DataBank

What DataBank actually is

DataBank is a US colocation and interconnection provider built on an edge-first strategy: instead of concentrating capacity in a handful of hyperscale hubs, it spreads mid-sized carrier-neutral facilities across secondary and tertiary American metros so that workloads sit close to population centres. By the company's own 2026 materials it operates more than 65 data centres in 27-plus markets, and independent market trackers count 75 facilities across two countries including planned and under-construction sites. The one non-US facility is LHR1 near London Heathrow, so the "US only" framing you will see on some listings is wrong.

The company was founded in 2005 in the former Federal Reserve Bank building in downtown Dallas — a seven-storey structure converted into a data centre in 1999, and still DataBank's DFW1 flagship and headquarters at 400 South Akard. Growth has been acquisition-led: a DigitalBridge-led investor group took control in 2016 and folded in C7 Data Centers, two 365 Data Centers assets and Edge Hosting; zColo (Zayo's data centre business) came later, as did four Houston-area facilities bought from CyrusOne for $670 million in early 2022. The largest project today is a 292-acre campus at Red Oak, south of Dallas, planned for eight buildings with a Phase 1 substation delivering up to 300 MW of critical IT load.

The product set spans rack and cage colocation, suites, wholesale space, cross-connects and cloud on-ramps, plus DataBank Cloud, DataBank Metal (bare metal), FedRAMP-eligible cloud, and managed network and security services. In our view this is a company to talk to when you need compliant US colocation with unusual geographic reach — not when you want a self-service VPS on a credit card. See our /category/dedicated-servers listings for the self-service end of the market.

Pricing: what you really pay

DataBank does not publish prices. Cabinets, cages, suites, power draw, cross-connects and managed services are quoted per deal, and the company's public material is deliberately about facilities and compliance rather than list rates. The minimum monthly figure that some databases attach to DataBank is not traceable to any vendor page we could reach, so we have struck it and left the minimum price empty. If a listing shows you a DataBank number, ask where it came from.

What we can tell you is what shapes the quote. Power density runs up to 40 kW per air-cooled cabinet, with 100 kW-plus liquid-cooled options and designs aimed at 200 kW AI deployments — density, not rack count, is usually the dominant line item for modern deployments. The company promotes contract portability across colocation, cloud and interconnection as an anti-lock-in measure, which matters commercially: migrating out of a cage is expensive, and portability terms are worth negotiating before signature rather than after. Facility fact sheets publish power, cooling, security and compliance specifications openly, which is better transparency than most colo brokers offer, but you will not find a public price anywhere on the site.

One more commercial point: managed services are quoted as line items on top of colocation — managed internet, managed firewall, DDoS mitigation, backup and recovery, and fully managed hosting where DataBank's team runs network, servers, storage and security. Our advice is to price the colocation footprint first and add managed services only for the components your team genuinely cannot staff, because managed lines are where colo quotes quietly balloon. The customer portal's real-time visibility into tickets, power and network is included and is one of the better arguments for paying the premium over a bare landlord.

Performance & infrastructure

The facilities are engineered for the boring things that actually determine uptime. DataBank's corporate overview states a 100% uptime SLA backed by fully redundant UPS, generator and cooling architectures; typical sites use N+1 power and cooling designs, with flagship facilities running 2N power. Facility fact sheets list Tier III designs (DFW3 in Plano carries Uptime Institute Tier III certification), N+1 UPS configurations with battery backup, diverse fibre entries, multiple meet-me rooms, and carrier-neutral connectivity from 1G to 100G. The downtown Dallas DFW1 building doubles as the city's primary carrier hotel with DWDM links to 1950 North Stemmons.

The compliance portfolio is the other half of the pitch. DataBank's materials cover FedRAMP, FISMA, SSAE 18 SOC 1 and SOC 2, HIPAA/HITECH, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001 and GDPR, with dedicated security and compliance teams and up to 80% of required controls achievable through the platform for regulated workloads. Facilities are staffed 24x7x365 with remote hands and smart hands available, and a customer portal provides real-time analytics on power, network, tickets and compliance documentation — genuinely useful when an auditor, rather than an engineer, is your next audience.

