Data Centre Cost per MW by Region: A Global Comparison of Construction Costs in 2025–2026

About This Research

Construction cost per megawatt has become the headline number for the data centre market, but the published benchmarks measure different things. JLL reports shell-and-core cost for a 50 MW air-cooled building. Turner & Townsend indexes construction cost per watt for a typical air-cooled hyperscale build-to-suit of 30 to 50 MW of IT load. Cushman & Wakefield reports all-in greenfield development cost for the United States and Canada, and a separate mid-specification construction guide for Asia-Pacific. Quoting any one of these as "the cost of a data centre" misleads.

This report compares those benchmarks region by region, shows where they converge, marks where the evidence runs out, and ties the cost trend to labour, power and demand indicators. Every figure is shown with its scope and date. Figures from different scopes are never added or subtracted. Historical values, current values, forecasts and NMSC calculations are labelled as such. Items that NMSC could not confirm against a publisher's own page are left out.

Market Pulse Metrics

At-a-glance benchmarks, each tied to a named publisher, scope and date.

NMSC analysis of JLL, Turner & Townsend, Cushman & Wakefield and CBRE data
https://www.nextmsc.com/industry-deep-dive/data-centre-cost-per-mw-by-region

Executive Summary

• The benchmarks agree more than their scopes suggest. In the six markets covered by both JLL (2026 shell-and-core midpoints) and Turner & Townsend (2025 cost per watt) the two differ by $0.64M per MW on average and by no more than $1.0M: Tokyo, Singapore, London, Frankfurt, Dublin and Mumbai. All six T&T figures fall inside JLL's published ranges.
• Dispersion, not the average, separates the regions. JLL's averages for its selected markets are $11.2M (North America), $11.7M (Europe) and $11.6M (Asia-Pacific). But Asia-Pacific midpoints span $9.5M, from Mumbai at $6.5M to Tokyo at $16.0M, against $2.5M in North America and in Europe.
• Scope matters more than geography. Cushman & Wakefield's US and Canada all-in average of $17.6M per MW is 1.56 times JLL's $11.3M global shell-and-core figure. The two include different cost categories, so the ratio is not a "premium".
• Costs are rising on every basis, at different speeds. JLL's global average rose from $7.7M (2020) to $10.7M (2025) and is forecast at $11.3M for 2026; T&T measured 5.5% inflation in 2025; C&W reports a 21% rise per MW in the US and Canada since its Q4 2024 edition and a 10% average rise in Asia-Pacific in 2025.
• The evidence is uneven. Latin America has no verified cost-per-MW benchmark in the sources reviewed. The Middle East and Africa rests on four African cities plus two 2024 values.

Why this matters: a developer, lender or tenant who compares a $17.6M all-in figure with an $11.3M shell-and-core figure will overstate regional gaps. The defensible comparisons are within a single scope. NMSC's reading is that tight demand, with North American vacancy at 1.4% and most new capacity already preleased, keeps cost pressure live, but the sources do not allow a forecast of cost per MW.

Why Cost per MW Is Not One Number

Table 1 sets out what each benchmark measures. The differences are large enough that the same word, "cost", covers building a shell, building a complete powered facility, and developing a site.

Table 1. Scope of the four benchmarks used in this report.

NMSC analysis of JLL, Turner & Townsend and Cushman & Wakefield publications
https://www.nextmsc.com/industry-deep-dive/data-centre-cost-per-mw-by-region

Units and cost headings

Turner & Townsend publishes US dollars per watt, and US$1 per watt equals US$1 million per MW, so its figures can be read directly as $M per MW. Its index draws on benchmark data from more than 300 live or recent projects in more than 20 countries and covers shell and core, architectural fit-out, mechanical and electrical fit-out, contractor preliminaries, margin and contingency, and mechanical and electrical equipment. The index is adjusted to represent a typical air-cooled build-to-suit hyperscale facility, so it is a standard-build benchmark, not a quote for a particular project.

The AI and liquid-cooling premium

For the first time, Turner & Townsend identified a 7 to 10 percent construction cost premium between traditional and AI data centres in the United States by comparing projects of similar IT capacity. Its methodology note describes the same range as the average premium of US liquid-cooled facilities over air-cooled benchmarks of similar IT load. Because JLL's and T&T's reference builds are air-cooled, their headline figures describe standard facilities. Higher-density AI data centres sit above them by at least this premium, and the sources do not give a global figure.

Regional Cost Comparison

Table 2 is NMSC's regional synthesis. It places JLL's regional averages next to the range of Turner & Townsend market figures in each region. JLL's average is a simple average of the midpoints for the five markets JLL selected in each region, not an average of the regional market.

