The 12 Top Data Center Companies in the USA for 2026

Every list of top data center companies in the USA prints a facility count beside each name. We went to the filings and the company websites to check those counts, and found something nobody writes down: most of these companies do not publish a US number at all.

Digital Realty is the clearest example. Its Form 10-K for 2025 says the portfolio holds 310 data centers. The same filing says 118 of them are in the United States. The number that gets copied onto every “top US companies” list is the global one.

This guide names 12 companies, eight colocation and wholesale operators and four hyperscalers. Beside each one we print what that company publishes about itself, where it publishes it, and the date we read it. Where a company publishes nothing, we say so instead of filling the gap with a guess.

The 12 top data center companies in the USA, and what each one publishes

Read the third column first. It is the one that decides whether a ranking can be built at all.

Company	Type	Facility count the company itself publishes	Headquarters	Notable US markets
Equinix	Colocation	280 worldwide, 77 markets, 36 countries. No US count. Form 10-K, 2025	Redwood City, CA	Ashburn, Dallas, Chicago, Silicon Valley, New York
Digital Realty	Wholesale and colocation	310 worldwide, 118 in the United States. Form 10-K, 2025	Austin, TX	Ashburn, Dallas, Chicago, Atlanta, Phoenix
CyrusOne	Wholesale	“More than 60 data centers across North America, EMEA, and APAC.” No US count, no megawatt figure. cyrusone.com, read Oct 23, 2026	Dallas, TX	Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix, Northern Virginia
QTS	Hyperscale colocation	Nothing read. qtsdatacenters.com redirected away on Oct 23, 2026	Overland Park, KS	Atlanta, Ashburn, Dallas-Fort Worth, Phoenix
CoreSite	Colocation	“30 data centers in 11 strategic markets across the United States.” coresite.com, read Oct 23, 2026	Denver, CO	Northern Virginia, Los Angeles, Chicago, New York
NTT Global Data Centers	Wholesale	Nothing read. The site blocks automated reads	Tokyo, Japan	Northern Virginia, Chicago, Phoenix, Hillsboro
DataBank	Edge colocation	No count and no megawatt figure on its own locations page. 27 locations are listed, 26 of them in the US. Read Oct 23, 2026	Dallas, TX	Atlanta, Dallas, Northern Virginia, Salt Lake City
STACK Infrastructure	Wholesale	No count and no megawatt figure. 10 Americas locations are listed, 8 of them in the US. stackinfra.com, read Oct 23, 2026	Denver, CO	Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Portland, New Albany OH
Amazon (AWS)	Hyperscale	No datacenter count in any filing read	Seattle, WA	Northern Virginia, Columbus OH, Umatilla OR, Phoenix
Microsoft	Hyperscale	No datacenter count in the FY2026 Form 10-K. The Human Capital section says only that it operates “datacenters throughout each of these regions”	Redmond, WA	Central Iowa, San Antonio, Cheyenne WY, Phoenix
Google	Hyperscale	No datacenter count in the Q2 2026 earnings release	Mountain View, CA	Council Bluffs IA, The Dalles OR, Henderson NV, Pryor OK
Meta	Hyperscale	No datacenter count in the Q3 2026 earnings release	Menlo Park, CA	Prineville OR, Altoona IA, Forest City NC, Sarpy County NE

Two of twelve publish a US facility count. One of those two, CoreSite, is the smallest colocation company on the list.

The biggest data center companies: why the answer changes with what you count

Pick a yardstick and the order changes. Digital Realty leads on facility count. Equinix leads on revenue, markets and staff. Amazon leads on money spent. None of those three is the same question.

Digital Realty’s 2025 Form 10-K is worth reading closely, since it prints three different numbers for the same company. The portfolio holds 310 data centers. Of those, 89 sit in unconsolidated entities, meaning joint ventures the company does not consolidate on its balance sheet, which leaves 221. And 118 are in the United States.

One company, one filing, three defensible counts: 310, 221 and 118. Lists that rank “US data center companies” almost always reach for 310.

Equinix does not give you the choice. Its 10-K says the footprint “spans 280 data centers, in 77 markets in 36 countries” and stops there. The nearest thing to a US figure in the whole filing is 10.8 million gross square feet in the US and 24 LEED-certified US data centers, which is a subset of a total the company never states.