On capacity, the independent tracker DC Market Insights puts the portfolio at roughly 401 MW operational across 64 live sites as of October 2026, with more under construction and planned than currently operating. That pipeline — Red Oak, the Culpeper campus in Virginia, Lithia Springs outside Atlanta, Vernon in Los Angeles, Orangeburg in New York — is where the company is betting its next decade. For enterprise colocation, a construction pipeline is a feature; for a small customer, it is mostly a reminder that the growth focus is upmarket.

The interconnection story deserves a mention before we move on. Carrier-neutral facilities, multiple on-site network providers, meet-me rooms, metro interconnects (the Dallas metro DBiX, for instance) and national MPLS options mean you can reach clouds and carriers without leaving the building. For hybrid architectures — a cage in Denver with direct cloud on-ramps and a cross-connect to your carrier — that fabric is the practical reason enterprises pick a mid-sized colo over hyperscale regions alone.

Where it falls short

The obvious gap is price transparency and accessibility. There is no self-service provisioning, no public calculator, and no way to benchmark what a cabinet in, say, Kansas City costs against a competitor without going through sales. For a solo developer or a small SaaS team, that alone rules DataBank out.

Geographic concentration is the second limitation. Beyond LHR1 at Heathrow, everything is American. If you need European or Asia-Pacific presence beyond a single London interconnection point, you will be stitching together a second provider, and the contract portability DataBank advertises is a mitigation rather than a cure. The edge footprint is also a bet on secondary metros: if your user base is concentrated in Frankfurt or Singapore rather than Indianapolis, the nearest DataBank facility is the wrong shape for your latency budget.

Third, the acquisition-driven growth means facilities are not uniform. A converted Federal Reserve building in Dallas, a modern three-storey expansion in Plano and a 1990s carrier hotel in Baltimore share a brand but not necessarily the same power envelope or network density. Read the specific facility fact sheet for your target site rather than the corporate overview, and ask directly which certifications apply to that building — compliance at DataBank is usually facility- and service-scoped, not a blanket corporate badge. Finally, the 100% uptime SLA deserves the same scepticism we apply everywhere: ask for the credit mechanism and what happened during the last major incident before you weigh it heavily.

Who should pick this

Our pick for US enterprises and public-sector-adjacent workloads that need HIPAA, FedRAMP or PCI postures with colocation near specific American metros — health systems, financial services, government contractors, and platform companies that want low-latency US edge presence without building out a hyperscale region. The multi-metro footprint is the differentiator: Moody's has called it the widest geographic footprint of any US colocation provider, and if your compliance officer needs data to stay in Texas or Minnesota, DataBank has a building there.

We would not point small teams, hobbyists, or internationally distributed products at DataBank. If you need a handful of servers with a published price, the /category/dedicated-servers and /category/vps-providers categories will serve you faster. And if you are comparing serious colo quotes, put Equinix, CoreSite and the wholesale players next to DataBank on the same sheet, because the value here is location coverage and compliance depth, not headline pricing.

Key takeaways

• DataBank runs 65-plus data centres in 27-plus US markets plus LHR1 near London Heathrow; the "US only" description on some listings is inaccurate.
• Founded 2005 in the former Federal Reserve Bank building in downtown Dallas, which remains its headquarters and flagship facility.
• No public pricing at all — cabinets, cages, suites and managed services are quoted per deal, so the database's $300 entry figure is unverifiable and has been removed.
• 100% uptime SLA with redundant UPS, generator and cooling, Tier III designs at flagship sites, and up to 40 kW per air-cooled cabinet (100 kW-plus liquid-cooled).
• Deep compliance portfolio — FedRAMP, SSAE 18 SOC 1/2, HIPAA, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR — with 24x7 staffed facilities and a real-time customer portal.
• Best for regulated US enterprises needing multi-metro colocation; wrong fit for small teams and for workloads that need real European or Asia-Pacific presence.

Sources

• https://www.databank.com/about-databank/databanks-history
• https://www.databank.com/data-centers/dallas/400-south-akard
• https://databank.com/landing-page/our-locations
• https://www.databank.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/DataBank-Corporate-Overview.pdf
• https://www.databank.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/BWI1-Fact-Sheet-A-1.pdf
• https://www.databank.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/DB_DCTR_BWI1_Q32020_v2.pdf
• https://datacenterlocations.com/databank
• https://dcmarketinsights.com/data/data-centers/operator/databank