 100 MVA unit. Highly customized units reach about $4 million. Those are 2024 equipment prices before installation, and delivery adds 3 to 20% (National Laboratory of the Rockies, formerly NREL, May 2026). The same report cites typical lead times of 30 to 36 months, and up to 60 months for extra-high-voltage units. A transformer is only part of a substation. Breakers, switchgear, land, civil work and the line itself come on top.

Who pays

Since 2025, regulators in the largest markets have moved grid costs onto the data center. The tools are long contracts, minimum bills whether or not you use the power, collateral and exit fees:

The reason is the rest of the rate base. JLARC's consultant modeled Virginia data center growth adding about $14 to $37 a month to a typical Dominion household's generation and transmission charges by 2040, depending on how much of the demand is built (JLARC, December 2024). Regulators would rather the data center carry that risk.

The bigger cost is time

In July 2024, Dominion told customers that large loads anywhere in its transmission zone would take 12 to 36 months longer to connect than before (JLARC, citing Dominion). A building that waits for power earns nothing while its financing runs. That is why a site with power already secured is worth so much more than one with only a place in the queue. Our AI capacity guide covers time to power by market, and our land guide covers what makes a site powered.

If you lease, the landlord carries these obligations. They still reach you, as minimum power commitments and longer terms in the lease. Ask any landlord which utility contract sits behind your space and what minimums it carries.

What it costs to run

Building is a one-time cost. Power is a bill that never stops, and it is the largest operating cost. Virginia's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission puts electricity at about 40% of a data center's operating spending (JLARC, December 2024).

The bill depends on three numbers: how much IT load you run, how efficient the facility is, and what you pay per kWh. Efficiency is measured as PUE, the total power the building draws divided by the power the IT uses. The industry average was 1.52 in 2026, and 1.45 at respondents' largest sites (Uptime Institute, July 2026). Google reports 1.09 across its fleet, which shows what the best designs reach (Google).

Real bills are usually lower, because few facilities run at full load all year. But power is rising. EIA's US industrial average for January to July was 9.03 cents per kWh in 2026, against 8.53 cents a year earlier. Digital Realty's utility costs rose 7% in 2025, which it put down to higher power pricing (Digital Realty 10-K).

Virginia added a cost this year. Its 2026-2028 budget taxes electricity used at data centers of 1 MW or more at 1.1 cents per kWh, from July 1, 2026 to June 30, 2028 (Virginia budget, Item 3-5.24). The state kept its sales and use tax exemption on data center equipment. In fiscal 2025 that exemption was worth $1.94 billion to 56 operators (Virginia Tax and VEDP, January 2026). Tax treatment belongs in any site comparison. Our site selection guide covers incentives by state.

The rest of the operating budget is people, maintenance and insurance. JLARC reports that a typical 250,000 square foot data center employs about 50 full-time workers, about half of them contractors such as electricians, pipefitters and security. We found no reliable published figure for yearly maintenance cost as a share of build cost. Figures you may see online, such as 1 to 3% a year, trace back to vendor blogs, not to a cost survey.

What build cost means if you lease

Most tenants never see a construction invoice, but they pay for one. A developer sets rent so the project earns a target yield on its total cost. datacenterHawk describes yield-based rents targeting 7 to 14% (datacenterHawk, 2026). By our arithmetic, $17.6 million per MW at a 7% yield implies first-year rent of about $103 per kW per month. At 14% it is about $205.

For comparison, CBRE's first-half 2026 average asking rents ranged from $165.31 to $204.69 per kW per month, depending on deal size (CBRE, H1 2026). Those are asking rents, not signed deals, and power is billed on top.

If you are weighing building against leasing, compare the full term: your capital, its financing, staff and maintenance, against a rent that bundles all of them. That is the comparison we run for tenants. It costs you nothing, because the provider you choose pays us. Here is how that works.

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