So the headline comparison that every list makes, 309 or 310 against 250 or 280, puts a global number against a global number and calls it a US ranking. On the only US figures the two companies actually publish, the comparison is 118 against nothing.

The largest data center companies in the US, by what they disclose

Two kinds of company appear on this list, and they are governed by different rules. Equinix, Digital Realty and Iron Mountain are real estate investment trusts, so they file annual reports with the Securities and Exchange Commission and have to describe their portfolios and their workforces. CyrusOne, QTS, DataBank, STACK, Vantage and Aligned are privately held, so they publish what their marketing teams choose to publish, and nothing more.

That split explains almost everything about which numbers you can check. It also explains why a private operator can be very large and invisible at the same time.

Company	Files with the SEC?	Total employees, company-wide	As of	Source
Amazon	Yes	1,595,000	June 30, 2026	Q2 2026 earnings release, Exhibit 99.1
Microsoft	Yes	About 223,000 (121,000 in the US, 102,000 international)	June 30, 2026	FY2026 Form 10-K, Human Capital Resources
Google (Alphabet)	Yes	198,933	June 30, 2026	Q2 2026 earnings release, Exhibit 99.1
Meta	Yes	66,775	September 30, 2026	Q3 2026 earnings release, October 21, 2026
Equinix	Yes	13,931	June 30, 2026	Q2 2026 Form 8-K. The 2025 10-K splits 13,716 into 5,917 Americas, 4,706 EMEA, 3,093 Asia-Pacific
Digital Realty	Yes	4,282 full-time	December 31, 2025	Form 10-K, 2025
CyrusOne	No	Not published	n/a	Private since 2022
QTS	No	Not published	n/a	Private, Blackstone-owned
CoreSite	Through its parent	Not published separately	n/a	A subsidiary of American Tower since 2021
DataBank	No	Not published	n/a	Private
STACK Infrastructure	No	Not published	n/a	Private
NTT Global Data Centers	No US filing	Not published	n/a	A division of NTT, listed in Tokyo

One warning before you use that table for a job hunt. Not one of these companies publishes a data center headcount. Every figure above is company-wide. Amazon’s 1,595,000 is mostly warehouse and retail staff. Alphabet’s 198,933 is mostly engineers and salespeople. Equinix’s 13,931 includes every finance, legal and sales role in 36 countries.

Treat a company-wide headcount as a measure of company size, never as a measure of how many people work on a data hall floor.

Data center providers: the three business models, in plain terms

“Data center provider” covers three very different businesses. The difference matters to a job applicant more than it matters to a customer, since the three models hire different people and run their sites at different staffing levels.

Colocation rents space, power and cooling to many tenants in one building, the way an office landlord rents floors to different firms. Equinix and CoreSite are colocation companies. Their differentiator is the number of networks and clouds you can reach from inside the building, which is why Equinix reports interconnection as a revenue line of its own. Its Q2 2026 Form 8-K shows interconnection revenue of $453 million against $407 million a year earlier, and “a record 9,700 net interconnections” added in the quarter.

Wholesale leases whole data halls or whole buildings to one large customer, usually a cloud provider. CyrusOne, STACK and most of Digital Realty’s new business work this way. Fewer tenants, bigger rooms, longer leases.

Hyperscale means the company builds and runs sites for its own platform. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta are hyperscalers. They are not landlords. They are their own tenant.

One company can be two of these at once, which is where most confusion starts. Digital Realty rents retail colocation cabinets and signs wholesale hyperscale leases out of the same portfolio. Our guide to colocation vs hyperscale data center careers breaks down how the two feel different on the floor.

Top 10 data center companies in USA: the short list

If you want the list without the footnotes, here are ten, ordered by how much of their own data they put in public. That ordering is deliberate. A company you can check is a company you can plan a career around.

