Abstract: Techniques are described for enabling a service provider to determine the power utilization of electrical lineups powering physical servers in a data center and place virtual machine instances into the physical servers based on the power utilization and a user-specified preference of a virtual machine instance type. In one embodiment, a computer-implemented method includes determining a power utilization for each lineup of a plurality of lineups that comprise a plurality of racks of physical servers, selecting a lineup of the plurality of lineups for the virtual machine instance based on the power utilizations for the plurality of lineups, selecting a virtual machine slot for the virtual machine instance from a plurality of candidate virtual machine slots of the physical servers of the lineup based on the user-specified preference, and causing the virtual machine slot of a physical server of the lineup to execute the virtual machine instance.