AI Data Centers in Miami: What Is Actually Being Built

What is being built

Iron Mountain MIA-1, Westview

The largest of the new projects is Iron Mountain MIA-1 at 2925 NW 120th Terrace, a converted records-storage building on a 3.4-acre campus in Westview. Iron Mountain publishes it as 150,000 sq ft supporting 16 MW of customer IT load on 26 MVA of utility power, with a GPU-ready high-density design aimed explicitly at AI deployments and 100% carbon-free energy from launch. It is the company's first Miami data center, sits about 8 miles from Miami International Airport, and is carrier-neutral with diverse fiber entry and cloud on-ramps.

On status: Iron Mountain broke ground in February 2025 and topped the structure out in September 2025, and its own guidance describes the building phasing up to full capacity by mid-2026. As of August 2026 we have found no announcement from Iron Mountain that MIA-1 is open for service. If a broker quotes you space there, ask for a written turn-up date.

Metrobloks, west Miami-Dade

Metrobloks is developing a facility of roughly 112,900 sq ft at 500 NW 137th Avenue, on a 4.05-acre parcel in unincorporated Miami-Dade near the eastern edge of the Everglades. The developer has published a design to Uptime Institute Tier III standards with rack densities scaling well past 100 kW per cabinet, hybrid air and liquid cooling, and delivery targeted for late 2026. Its pitch is latency: a fraction of a millisecond to the NAP of the Americas and direct reach to the subsea cable systems that land in South Florida.

Beyond those two, Miami-Dade's roughly 27 existing or planned data centers include a handful of smaller projects in the pipeline, among them a micro-data center proposed in south Miami-Dade. None of the announced Miami-Dade projects approach the scale of what is being proposed elsewhere in the state.

Why Miami — and why the projects here are small

Miami's advantage has never been cheap power or open land. It is the interconnection position. The NAP of the Americas and the carrier hotels around it terminate the subsea systems linking North America, Latin America and the Caribbean, which makes South Florida the natural place to serve users across the region from a single footprint. For AI workloads that means inference — serving a model close to the people querying it — rather than training, where latency to the end user is irrelevant.

The constraints cut the other way for anything larger. Miami-Dade sits at the end of Florida's transmission network rather than near generation, industrial land is expensive and comes in small parcels, and hurricane exposure raises the cost of every megawatt of resilient capacity. So the AI capacity landing here arrives in 3 to 4 acre infill buildings at 15 to 17 MW. Compare that with the hyperscale proposals inland: a campus in Polk County on more than 1,100 acres of former phosphate land, and a Palm Beach County proposal of roughly 202 acres that county commissioners denied without prejudice in July 2026. Those are the projects chasing gigawatt-scale training capacity, and they need geography Miami does not have.

The local debate: power, water and zoning

The buildout is contested, and the objections are specific rather than general. Residents near proposed sites raise three concerns. First, grid load: large facilities draw power that has to come from somewhere, and neighbors ask who pays for the upgrades. Second, water: cooling at high density consumes water, and Florida water researchers have publicly identified supply as the leading constraint on hyperscale AI development in the state. Third, process: in Miami-Dade, data centers have been treated in the zoning code much like other industrial uses, so a project on land already zoned industrial can proceed without rezoning — and therefore with limited notice to nearby residents, even when the building is large.

Two responses are in motion. At the state level, SB 484 took effect on 1 July 2026. It defines a large-scale data center as a single location with an anticipated monthly peak load of 50 MW or more, requires those customers to pay the full cost of serving them so utilities cannot shift it onto residential and small-business ratepayers, blocks load-splitting to duck the threshold, requires public disclosure of development deals, and preserves local authority to set stricter standards or deny projects outright.

At the county level, the Board of County Commissioners directed staff in July 2026 to draft a one-year moratorium on zoning applications for large-scale data centers that qualify as large load customers, with a zoning commission hearing on 6 August 2026 and a first reading before the commission on 27 August 2026. Several other Florida counties have adopted similar pauses. Two points matter for buyers: the moratorium as directed covers new zoning applications, not buildings already under construction, and both Iron Mountain MIA-1 at 16 MW and the Metrobloks site fall below the 50 MW large-load threshold the state and county definitions turn on. As of August 2026 the county vote has not been taken; check the current status before relying on any of this.

What it means if you are buying colocation

The practical effect is that GPU-ready capacity is arriving in Miami for the first time in volume. Until now, deploying dense AI hardware here usually meant negotiating a custom high-density arrangement inside a facility built for 5 to 10 kW cabinets. Both new buildings are designed for the load and the cooling from the start, which changes the conversation from whether a site can take your racks to what it costs.

Three things worth doing. Ask every operator for the per-cabinet density they will actually commit to in a contract, not the number on the brochure — the gap between design capacity and contracted capacity is where AI deployments go wrong. Confirm the cooling method, since liquid-cooled racks and air-cooled racks are not interchangeable and retrofits are expensive. And treat delivery dates on buildings that are not yet in service as provisional, because a phased turn-up means early tenants may sit in a partly commissioned building.

If your requirement is live now rather than late 2026, the operating carrier-neutral facilities in the market remain the answer. Our facility directory covers tier rating, power, cooling and connectivity for each Miami site, and the comparison tool puts them side by side so you can filter on the specifications that matter for dense deployments.

Timeline

• November 2023 — Iron Mountain announces its first Miami data center.
• February 2025 — Groundbreaking on Iron Mountain MIA-1 in Westview.
• September 2025 — MIA-1 tops out; Iron Mountain guides to a mid-2026 phase-up to 16 MW.
• 1 July 2026 — Florida SB 484 takes effect, applying cost-of-service and disclosure rules to data centers at 50 MW or more.
• July 2026 — Miami-Dade commissioners direct staff to draft a one-year moratorium on large-load data center zoning applications; Palm Beach County denies a 202-acre hyperscale proposal without prejudice.
• August 2026 — Miami-Dade zoning commission hearing (6 August) and first commission reading (27 August) on the proposed moratorium.
• Late 2026 — Metrobloks targets delivery of its west Miami-Dade facility.

This is a moving story. Every status claim above is dated, and we review this page quarterly against operator announcements and county agendas.

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