Data Center Vacancy Rates Sink to Record Lows in 2026
The global race to build artificial intelligence infrastructure is rapidly outstripping the world’s ability to deliver new data center capacity, tightening markets from Northern Virginia to Singapore and driving vacancy rates toward historic lows despite an unprecedented construction boom.
Global data center inventory expanded 25% over the past year to 16 gigawatts across the world’s 16 largest markets in the first quarter of 2026, according to CBRE’s latest Global Data Center Trends report. Yet even as developers added record levels of new capacity, demand surged even faster, pushing average vacancy rates down to 6.7% from 8.3% a year earlier.
The imbalance underscores how the explosive growth of AI workloads is reshaping the global digital infrastructure landscape, forcing cloud providers, technology firms and enterprise occupiers to secure capacity years in advance amid growing concerns over power availability and development constraints.
“Across the globe, demand is outpacing even aggressive new supply increases,” said Pat Lynch, Executive Managing Director of CBRE Data Center Solutions. “Companies can no longer assume capacity will be available when they need it.”
The United States remains the epicenter of growth. Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth and Chicago collectively added nearly 2 gigawatts of new capacity over the past 12 months, representing a 33% increase and marking the fourth consecutive year of double-digit expansion.
Even that surge in development has done little to ease market tightness.
Vacancy rates have fallen to just 0.3% in Northern Virginia–the world’s largest data center hub–and 1.8% in Dallas-Fort Worth as hyperscale cloud operators and AI developers aggressively absorb new inventory. Net absorption across major U.S. markets reached a record 2,236 megawatts, a 34% increase from a year earlier.
The same pattern is emerging across international markets.
In Latin America, data center inventory in São Paulo, Bogotá, Querétaro and Santiago expanded 41% year-over-year to more than 1 gigawatt of capacity. Yet demand from global cloud providers and AI operators continues to consume newly delivered space almost as quickly as it enters the market.
Europe is experiencing even stronger demand growth. Leasing activity across the region jumped 90% compared with first-quarter 2025 levels, led by Frankfurt and London, two markets already grappling with severe land and power constraints.
Meanwhile, Asia-Pacific markets are becoming increasingly difficult for occupiers to access. Available capacity across the region has fallen by nearly half over the past year, leaving just 248 megawatts of immediately available inventory. Large contiguous blocks of space are becoming particularly scarce in key markets such as Singapore.
The growing appetite for AI computing power is also changing the type of facilities tenants require. Operators are increasingly seeking larger campuses capable of supporting high-density, power-intensive workloads associated with advanced AI training and inference systems.
However, relief from future construction may remain limited.
By the end of 2025, approximately 80% of all data center capacity under construction in the four largest U.S. markets had already been preleased, according to CBRE, leaving little speculative inventory available for future occupiers.
Power availability is emerging as the industry’s most significant bottleneck.
Electrical grid limitations, transmission infrastructure delays and lengthy utility approval processes are slowing development in many of the world’s largest markets, including Northern Virginia, Chicago, London and Frankfurt. In the United States, those constraints are expected to extend development timelines and limit meaningful supply growth through the remainder of the decade.
As availability tightens, pricing power is shifting decisively toward landlords and operators.
Chicago currently commands the highest rental rates among major U.S. data center markets, with pricing ranging between $200 and $230 per kilowatt per month for mid-sized deployments. Average rents in the market increased nearly 15% over the past year.
“Limited power, land and infrastructure are slowing development and keeping vacancy near zero in some key U.S. markets,” said Gordon Dolven, Head of Data Center Research for the Americas at CBRE. “These supply constraints will continue to push pricing higher and redirect investment toward markets capable of scaling more quickly.”
For investors, developers and technology companies, the message is becoming increasingly clear: in the age of artificial intelligence, access to power–not capital–may be the most valuable commodity in the global data center industry.
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