Data Center Cost in 2026: What You Pay to Build and Run One, per Megawatt

Data center cost splits cleanly in two. Capital cost is everything spent before the first rack goes live: the building shell, mechanical and electrical fit-out, cooling plant, network, land, the utility's connection charges and soft costs such as design and permitting. Operating cost is the yearly bill once it runs, dominated by electricity.

For most facilities the build is the bigger number up front, but power is the line that never stops. A 50 MW site in Texas spends about US$559.7M to build as a powered shell and about US$31.4M a year on electricity at the configurator's modelled ERCOT rate of US$0.071/kWh. Over a ten-year contract, energy alone exceeds half the original build cost.

The single most useful number for comparing projects is capital cost per megawatt of IT load. It varies by a factor of four between build types, because a hyperscale AI factory and a hybrid mining hall are completely different buildings.

Two things stand out. First, the facility itself runs from about C$9.5M per MW for a hybrid mining and AI hall to C$36.5M for a hyperscale AI factory. Second, once you buy the GPUs the facility becomes the smaller part of the bill: B200-class accelerators add roughly C$41M per MW. Run any of these combinations, in any province or state, in the free live demo.

Move the same 50 MW powered shell between states and the build cost moves by more than a third. The configurator applies each state's construction cost factor to the shell, fit-out, cooling and network, then adds sales tax on equipment where no exemption is open.

California is the target market for many of our readers, so it is worth knowing it sits at the expensive end on every axis: US$0.205/kWh modelled power, a 1.22× construction cost factor, a 48-month grid queue and no sales-tax exemption on equipment. The same 50 MW site in California pays about US$90.7M a year for power, almost three times the Texas bill. See every state in our data center cost per MW by state table.

Every figure on this page came out of the AI Build Configurator, the same tool you can put on your own website. Pick a build type, a province or any US state, cooling and GPU class, and it returns capital cost by line item, annual energy cost, revenue, EBITDA and simple payback in real time.

Consultancies, engineering firms and developers license it so their own visitors can price a build before they call. Standard is CAD $4,000 a year per website; Pro, at CAD $10,000, adds every build type, CSV export for proposals, white-label theming and lead capture. If you only need numbers for one site, order a one-time Site Screening Report (CAD $950).