1. Digital Realty. 310 data centers, 118 of them in the United States, about 2.9 GW of in-place IT capacity, 4,282 employees. All four figures sit in one SEC filing.
2. Equinix. 280 data centers, 77 markets, 36 countries, more than 10,500 customers, 13,931 employees. Everything global, no US split.
3. Amazon (AWS). No facility count, but the most open job board of any company here, and the only one that prints a pay band on the posting.
4. Microsoft. About 223,000 employees, 121,000 of them in the US. No datacenter count in the 10-K.
5. Google. Publishes a site-by-site map of its own campuses at datacenters.google, but no total in the earnings release.
6. Meta. The only one of the four hyperscalers that prints a full-year capital spending range in its earnings release.
7. CoreSite. 30 data centers in 11 US markets. The cleanest US facility count on this page, from a company owned by American Tower.
8. CyrusOne. More than 60 data centers across three regions. No US split, no capacity figure.
9. QTS. Blackstone-owned, building at campus scale in Atlanta, Northern Virginia and Dallas-Fort Worth. Publishes no count we could read.
10. DataBank. 26 US locations listed by city. No count, no capacity figure.

STACK Infrastructure and NTT Global Data Centers fill out the twelve. Both are large, both are wholesale, and neither publishes a figure we could verify on October 23, 2026.

What the hyperscalers actually filed, and the number that is missing

You have read the headline: the big four will spend some enormous combined sum on data centers this year. We opened all four earnings releases on October 23, 2026 to find the figure. It is not there.

Exactly one of the four prints a full-year 2026 capital spending number in its own release. Meta’s third quarter release, dated October 21, 2026, says it expects “2026 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $135-145 billion,” narrowed from a previous $130 to $145 billion. Amazon’s, Alphabet’s and Microsoft’s releases carry no full-year figure at all. Their outlook numbers are spoken on the analyst call, not printed in the document.

What the four do print is actual cash spent, taken straight from the cash flow statement. Those are the honest numbers, so those are the ones below.

Company	Figure the release prints	Period it covers	Full-year 2026 outlook in the release?
Microsoft	$115,948 million, additions to property and equipment	Twelve months ended June 30, 2026, which is Microsoft’s full fiscal year 2026	No
Alphabet (Google)	$80,598 million, purchases of property and equipment	Six months ended June 30, 2026	No
Meta	$34.91 billion, capital expenditures including finance lease payments	Quarter ended September 30, 2026	Yes, $135 to $145 billion
Amazon	$54.2 billion, gross purchases of property and equipment	Quarter ended June 30, 2026, against $32.2 billion a year earlier	No

Look at the third column. Microsoft’s year ended on June 30, 2026. Amazon, Alphabet and Meta all run on the calendar. Any single “combined 2026 spending” total is stacking a Microsoft fiscal year on top of three calendar years and calling the result one number.

That is why we do not print a combined figure here. It cannot be built from these four documents without inventing a twelve-month window that none of them uses.

One figure is safe to take away: Microsoft spent $115.9 billion on property and equipment in a single audited fiscal year. The buildout is real. The tidy combined headline is not.

Which of these companies is actually hiring right now

A ranking by size tells you who is big. It does not tell you who will read your application. So we counted live postings on the boards that answer a machine, on October 23, 2026, and recorded a blank where the board refused.

Company	Board	What we counted on October 23, 2026	Pay band printed on the posting?
Amazon	amazon.jobs	1,113 postings match the full-text phrase “data center technician” worldwide. Filtered to one town: Ashburn, Virginia returns 21, Columbus, Ohio returns 4	Yes, on US postings
Cologix	Lever	Three Data Center Technician postings and one Data Center Electrician, in Columbus OH and Vancouver BC	No
T5 Data Centers	Lever	The postings we could read were all Assistant Critical Facilities Manager, in Kings Mountain NC, Frederick MD, Lytle TX and Cheyenne WY. Zero titles contain the word Technician	No
EdgeConneX	Greenhouse	19 open jobs in total. Zero of the 19 titles contains the word Technician	No
Equinix	Own site	careers.equinix.com returned an error to our reader. Not counted	Not read
Digital Realty, CoreSite, CyrusOne, QTS	Workday and Phenom	These platforms render their listings in the browser only, so no count can be taken. Not counted	Not read
Google	careers.google.com	The site blocks automated reads. Not counted	Not read

Three lessons sit in that table, and all three are useful on a Tuesday night when you are applying.

