The growth of artificial intelligence and high-performance computing (HPC) is “challenging global data center supply chains, causing significant power shortages and construction delays,” reports CBRE in its latest market forecast — Global Data Center Trends 2024. Data Center operators in North America, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific named power availability as their top concern.
The shortage of power has been hampering expansion plans and leading to an escalation in rentals. Now, secondary markets with a surplus of power are seeing their first sizeable investments as operators search for available locations. This mirrors the expected continued growth in data center demand for AI and HPC, which means that many design innovations will be required to accommodate more power density.
Large corporations are finding it challenging to secure the necessary space due to the global power shortage. Vacancy rates in key markets like Northern Virginia, Chicago, Singapore, and Mexico City are at record lows. For instance, Querétaro, Mexico, has only 0.6 MW available for lease, while Singapore, the world’s most power-constrained market, has a vacancy rate of just 1%.
Rental rates are climbing sharply, with Singapore leading globally, ranging from $315 to $480 per month for a 250- to 500-kW requirement. In contrast, Chicago has the lowest rates at $155 to $165. Northern Virginia has seen public cloud providers and AI vendors lease most of the market’s space, resulting in a record-low vacancy rate of 0.9% and a 41.6% year-over-year surge in rental rates. Dallas-Ft. Worth experienced a 31.9% year-over-year inventory growth, with a record 372.2 MW of space under construction, 91.8% of which is pre-leased.
With availability virtually none in the market, hyper-scalers and financial services firms have driven record-low vacancy-the 1.9% that dropped from delivery of leases signed in this year has led to rent growth accelerating nearly by one third point YOY, now at 33%. Silicon Valley, the strongest market in the U.S., has a 6.5% vacancy rate but much of that is made up. Data centers from “emerging markets” like Northern Indiana Boise (ID) have been focused on new-found power which ballooned to 807.5 MW during the first three months of this year, an increase of 24.4 percent across top markets including NoVa peaking above traditional leaders Chicago and Dallas.
Overall, the data center industry is confronted with a knotty contradiction: record demand and potential emerging capacity shortages accompanying increasing power costs. As such, how long can current infrastructure respond to escalating requirements?
