Data Centers in Florida: Every Major Market Compared

Florida’s data center markets at a glance

Counts below are approximate. Operators open, consolidate and rebrand facilities continually, and published market boundaries differ from source to source — treat these as the shape of the state rather than an inventory.

Miami: the state’s interconnection capital

Miami is the only Florida market whose value comes from what it connects to rather than what it contains. The subsea cable systems linking North America with Latin America and the Caribbean come ashore in South Florida and backhaul into downtown Miami, where the NAP of the Americas concentrates more than 160 carriers and service providers in a single carrier-neutral building. That density is why a network serving users in Bogotá, Lima, Santiago or São Paulo is far better off in Miami than in Virginia or California, and it is the reason the market exists at the scale it does.

The tradeoff is cost. Downtown interconnection carries a premium, and if what you need is thirty cabinets of general compute with ordinary transit, you will pay for an advantage you are not using. A common pattern is to split the two: a small network presence in a carrier hotel for peering and cloud on-ramps, with bulk compute in a cheaper facility connected back over metro fiber.

This site tracks twelve Miami-area facilities in depth — tier rating, power, cooling, hurricane hardening, compliance and carrier count for each. Start with the facility directory if you want to read the sites one at a time, or the comparison tool if you would rather filter them side by side on the specifications that matter to your deployment.

Tampa: the disaster recovery market

Tampa is Florida’s west-coast colocation hub, and it functions largely as an in-state disaster recovery and second-site market. The differentiator operators sell there is geography: inland siting, outside mandatory evacuation zones, far enough from Miami that a single storm is unlikely to take both sites out.

Centersquare’s TPA1 campus is the clearest expression of the pitch. It sits eight miles east of downtown Tampa and outside mandatory evacuation zones, with 19,245 sq ft of raised floor, 9 MW of utility capacity matched by 9 MW of generator capacity, 2.5 MW of UPS, chilled-water cooling and eleven carriers in a carrier-neutral meet-me room. It carries SOC 1 and SOC 2 Type II, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 and NIST 800-53 certifications.

Hivelocity’s Tampa 1 makes the same argument from further out. The facility is 15,000 sq ft of raised floor at 8010 Woodland Center Blvd, seventeen miles inland, with N+1 battery UPS, 260 tons of N+2 CRAC cooling, diesel generators carrying five days of fuel runtime, a roof rated to 135 mph winds, and private peering with more than 300 networks. Flexential also operates colocation in the Tampa market and is worth including in any shortlist there.

Orlando: the Miami-adjacent alternative

Orlando is a mid-sized enterprise and content market, and its operators position it explicitly as an alternative to Miami rather than a competitor to it. The tell is that both anchor facilities sell connectivity that routes back south — the pitch is Orlando economics with Miami reach.

CoreSite, an American Tower company, operates OR1 at 9701 S. John Young Parkway: more than 129,000 sq ft with over 20 networks on campus, 140-plus digital ecosystem partners, ten or more cloud offerings through CoreSite’s Open Cloud Exchange, and internet exchange access reaching toward South America.

HostDime runs a 25,000 sq ft Tier III-certified carrier-neutral facility with dual redundant fiber feeds, close to 100 Gbps of redundant fiber capacity, and private dark fiber running to Miami and the NAP of the Americas. The company is also building a new 100,000 sq ft seven-story headquarters facility in Maitland for more than 1,000 racks, with Category 5 hurricane-rated construction, expected complete in Q3 2026.

Jacksonville: the second subsea gateway

Jacksonville is the market most buyers overlook and the one with the most interesting network story. It is Florida’s second subsea gateway and the state’s main Miami-diverse route to Latin America, which means a customer can build an express path south without traversing Miami at all. For anyone whose risk model treats South Florida as a single point of failure, that is the whole argument.

Cologix anchors the market with two connected sites. JAX1 is an 11,000 sq ft interconnection facility at 421 West Church Street in the central business district with more than 30 unique networks in its meet-me room; Cologix describes it as having access to two separate submarine cable systems reaching Central America, South America and the Caribbean. JAX2 is the scale counterpart — 125,000 sq ft of hurricane-rated colocation and disaster recovery space with 2N UPS, N+1 generators, 8-plus networks in the meet-me room, and access to more than 40 carriers over a dark fiber ring back to JAX1.

