Hillsboro’s data center market ended 2025 with a 0.2 percent vacancy rate, according to a recent report, underscoring insatiable demand in the sector and constrained supply.

At year end the market had 475.4 megawatts of inventory and approximately 1 megawatt of available capacity, CBRE found. Asking rents ranged from $175 to $225 per kilowatt per month.

“Hillsboro‘s exceptionally low vacancy underscores how critical the market has become for West Coast deployments,” Haakon Weinstein, a Portland-based CBRE vice president, stated in a news release.

“Even with limited new supply last year, demand remained steady, driven by the area’s network density and access to renewable power,” Weinstein added. “With development constrained in part by the region’s urban growth boundary and power transmission limitations, availability will remain scarce, influencing both rate and land price trends.”

Hillsboro remained the seventh-largest North American data center market, led by Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, Chicago, Phoenix and Silicon Valley.

Locally and nationally, data center developers perhaps have run out of easy locations to build. Data center capacity under construction fell to 5,994.4 megawatts at the end of 2025, compared to 6,350.1 megawatts a year earlier.

CBRE’s report blamed “longer timelines tied to permitting, zoning approvals and securing adequate power” for the first drop in data center construction since 2020.

Weinstein said he expects to see more construction near major cities, where operators prize speed.

“As data centers progress, you’re going to see more data centers on the edge of population centers that have very low latency,” Weinstein added in an interview.

Despite demand, Hillsboro isn’t where growth is occurring nationally. Dallas, Austin, Atlanta, Raleigh, North Carolina and Denver-Boulder, Colorado, are all seeing strong growth, Weinstein said.

Oregon is prized for relatively cheap electricity, and a mix high in renewable energy. Undersea data cables come ashore at Pacific City, and the state is sandwiched by tech clusters in Seattle and Northern California.

More growth is expected in Eastern Oregon, where Amazon has bought up “huge swaths of land,” Weinstein said. Hillsboro could see more growth if an effort to expand its urban growth boundary is successful, he said.

Meanwhile, data centers face political opposition from some critics who blame the industry for sharp rises in utility bills and water usage. The Oregon Legislature this month approved a one-year moratorium on property tax incentives for new data centers.

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