Table 2. Regional benchmark summary, US$M per MW.

NMSC analysis of JLL 2026 and Turner & Townsend 2025-26 data; Saudi Arabia and UAE 2024 values excluded from ranges
https://www.nextmsc.com/industry-deep-dive/data-centre-cost-per-mw-by-region

What the table shows

The three regions with JLL data sit within $0.5M of one another on average ($11.2M, $11.6M and $11.7M). The ranges behind them do not. North America's T&T figures run from $9.5M (Charlotte) to $13.3M (Silicon Valley), a 1.4 times spread, and Europe's from $10.0M (Dublin and Madrid) to $14.2M (Zurich), 1.42 times. Asia-Pacific runs from $6.64M (Mumbai) to $15.2M (Tokyo), 2.29 times. On JLL's midpoints the Asia-Pacific spread is 3.8 times the North American one. A regional average therefore says little about which market a project is in.

Two regions are not on the same footing. For the Middle East and Africa the table shows only four African cities, which sit in a narrow $9.74M to $10.5M band. Latin America has no verified cost-per-MW figure in the sources reviewed. Both gaps are discussed below.

Market Cost Matrix

Table 3 lists 31 markets with whichever benchmarks are available. Markets are ranked by the Turner & Townsend figure where one exists, otherwise by JLL's midpoint. The twelve highest-cost rows are shown below. The remaining markets are available through "Access for more", which opens the Project Dataset Explorer at the end of this page.

Table 3. Construction cost per MW by market: T&T 2025-26 index and JLL 2026 shell-and-core range, US$M per MW.

NMSC analysis of Turner & Townsend and JLL data
https://www.nextmsc.com/industry-deep-dive/data-centre-cost-per-mw-by-region

Reading the rankings

Tokyo, Singapore, Zurich and Osaka occupy the top four places in Turner & Townsend's index at $14.1 to $15.2 per watt. Two US hubs, Silicon Valley ($13.3) and New Jersey ($12.9), follow, with Chicago the highest JLL North American market (midpoint $13.0M). At the bottom, Mumbai ($6.64 per watt, 51st of 52 markets per the supplied workbook) costs less than half as much as Tokyo. Markets shown with only a JLL range, such as Chicago, Paris and Amsterdam, have no Turner & Townsend figure in the supplied data.

Where the Benchmarks Agree

Six markets appear in both the Turner & Townsend index and JLL's 2026 outlook. Table 4 compares them. The two benchmarks have different scopes and different reference builds, so agreement is informative but not a proof that they measure the same thing.

Table 4. JLL 2026 midpoint against T&T 2025 for the six markets in both, US$M per MW.

NMSC analysis of JLL 2026 and Turner & Townsend 2025-26 data
https://www.nextmsc.com/industry-deep-dive/data-centre-cost-per-mw-by-region

The average absolute difference is $0.64M per MW and the largest is $1.0M (Singapore and London). All six T&T figures lie inside JLL's range, though London and Dublin sit at the bottom edge of theirs. The sign changes with the market: JLL is higher in Tokyo, London, Frankfurt and Dublin, and lower in Singapore and Mumbai. There is therefore no consistent offset between the two scopes. For cities in both datasets, either benchmark gives a cost within about $1M per MW of the other, which is small beside the gap of roughly $9M between Tokyo and Mumbai.

Cushman & Wakefield's country-level Asia-Pacific mid-specification figures point the same way. Its mid value for Japan is $16.0M (JLL's Tokyo midpoint is also $16.0M; T&T's is $15.2M), for Singapore $14.4M (JLL $13.5M; T&T $14.5M) and for India $7.4M across five cities (JLL's Mumbai $6.5M; T&T $6.64M). C&W's figures are country-level and mid-specification, so NMSC treats them as corroboration and not as a like-for-like check.

Asia-Pacific: The Widest Dispersion

Cushman & Wakefield's 2026 Asia-Pacific guide draws on data from 90 clusters across 26 locations and reports construction costs rising by an average of 10% year on year in 2025. Mid-specification mid values run from $16.0M per MW in Japan to $6.5M in Taiwan, a 2.46 times spread across 14 markets.

The costliest markets are escalating fastest

Singapore recorded the largest year-on-year increase in the guide (22.7%), followed by Japan (20.9%), the Philippines (17.7%) and Thailand (14.7%). The two highest-cost markets are therefore also the fastest-escalating, which widens the gap with lower-cost markets. At the other end, New Zealand shows no change, China 0.4% and Taiwan 1.7%. NMSC reads this as dispersion that is still widening, but the guide covers one year and the sources do not support projecting it.