EdgeConneX operates a smaller edge site in the market: a 17,570 sq ft facility within five miles of downtown, supporting more than 20 kW per cabinet with N+1 redundancy throughout.

Tallahassee: the public-sector market

Tallahassee is small and mostly public sector. It is anchored by the Northwest Regional Data Center, a unit of Florida State University serving government and education customers. NWRDC is purpose-built, sits 88 feet above sea level, is protected to Category 4 hurricane strength, runs generators able to sustain full capacity for weeks, and offers CJIS-approved space. Its sister site, NWRDC-Southwood, is a Tier III certified 32,000 sq ft facility.

The carrier-neutral commercial option is EdgeConneX TAL01, an 11,810 sq ft purpose-built edge facility established in 2014 six miles from downtown, supporting more than 20 kW per cabinet with N+1 power and cooling redundancy. If your requirement is commercial colocation rather than state or education workloads, Tallahassee is a thin market and one of the four larger ones will usually serve you better.

Florida’s subsea cable landings

Florida’s position in the global network is not a matter of how many buildings it has. It is a matter of where the cables come ashore, and they come ashore in three places.

The Miami area is the primary Latin America gateway, anchored by the NAP of the Americas as the interconnection point where those cables’ terrestrial backhaul converges. Boca Raton hosts multiple cable landing stations, including the Telxius station serving SAm-1, CFX-1, GlobeNet and the Bahamas Internet Cable System — a second South Florida entry point genuinely distinct from Miami-Dade, which matters if your diversity requirement is written at the county level rather than the building level. Jacksonville is the northern gateway: access to two separate submarine cable systems reaching Central America, South America and the Caribbean per Cologix, plus a Jacksonville Beach branch of the CONFLUENCE-1 domestic East Coast system.

The practical takeaway is that true route diversity out of Florida is available but has to be designed for. Two facilities in Miami-Dade are not diverse from each other in any meaningful sense once the traffic reaches the subsea layer. Pairing South Florida with Jacksonville is.

The AI buildout

The projects making news in Florida are an order of magnitude larger than the state’s existing colocation stock, and they are inland. Atlas Compute secured land and utilities in Fort Pierce in November 2025 for a 240 MW liquid-cooled GPU-oriented campus engineered for 100 kW per-rack density, with expansion capacity to 1 GW, targeting operational readiness in Q4 2026 to Q1 2027. In Polk County, the Stonebridge project in Fort Meade received zoning approval and a 20-year development agreement in April 2026 for a proposed 200-acre hyperscale campus on a 1,300-acre site that would require 1.2 GW of electricity using closed-loop cooling; the operator has not been disclosed.

Florida’s legislative response is SB 484, effective July 1, 2026, which defines a large-scale data center as a single location with an anticipated monthly peak load of 50 MW or more and requires those customers to pay their full cost of service so utilities cannot shift it onto residential and small-business ratepayers. The threshold is the useful thing to remember: the inland campuses fall far inside it, while ordinary colocation facilities across the state fall far below it.

Miami’s AI capacity arrives in a different form. Metrobloks has acquired land at 500 NW 137th Avenue in Miami-Dade for a 112,900 sq ft, 15.2 MW multi-tenant AI-ready facility designed to Tier III standards, with rack densities from 5 kW to more than 150 kW, hybrid air-and-liquid cooling and 0.21 ms latency to the NAP of the Americas, targeting a Q4 2026 launch. Iron Mountain MIA-1 is the other — 150,000 sq ft and 16 MW, GPU-ready, opening mid-2026 per Iron Mountain. Both are mid-sized colocation buildings rather than training campuses, which is the whole distinction. Our guide to AI data centers in Miami covers the Miami projects, the county zoning debate and what any of it means for a buyer in detail.

South Florida beyond Miami

The South Florida corridor runs north from Miami-Dade through Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach, adding roughly a dozen more facilities to the region. They are worth knowing about for two reasons: Boca Raton is a subsea entry point in its own right, and the Broward and Palm Beach sites often price below downtown Miami while staying within metro fiber reach of it. Our South Florida data centers guide covers the corridor market by market.

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