12 of the Largest Data Center Markets in the United States

The geography of cloud computing is increasingly the geography of electricity. Northern Virginia remains the largest data-center market in the United States by a wide margin, but the fastest-growing projects are spreading across Texas, Georgia, Illinois, Arizona and other states where developers can still secure large power connections and enough land for multi-building campuses.

CBRE's 2026 data-center research shows how quickly the hierarchy is changing. Dallas-Fort Worth moved up the ranking after adding hundreds of megawatts of inventory, while Chicago also gained ground. Northern Virginia remained dominant and added more than a gigawatt of capacity over the year, yet vacancy there fell to exceptionally low levels. Demand is not the problem. Delivering power, substations and completed buildings on schedule is.

Northern Virginia remains the benchmark

Northern Virginia's lead was built over decades around fibre connectivity, early internet infrastructure, a large government and technology customer base and a dense network of data-center operators. The Ashburn area became so central to internet traffic that new tenants benefit simply from being close to an existing ecosystem of carriers and cloud providers.

That density now creates its own constraint. Utilities face large interconnection queues and communities are paying more attention to land use and transmission infrastructure. Operators that once treated Northern Virginia as the automatic first choice increasingly compare it with Dallas, Atlanta and other markets where large sites can be assembled more easily.

Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago are scaling fast

Dallas-Fort Worth appeals to hyperscale developers because Texas combines a large power market, substantial land availability and strong fibre routes. CBRE's investor survey in April 2026 found Dallas-Fort Worth was the most attractive North American data-center market among respondents, narrowly ahead of Northern Virginia.

Atlanta has become another major beneficiary of AI-led demand. Georgia offers a large metropolitan workforce, interstate connectivity and room for new campuses. Chicago remains strategically important because it sits between the East Coast and western US markets and has long been a major financial and network hub.

Secondary markets are no longer secondary for every workload

Phoenix, Silicon Valley, Hillsboro in Oregon and the New York tri-state region all remain important, but the next wave of construction is also reaching places such as Salt Lake City, Columbus, Denver and parts of the Carolinas. For AI training workloads, latency can matter less than the ability to secure hundreds of megawatts of reliable electricity.

That changes the selection criteria. A market with abundant fibre but no available power is less useful than a less established location where a utility can deliver capacity within a predictable timetable. The result is a US data-center map that is becoming broader even as the biggest hubs continue to grow.