Three further points on the Asia-Pacific data. India's five-city mid-specification range is $5.9M to $9.0M per MW; Mumbai's JLL range is $6M to $7M and its Turner & Townsend figure $6.64M, so three sources place Indian construction at less than half the Japanese cost. South Korea ($10.6M), Australia ($10.0M) and Hong Kong ($9.8M) form a middle tier; India, Vietnam, China and Taiwan are at $7.4M or below. Auckland is a reminder to compare within a benchmark: it appears in the Turner & Townsend index at $12.3 per watt, well above the C&W New Zealand mid value, which is consistent with the two benchmarks differing in scope.

North America: Narrow Range, Heavy All-In Costs

North America is the tightest cost region in the data and the one with the most scope variation. JLL's midpoints run from $13.0M (Chicago) through $11.5M (Northern Virginia) to $10.5M (Phoenix, Dallas and Atlanta). Turner & Townsend's three markets run from $9.5M (Charlotte) to $13.3M (Silicon Valley) with New Jersey at $12.9M.

The all-in figure

Cushman & Wakefield's guide measures the full development, and says all-in greenfield costs in the United States and Canada average $17.6M per MW for the most modern facilities, excluding chips and GPUs. Power infrastructure is the single largest cost category at an average 21% of total greenfield development cost, and contingencies rank second, which C&W attributes to long material lead times, labour shortages and a shifting regulatory environment. Costs rose an average of 21% per MW from the previous edition in Q4 2024. Texas markets are among the lowest-cost development environments, which C&W links to a business-friendly regulatory climate, lower construction labour costs and mature contractor ecosystems.

The 21% rise and the 21% power share are two separate figures that happen to match. Neither should be read as a decomposition of the other. The ratio of the all-in figure to JLL's global shell-and-core average (1.56 times) shows how much of the budget sits outside the shell and core, but the scopes are not nested and NMSC does not present the difference as a cost component.

Demand conditions

CBRE's H1 2026 report, released on 27 August 2026, shows record activity against record tightness. Primary-market supply grew 33.7% year on year to 10,903 MW. Capacity under construction rose 24.8% to a record 7,481.1 MW, and 80.4% of it is already preleased, up from 74.3% a year earlier. Vacancy fell to 1.4% from 1.6%. Atlanta overtook Northern Virginia in capacity under construction, with 2,882 MW (up 52.3%), while Northern Virginia's vacancy is 0.2% on inventory of 4,496.5 MW.

Europe: Nordic and Swiss Premiums

Turner & Townsend's European markets span $10.0M to $14.2M. The ranking is not what the main hubs alone would suggest. Zurich ($14.2) is third in the global index, the Nordic markets (Oslo $12.4, Stockholm and Helsinki $12.3) sit above London ($12.0) and Frankfurt ($11.6), and Dublin and Madrid are the lowest at $10.0. JLL's midpoints for its five European markets are London $13.0M, Frankfurt $12.0M, Paris and Amsterdam $11.5M and Dublin $10.5M, an average of $11.7M, the highest of the three JLL regions by a small margin.

The two benchmarks give London different positions: JLL's midpoint ($13.0M) is $1.0M above the Turner & Townsend figure ($12.0M). That is the largest positive gap in the six-market check and a reminder to name the benchmark whenever a London number is quoted.

Labour and demand

Turner & Townsend's Global Construction Market Intelligence 2026 reports that more than 93% of European Union markets report labour shortages, and puts the average EU construction labour cost at $75.6 per hour, against $79.5 in North America and $68.0 in Australia and New Zealand. On the demand side, CBRE reports new supply in primary European markets rose 18.9% year on year in Q1 2026, as reported by DatacenterDynamics.

Middle East and Africa: Thin Evidence

The evidence for this region is the weakest of the four with data. Turner & Townsend figures for four African cities sit in a narrow band: Lagos $10.5, Cape Town $10.33, Johannesburg $10.06 and Nairobi $9.74 per watt. Lagos is 27th of 52 markets. These four values come from secondary citations of the index in the supplied workbook and NMSC treats them as indicative.

The Gulf figures are older. Saudi Arabia ($10.8) and the UAE ($8.8) are 2024 index values, not 2025-26 figures, and are not included in the regional range in Table 2. Beyond the cost data, Turner & Townsend's 2026 market survey puts Middle East construction cost inflation at a forecast 5.1% in 2027, second-highest of any region, as AI infrastructure demand tightens contractor capacity, as reported by MEED. NMSC does not present a regional average for the Middle East and Africa, because neither JLL nor the other verified sources provide one.

