Description
The US data centre colocation market entered 2026 expanding on both operational and pipeline capacity. But the story of the year is less about the scale of growth than about the friction now surrounding it. Hyperscale cloud and AI compute demand continue to outstrip supply across virtually every Tier 1and Tier 2 market tracked in this report, from Northern Virginia to West Texas, and utility interconnection queues kept climbing rather than clearing. ERCOT’s large-load queue alone moved from roughly 226GW in November 2025 to over 474GW by August 2026, forcing the grid operator to abandon one-by-one project reviews in favour of a batched study process. Dominion Energy added more than 5GW of contracted data centre capacity in Virginia between January and July 2026 alone, pushing its total to 53.8GW. These are not the hallmarks of a market correcting for oversupply; if anything, the gap between requested and deliverable power widened over the year.
Power procurement has become the defining constraint of the market, and utilities have moved well beyond the large-load tariff experiments of 2025. Minimum-take requirements, dedicated large-load rate classes, and outright generation-cost reallocation to data centres are now standard policy tools rather than proposals. As of 2026, Structure Research is tracking 23.1GW of operational capacity, 16.6GW of under development capacity and 114.5GW of land banked capacity in the US colocation data centre market.
The most significant shift in 2026, is the scale and coordination of local and state-level opposition, which has moved from scattered pushback to a genuinely systemic constraint on where and how fast capacity can be built. Community and legal opposition has also proven capable of killing large projects outright, most notably the cancellation of Prince William Digital Gateway in Northern Virginia. Virginia’s legislature alone considered more than 60 data centre-related bills in 2026, passing 15 and carrying 46 over into 2027. One structural consequence of this regulatory tightening, alongside power constraints, is accelerating geographic diversification. Capacity is diffusing outward from constrained Tier 1 cores into extension and Tier 2 markets that offer cheaper land, faster permitting and less congested utility systems.
This report applies Structure Research’s updated four-tier global market classification framework, scored across commercial colocation, hyperscale cloud and self-build, AI market maturity, and connectivity/interconnection, to categorize US markets and analyses national and market-level operational, under-development and land banked capacity, alongside dedicated coverage of the GPU/neocloud segment as it converges with the mainstream colocation market. The US Data Centre Markets report remains the most comprehensive dataset available on the US colocation market and an essential resource for service providers, investors and end users navigating a market where demand fundamentals remain strong but the regulatory and power-delivery environment has become materially more complex than it was twelve months ago.
