You need megawatts on a date. Less than 1,500 MW is available for pre-leasing across North America’s primary markets, and more than 80% of what’s under construction is already leased, on first-half 2026 market data.
So the shortlist that matters is short. Most of the market can show you a building. Very few can show you a utility commitment with a date attached to it, and that is the only version of a shortlist worth underwriting.
Who this is for
Enterprises moving AI or HPC workloads out of an owned room. Neocloud and GPU platforms scaling past their first site. MSPs and SaaS operators facing a colocation renewal that is about to reprice. Trading firms who need a specific building in a specific carrier hotel and won’t trade latency for anything.
Typical requirement: 500 kW to 20 MW, air or liquid, delivery inside 36 months.
What usually goes wrong
The date isn’t real. A developer quotes an energization quarter that rests on a conversation rather than on a signed agreement and an equipment purchase order. We wrote up the evidence ladder separately, because this one costs more money than the other two combined.
The density doesn’t match. A hall built for 8 kW a rack gets sold as AI-ready on the strength of a liquid-cooling roadmap. Your racks don’t fit a roadmap.
The lease reprices at renewal. Rents rose 8.3% for users in the 3 to 10 MW band in the first half of 2026 alone. A cheap three-year deal signed into a 1.4% vacancy market is an expensive five-year decision, and the expansion right you didn’t negotiate is the one you’ll want in 2029.
How we work
Define the requirement properly. Megawatts, ramp, density, redundancy, latency, and the date that actually matters to the business rather than the one in the project plan. A good share of the searches we take over were scoped against the wrong number.
Screen the whole market, including what isn’t marketed. We go to operators directly, and to owners of energized capacity who aren’t advertising it.
Verify. For every site that reaches the shortlist we ask for the utility documentation, the equipment position, and the fiber. Whatever comes back goes in the report with its source named, and whatever doesn’t come back is written down as missing.
Negotiate and stay in it. Through signature, through energization, through the first ramp.
Start here: the Site Screen
You get a written shortlist of three to five sites, and for each one:
- the utility’s position, quoted from the document rather than summarized
- the energization date and the specific evidence supporting it
- rack density and cooling method as built, not as marketed
- indicative rate, and the terms sitting behind that rate
- fiber and carrier count on site
- and for every site we cut, the reason we cut it
One call to walk through it, and no obligation to run the transaction with us afterward.
Questions
We already have a shortlist. Is this useful? Usually more useful. The screen becomes a check on what you were told, and it tends to find the two sites where the evidence is thinner than the presentation.
How small is too small? Below roughly 250 kW you’re better served by a direct operator conversation, and we’ll point you at the right two or three without charging you for it.
Do you place capacity you own? No. We don’t own or operate data centers, so there’s no house inventory to steer you toward.
Start with a Site Screen
Tell us the requirement and the date. If a screen isn’t the right first step, we’ll say so on the call.