Latin America: Demand Without a Verified Cost Benchmark

The supplied workbook contains a Latin American cost-per-MW figure from a model published by DC Market Insights. NMSC could not access the source page or confirm the figure against any other publication, and the workbook's own verification log records it as unverified. It is therefore excluded from this report. No other benchmark in the sources reviewed gives a verified Latin American cost per MW, and neither JLL nor Turner & Townsend publishes one in the data supplied.

The demand picture is verified. CBRE reports inventory across the four largest Latin American markets (Sao Paulo, Queretaro, Santiago and Bogota) up 41.3% year on year to 1,045.0 MW in Q1 2026, the fastest inventory growth of any region in its 2026 global report. For developers and lenders, the practical implication is that Latin American cost assumptions currently rest on local quotes, not on a published benchmark that can be compared with the other four regions.

What Is Driving Costs

Labour availability

Turner & Townsend's 2026 survey covers 112 markets in 44 countries and finds that, across the global construction market, labour availability has displaced material prices as the main cost driver. About 71% of markets report labour shortages. North America reports shortages or severe shortages in about 79% of its markets, European Union markets exceed 93%, and 87% of markets report shortages in mechanical, electrical and plumbing trades, the trades most data centre builds depend on. Global construction cost inflation is expected to rise from 4.2% in 2025 to 4.5% in 2026 and then stay broadly flat in 2027. On Turner & Townsend's two measures, data centre construction costs rose faster in 2025 (5.5%) than the construction sector as a whole (4.2%).

Power infrastructure and equipment

C&W's finding that power infrastructure is the largest single category of US and Canadian greenfield cost, at 21%, is consistent with the IEA's view that data centre expansion is meeting physical bottlenecks. The IEA reports that electricity demand from data centres rose 17% in 2025, against 3% growth in global electricity demand, and that supply chain shortages for items such as transformers and gas turbines, and delays in grid connections, are slowing development, as reported in coverage of its April 2026 analysis.

The AI design premium

As covered earlier, AI-oriented designs carry a 7 to 10 percent construction premium in the US, on Turner & Townsend's measure. This is a premium on construction cost for similar IT load and does not include the cost of the IT equipment itself. The data supplied do not allow a regional comparison of the premium.

Demand and Power Constraints

Cost benchmarks matter more when capacity is scarce. In North America the vacancy rate is 1.4% and most new capacity is already leased. In Asia-Pacific, CBRE reports overall vacancy of 7% in Q1 2026 and inventory growth of 13.4% year on year across Singapore, Tokyo, Hong Kong and Sydney. In Latin America, inventory growth is the fastest of any region in CBRE's 2026 report.

The IEA adds a system-level indicator: the capital expenditure of five large technology companies exceeded $400 billion in 2025 and is set to rise by a further 75% in 2026, and data centre electricity consumption is set to double by 2030. These are demand signals, not cost data, and NMSC does not convert them into a cost forecast. They do explain why the benchmarks in this report keep moving in the same direction.

Conclusion: Comparing Cost per MW Without Misleading

Data centre construction cost per MW differs more by market than by region, and more by cost scope than by either. JLL's regional averages for selected markets are close ($11.2M to $11.7M), the Turner & Townsend and JLL benchmarks agree within $1.0M per MW in the six markets they share, and Asia-Pacific is the one region where the spread between markets is large: from $6.5M in Mumbai to $16.0M in Tokyo on JLL's midpoints. Costs are rising on each basis, with JLL's global average forecast at $11.3M for 2026, T&T inflation at 5.5% in 2025 and C&W reporting a 21% rise per MW in the US and Canada.

The practical rules follow from the evidence. State the scope of every figure; compare within a benchmark, not across; treat the Turner & Townsend and JLL figures as standard air-cooled references and add at least the 7 to 10 percent AI premium for higher-density builds; and recognise that Latin America and, to a large extent, the Middle East and Africa lack verified published benchmarks. The measures to follow in the next editions are JLL's outturn against its 2026 forecast, Turner & Townsend's next index, and whether Cushman & Wakefield's all-in figures begin to be published outside the US and Canada. This report will be refreshed as those publications are updated.

Project Dataset Explorer

Filter the underlying market cost dataset (31 markets) and the Asia-Pacific construction cost dataset (14 markets) compiled for this report. The Excel workbook also includes the regional synthesis, the cross-benchmark check, verified cost drivers and demand indicators, and the source and verification record.

31 records shown

NMSC analysis of JLL, Turner & Townsend and Cushman & Wakefield data; Excel workbook: data-centre-cost-per-mw-by-region-dataset.xlsx
https://www.nextmsc.com/industry-deep-dive/data-centre-cost-per-mw-by-region