The hyperscaler board is the open one

Amazon publishes a searchable, filterable board with a pay band on every US posting. Most colocation operators publish neither. If you want to know what a job pays before you apply, the hyperscalers are where you can find out. Our data center technician salary guide collects those bands.

A big operator can have no technician jobs open at all

EdgeConneX had 19 jobs open and not one of them was a technician role. T5’s readable postings were all management. A company being large this year does not mean it is hiring your job this week. Check the board, not the headline.

Demand concentrates in a handful of towns

Ashburn, Virginia returned 21 Amazon technician postings on its own. Columbus, Ohio returned 4. The gap between a hot town and an ordinary one is bigger than the gap between most employers. Our guide to the best cities for data center careers ranks those towns by where the postings actually are.

Where these companies are building

CBRE publishes the only per-market capacity table in this industry that a reader can check without buying a report. The figures below come from its press release of August 27, 2026, which carries the table itself. The chapter pages of the same report bury their figures inside charts, so the press release is the source worth bookmarking.

Market	Built capacity, MW	Available capacity, MW	Share of the eight primary markets
Northern Virginia	4,496.5	10.8	41.2%
Atlanta	1,803.2	29.5	16.5%
Dallas-Fort Worth	1,432.8	39.6	13.1%
Phoenix	1,069.2	12.1	9.8%
Chicago	910.6	20.0	8.4%
Silicon Valley	509.2	21.2	4.7%
Hillsboro, Oregon	491.4	1.1	4.5%
New York Tri-State	190.0	13.7	1.7%
Total	10,902.9	148.0	100%

The share column is our arithmetic on CBRE’s own figures, not something CBRE publishes. It is each market divided by the eight-market total. Shares are rounded to one decimal place, so the column adds to 99.9 rather than exactly 100.

Three things in that table are worth a job seeker’s attention. Overall vacancy across these markets held at 1.4%, and Northern Virginia fell to 0.2%, which means a tenant looking for a room in Ashburn today has almost nowhere to put it. Atlanta has nearly 2,900 MW under construction, more than its entire existing inventory. And total supply grew 33.7% year over year.

A low vacancy rate is a measure of space, not of hiring. A market can be full and still post nothing. Read the vacancy figure as a signal that construction will continue, then check the job board separately.

Northern Virginia deserves one footnote. CBRE publishes no facility count for it, and no federal agency publishes one either. The only official building count we have found anywhere in this industry is Loudoun County’s own Planning and Zoning figure of 233 data center buildings as of March 1, 2026. Our Loudoun County Data Center Alley guide works through what that means for the local job market. Atlanta, Dallas, Phoenix and Chicago all have careers pages here too: data center jobs in Atlanta, data center jobs in Dallas, data center jobs in Phoenix and data center jobs in Chicago.

Colocation landlord or hyperscaler: which one should you apply to

Both camps are building. They are not the same place to work, and the difference shows up in what they publish about themselves.

What you want to know	Colocation and wholesale landlords	Hyperscalers
Can you find out what the job pays before applying?	Rarely. Most boards print no band	Usually yes on US postings. Amazon and Microsoft print bands
Can you check the company’s size?	Only for the REITs. Equinix and Digital Realty file with the SEC. The private ones publish what they choose	Yes for company size, no for data center size. None publishes a datacenter count
Who are your customers?	Many tenants in one building, or one big tenant per hall	One customer, which is the company itself
Team size on site	Smaller teams, broader jobs. One person covers more systems	Larger teams, narrower jobs, more shifts
How fast you find out whether you got it	Usually faster. Fewer interview stages	Usually slower. More structured loops
Published training route for beginners	Not standardised across the group	Yes. Microsoft Datacenter Academy, AWS Workforce Accelerator and Google Data Center Academy are all public programmes

The verdict. Apply to a hyperscaler first if you want to know the pay before you spend an evening on the application, and if you are starting with no experience and want a published training route. Apply to a colocation operator first if you want a job that touches more systems sooner and a hiring process that moves in weeks instead of months. The honest caveat: you can research a hyperscaler properly from your kitchen table and you largely cannot research a private colocation operator at all, so the second choice involves taking more on trust.

