A data center costs $10m per megawatt before the computers

A public filing gives the cleanest current answer, and also shows why the usual answers are so slippery.

Hut 8 told investors that it expected to spend $9m to $11m for each megawatt of contracted computing capacity on a 245 MW artificial-intelligence data center in Louisiana. Multiply the two figures and the facility comes to roughly $2.2bn to $2.7bn.

That does not buy the tenant's computers. It does not buy the land. It does not represent the power plants and transmission lines needed beyond the property. It is also not the $7bn number attached to the same project, which is the value of 15 years of lease payments.

Four numbers can therefore describe one development without any of them being arithmetically wrong. They answer different questions. The useful question is less "What did the data center cost?" than "Which parts of the data center are inside this cost?"

The public data makes those boundaries unusually visible. The Census Bureau records the physical facility as construction. A Federal Reserve staff paper adds an estimate for computers and networking equipment. An SEC filing supplies a project-level build estimate. A utility filing shows how large the power-system bill can become outside the fence.

How much does it cost to build a data center?

A useful current benchmark is $9m to $11m per megawatt of contracted IT capacity for the facility itself. A filed 245 MW project therefore implies about $2.2bn to $2.7bn. The range is project-specific and excludes the tenant's servers, land, lease payments and off-site utility construction.

The benchmark comes from a Hut 8 investor presentation filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It describes the River Bend campus in Louisiana, which Hut 8 planned to develop for Fluidstack with Google backing Fluidstack's lease obligations.

The scale matters. River Bend is not a modest enterprise server room. The project has 245 MW of contracted IT capacity and 330 MW of utility capacity. Hut 8 expected initial delivery in the second quarter of 2027 and the rest during that year. The build-cost estimate was forward-looking as of December 2025, so it should be treated as a disclosed budget range rather than a final invoice.

The same filing expected financing for as much as 85 percent of project cost. Financing is a way to pay the bill, not a reduction in the bill. Interest incurred during construction can enter the Census construction measure. Interest paid for years after completion belongs elsewhere.

Small data centers can cost more per megawatt because security, backup power and cooling need a minimum practical scale. Very large campuses can gain purchasing and design efficiencies, then lose some of them to more demanding chips, water systems, grid delays or accelerated schedules. One number cannot settle those differences. A documented large-project range can at least give the discussion a floor that has a date, a capacity definition and an owner.

Why do data center cost estimates disagree?

Most estimates disagree because they count different assets or use different denominators. Cost per square foot measures a building shell and its systems. Cost per IT megawatt measures supported computing load. Total campus spending may add servers, land and substations. A lease value measures payments over time, not construction.

A conventional office is often discussed by square foot. That unit becomes awkward for data centers. A room packed with high-density accelerators can require much more power and cooling than an equally large room holding ordinary servers. Two buildings with the same floor area can support very different computing loads.

Megawatts improve the comparison, but only if the megawatts mean the same thing. River Bend's filing lists 245 MW of contracted IT capacity and 330 MW of utility capacity. The ratio follows from its stated power usage effectiveness, or PUE, of 1.35. In plain arithmetic, 245 multiplied by 1.35 is 330.75, close to the rounded utility figure.

IT capacity is the electricity delivered to computers and related information equipment. Utility capacity must also cover cooling, power conversion, lighting and the rest of the facility. A quote of $10m per IT megawatt and a quote of $10m per utility megawatt are not equivalent. At a PUE of 1.35, the second denominator is 35 percent larger.

Capacity is also the bridge to two adjacent costs. The national data center electricity estimate is modeled from equipment rather than read from one meter, and the data center water estimate is mostly indirect consumption at power plants. Neither belongs inside a facility budget by default.

Then there is time. A 15-year agreement for a completed facility includes the owner's recovery of construction cost, financing, operating expense and return. Hut 8's SEC-filed announcement values the River Bend lease at $7bn and expects average annual net operating income of $454m. Neither figure says the building costs $7bn to construct.

The distinction is simple enough to state and easy enough to lose in a headline. A cost estimate needs a numerator, a denominator and a time period. If any one is missing, comparison becomes guesswork.

What does the Census Bureau count as data center construction?

Census construction spending covers the building, additions, site work, fixed utility connections, mechanical and electrical systems, emergency backup power, design fees, contractor profit and some owner costs. Its definition excludes land, maintenance and special-purpose equipment. For a data center, the excluded equipment expressly includes racks and servers.

Those boundaries come from the Census Bureau's Value of Construction Put in Place definitions. A data center is classified within private office construction and defined as a building containing the hardware required to store, process or transmit digital information.

The construction measure is broader than concrete and steel. It includes central air-conditioning equipment, electrical work, elevators, fire protection, site preparation, water facilities and utility connections. Architecture and engineering, contractor margins, owner overhead, construction interest and taxes can also enter value put in place.

The same definition makes the exclusions explicit. Land acquisition is outside the series. So are ordinary repairs and maintenance. Special-purpose machinery that is not integral to the structure is excluded. Census names racks and servers in data centers as examples.

This is why the national construction figure is neither the industry's total capital spending nor an estimate of the market value of every completed campus. It measures work installed during a period. A project that takes two years contributes to the series as the work occurs, rather than appearing once at its announced total.

That timing also prevents a common error. A press release may announce a multiyear campus with several phases and a large prospective budget. Construction put in place counts the portion actually installed during the reporting year. Plans, options and later phases do not become current construction merely because they share a project name.

How much did the United States spend on data center construction?

Private US data center construction put in place reached $49.7bn in 2025, according to the Census annual workbook. That was 43 percent above 2024 and 3.95 times the 2022 amount. It was a structures measure, so computers, racks and land remained outside the total.

The Census Bureau's annual private construction workbook separates data centers from the rest of office construction for recent years. The figures below are dollars of construction put in place, not announced project values.

Year	Private data center construction	Change from prior year
2022	$12.6bn	26.5%
2023	$20.0bn	58.9%
2024	$34.8bn	74.0%
2025	$49.7bn	42.9%

The annual increase slowed in percentage terms in 2025, but the dollar increase was still $14.9bn. Data centers accounted for 47.7 percent of all private office construction that year, compared with 15.3 percent in 2022.

The regional distribution was lopsided. Of the $49.7bn national total, the South accounted for $27.2bn, the Midwest $13.1bn, the West $8.9bn and the Northeast $524m. That works out to about 54.6 percent in the South and 26.4 percent in the Midwest.

These are survey estimates, not cash-register totals. Census publishes a coefficient of variation that indicates sampling uncertainty. It was 0.9 percent for the 2025 national data center estimate, 1.2 percent for the South, 1.3 percent for the Midwest, 1.6 percent for the West and 4.4 percent for the much smaller Northeast estimate. Precision is good enough to support the broad comparison. It does not turn $49.737bn into an audited industry ledger.

How much do the servers add?

There is no official series that cleanly assigns every server and network purchase to data centers. A Federal Reserve staff paper uses a rough 30 percent structures and 70 percent high-tech equipment split for its import calculation. That illustrates why an all-in investment estimate can greatly exceed construction spending.

The Federal Reserve staff paper begins with the measurement problem. National accounts do not contain one category that captures all data center investment. Structures appear in one place. Computers and peripheral equipment appear in a broader category that also contains business laptops, printers and other purchases unrelated to data centers.

The authors estimate the data center portion of equipment by extending the earlier trend in computer investment and treating the excess above that trend as data center-related. They then add that inferred equipment amount to structures. It is a reasoned estimate, not a count of serial-numbered servers.

Using project plans available in September 2025, their simulation put total data center investment near a $60bn annual rate in the fourth quarter of 2024, $180bn in the fourth quarter of 2025 and roughly $370bn by the second quarter of 2026. The last figure is a nowcast. It depends on project timing, completion and abandonment assumptions. It should not be presented as observed 2026 spending.

The paper's separate import calculation assumes 30 percent of investment is domestic structures and 70 percent is high-tech equipment. It calls that split a ballpark estimate derived from 2024 government data. The useful lesson is about order of magnitude. Once computing equipment enters the numerator, the bill can be far larger than the building series. The exact equipment share for one project can differ.

Servers also arrive on a different replacement schedule. A structure may operate for decades. Computing hardware can be replaced several times. A five-year equipment refresh is an investment decision, but it is not a second construction of the same building. Adding lifetime refreshes to the original build price would answer yet another question.

How much can the power system add?

Power infrastructure can add billions outside the data center owner's construction budget. Entergy Louisiana has proposed seven generating units totaling 5,278 MW at about $12.9bn and a new 500 kV transmission line at about $1.4bn while arranging service for large data center customers. Those are utility-system projects, not one campus price.