Our guides to the data center career path and to data center careers with no experience work through both routes rung by rung.

The names, acronyms and bodies you will meet in this industry

• Equinix, Inc. Colocation operator, Redwood City, California. Runs IBX (International Business Exchange) data centers and xScale sites for hyperscale tenants.
• Digital Realty Trust, Inc. Real estate investment trust, Austin, Texas. Markets its platform as PlatformDIGITAL.
• CoreSite, a subsidiary of American Tower Corporation since 2021. Denver, Colorado.
• CyrusOne LLC, Dallas, Texas. Taken private in 2022 by KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners.
• QTS Realty Trust, Overland Park, Kansas. Taken private by Blackstone in 2021.
• DataBank Holdings, Dallas, Texas. Majority held by DigitalBridge.
• STACK Infrastructure, Denver, Colorado. Backed by IPI Partners.
• NTT Global Data Centers, the data center division of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, Tokyo.
• AWS, Amazon Web Services, the cloud arm of Amazon.com, Inc.
• CBRE Group, Inc. The commercial real estate firm whose twice-yearly North America Data Center Trends report is the industry’s standard capacity count.
• Synergy Research Group, Reno, Nevada. Counts hyperscale facilities worldwide each quarter.
• Uptime Institute. Publishes the annual Global Data Center Survey and owns the Tier certification system.
• BLS, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which measures the data center industry under NAICS 518 and publishes no data center occupation.
• SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, where the Form 10-K and Form 8-K filings quoted on this page are public and free to read.
• REIT, real estate investment trust. The structure Equinix, Digital Realty, Iron Mountain and American Tower use, and the reason their numbers are checkable.

How many people the industry needs, using the one federal number that exists

The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not have an occupation code for a data center technician, so there is no federal wage or headcount figure for the job. It does measure the industry these companies sit in, under NAICS 518, computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting and related services.

That industry employed 479,900 people in 2025 and is projected to employ 600,300 by 2035, a rise of 120,400 jobs, or 25.1%. For scale, total US employment over the same ten years is projected to grow about 4%.

Read that number for what it is. NAICS 518 covers every cloud and hosting business in the country, including software and support staff who never set foot in a building. It is a direction, not a job count.

On the staffing side, the Uptime Institute’s 2026 Global Data Center Survey, fieldwork April to May 2026, published July 2026, found that 53% of operators report difficulty finding qualified candidates for vacant roles, up from 46% in 2025 and described by Uptime as a statistically significant increase. A further 33% cite a retention problem, with 28% saying staff have been hired away by competitors.

The survey also names where the gaps are, which is the useful part for anyone choosing what to train in. Operators report the largest skills gaps in electrical (38%), junior level operations (38%), operations management (35%) and mechanical (34%) roles. The electrical gap has widened by 13 percentage points since 2023.

If you are picking a trade to learn, electrical is the one the industry says it is shortest of, and has been getting shorter of every year. Our data center workforce shortage breakdown goes further into what the gap means for a first job.

What we could not verify

Naming the holes is the point. A page that fills every box has either found a source nobody else has, or made something up.

• No US data center count exists for Equinix, CyrusOne, QTS, NTT, DataBank or STACK. We checked each company’s own site and filings on October 23, 2026. Where they publish a count at all, it is global.
• No megawatt capacity figure is published by CyrusOne, QTS, DataBank, STACK or Switch on the pages we could reach. Any per-company megawatt number you see on another list did not come from the company.
• No federal agency counts data centers. The widely cited US totals come from commercial directories. Datacentermap listed 5,033 US facilities from 1,923 operators on October 23, 2026, which is a count of listings rather than a census. The only official building count we have found is Loudoun County’s 233, as of March 1, 2026.
• No federal wage figure exists for a data center technician. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has no occupation code for the job. Any national average salary you see for it was built by a jobs site from user submissions, not measured by a statistical agency. The bands on this site all come from employer postings.
• No company on this page publishes a data center headcount. Every employee figure here is company-wide.
• Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft publish no full-year 2026 capital spending figure in their earnings releases. Meta is the only one of the four that does.
• Several sites would not answer our reader on October 23, 2026: qtsdatacenters.com redirected away, aligneddc.com and flexential.com returned errors, careers.equinix.com returned an error, NTT’s site blocks automated reads and careers.google.com blocks them too. Those rows are blank above rather than guessed.
• One source-side error worth knowing about. CBRE’s own press release prints the North America total as “10.9 megawatts” where its own table sums to 10,902.9 MW. That is a units typo at the source. The correct reading is 10.9 gigawatts.