Entergy's first-quarter 2026 SEC filing says its Louisiana utility signed an electric service agreement with a Meta subsidiary for a second data center. The filing also describes applications for seven combined-cycle generating units, three battery systems and new transmission.

The generating units would total 5,278 MW and cost an estimated $12.9bn. A proposed 500 kV line from West Fork Creek to St. Landry was estimated at $1.4bn, with related transmission work also planned. Regulators still had decisions to make, and the filing discusses customer contributions and financial protections.

It would be wrong to attach the full $14.3bn to one data center. The assets form part of a utility system, have their own approvals and may support several loads over time. It would also be wrong to pretend the power requirement has no cost merely because the expense sits on a utility's books.

This is where discussions of public subsidies and ratepayer exposure belong. The question is not simply whether a campus developer paid for a substation. It is who finances generation and transmission, what contract protections exist, who owns the assets, and how unused capacity would be handled if a planned customer arrived late or not at all. Those answers require the utility agreement and regulatory orders for the specific project.

Which data center cost number should you compare?

Compare figures only after matching five items: the assets included, the capacity denominator, the development phase, the price date and the payer. A per-megawatt facility budget can be compared with another facility budget. It cannot be cleanly compared with a lease, an equipment forecast or a regional power plan.

For an announced project, a short cost audit is more useful than another industry average:

1. Name the asset. Is the number for a powered shell, a fully fitted facility, tenant computers, land, or a collection of those items?
2. Name the megawatt. Is capacity stated at the IT load, the building meter, the utility connection or the whole campus reservation?
3. Name the phase. Does the figure cover the first building, all contracted buildings, or an aspirational later expansion?
4. Name the date. Is it a current estimate, a contract value, construction put in place during one year, or a final cost after completion?
5. Name the payer. Is the developer, tenant, utility, local government or tax system carrying the item?

Square-foot estimates still have a place when comparing similar buildings with similar power density. Per-megawatt estimates are better for comparing computing support. Total project cost is the right figure for financing. Annual construction spending is the right figure for measuring current economic activity. None is a master number.

For River Bend, the defensible short answer is therefore narrow: the filed facility estimate was $9m to $11m per contracted IT megawatt, implying $2.2bn to $2.7bn for 245 MW. It is concrete enough to be useful and bounded enough to resist becoming fiction.

What should a data center cost estimate include?

A decision-ready estimate should separate land, building and site work, electrical and cooling systems, backup power, utility interconnection, computing equipment, financing and long-term operations. It should state IT and utility capacity separately. It should also keep lease value and public power-system investment outside the construction subtotal.

That format leaves room for uncertainty without hiding it. Owners can show a base construction range, an equipment range and identified off-site obligations. Readers can see which costs are contracted, which remain estimates and which belong to another party.

It also makes later comparisons possible. If the final cost rises, a reader can tell whether steel and labor ran over budget, power equipment became more expensive, the computing density increased, or the project simply added another phase. A single promotional total cannot do that work.

Frequently asked questions

The shortest defensible answer is about $9m to $11m per IT megawatt for one current large AI facility, before servers and land. National averages are less precise because projects differ in size, density, redundancy and timing. Always check whether a quoted total describes construction, equipment, a lease or utility infrastructure.

Does data center construction cost include servers?

Usually not when the source is Census construction spending. The agency expressly excludes racks and servers as special-purpose equipment. A private project budget may use a broader definition, so the scope still needs to be checked.

Is the $7bn River Bend figure the cost to build it?

No. The SEC exhibits identify $7bn as the value of a 15-year lease. Hut 8's separate build-cost estimate is $9m to $11m per MW. Applied to 245 MW, that is about $2.2bn to $2.7bn.

How much did US data center construction grow in 2025?

It rose from $34.8bn in 2024 to $49.7bn in 2025, an increase of 42.9 percent. The series measures private construction put in place and excludes land, racks and servers.

Why is cost per megawatt more useful than cost per square foot?

Power and cooling, rather than floor area alone, limit how much computing a facility can support. Cost per IT megawatt therefore better reflects usable computing capacity. The comparison works only when every project uses the same capacity definition.

Can the utility bill be added to the data center's cost?

Only when the specific contract assigns that infrastructure to the project and identifies who pays. A regional generating plant or transmission line may serve several customers. Adding its full cost to one campus would overstate that campus's construction bill.