Frequently asked questions

Who is the largest data center company in the USA?

Digital Realty, on the only US figure either giant publishes. Its 2025 Form 10-K reports 118 data centers in the United States out of 310 worldwide. Equinix reports 280 worldwide in 77 markets and 36 countries, and publishes no US-only count, so the two cannot be ranked on US facilities.

What are the biggest data center companies?

By facility count, Digital Realty at 310 worldwide and Equinix at 280. By money spent, the hyperscalers are far larger: Microsoft alone recorded $115.9 billion of additions to property and equipment in its fiscal year ended June 30, 2026. The ranking depends entirely on which measure you pick.

What are the largest data center companies in the US by megawatts?

No reliable per-company US megawatt ranking exists. Digital Realty publishes about 2.9 GW of in-place IT capacity worldwide. Equinix publishes no capacity figure, and neither do CyrusOne, QTS, DataBank or STACK. CBRE measures capacity by market instead, led by Northern Virginia at 4,496.5 MW.

Are hyperscalers considered data center companies?

Yes. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta own and run their own buildings, so they belong on any list. They differ from colocation providers in that they serve one customer, themselves, rather than renting space to tenants. None of the four publishes how many datacenters it operates.

Which data center companies are hiring the most in 2026?

Amazon, by a wide margin among the boards that can be counted. On October 23, 2026 its board returned 1,113 postings matching the phrase “data center technician”, with 21 in Ashburn, Virginia alone. Most colocation operators run job boards that cannot be counted automatically, so no comparison is possible.

How many data centers are there in the US?

No federal agency counts them. The Datacentermap directory listed 5,033 US facilities from 1,923 operators on October 23, 2026, which counts listings rather than buildings. Loudoun County, Virginia publishes the only official building count we have found: 233 data center buildings as of March 1, 2026.

What is the difference between a data center provider and a hyperscaler?

A provider rents space, power and cooling to other companies. A hyperscaler builds for its own platform and rents to nobody. Equinix and CoreSite are providers. Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta are hyperscalers. Digital Realty does both, renting retail cabinets and signing whole-building hyperscale leases from one portfolio.

Do data center companies pay well?

No federal wage figure exists for a data center technician, so the only honest answer comes from employer postings. Amazon and Microsoft print pay bands on US requisitions; most colocation operators print none. Our data center technician salary guide collects the bands that employers actually publish.

Is the data center industry growing?

Yes, on every federal and market measure. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects NAICS 518 employment up 25.1%, from 479,900 in 2025 to 600,300 in 2035. CBRE reported built capacity across its eight primary North America markets up 33.7% year over year to 10,902.9 MW in its August 27, 2026 release.

Which company should I apply to first?

Start with whoever is building within commuting distance, then favour the employer that prints a pay band. Amazon publishes bands on US postings and runs the largest readable board. If you are starting cold, the three hyperscaler training programmes take people with no prior experience.

What to do with this list

Pick two or three companies that operate within driving distance of where you live, using the market table above rather than the company table. Where the capacity is, the jobs follow.

Then go to each company’s own careers page and search for the job title, not the company reputation. EdgeConneX had 19 jobs open and zero technician roles among them on the day we looked. Size on a list and a vacancy on a board are two separate facts.

Start with Northern Virginia, Atlanta or Dallas-Fort Worth if you can move. Those three hold 70.9% of the built capacity across CBRE’s eight primary markets between them, which is our arithmetic on CBRE’s table rather than a CBRE figure.

And if a list anywhere gives you a per-company megawatt figure or a US facility count for a private operator, check whether the company publishes it. On October 23, 2026, most of them did not.

Further reading on this site: working at an Equinix data center, Digital Realty data center salary, CyrusOne data center salary, QTS data center salary and AI data center careers.

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