Data centres:
leases, construction, power

How to read this

What matters about these numbers

• Every rate here was actually signed by the landlord, not asked for. Brokers' asking rates and an issuer's signed rates are different quantities and do not belong in the same row.
• Renewals price at almost twice new leases — $382 against $205 per kilowatt-month. That is not an anomaly but a lot-size effect: renewals are small colocation footprints of twenty-odd kilowatts, while new leases are wholesale blocks of a hundred and seventy at a volume discount.
• Three different rates coexist in one quarter: signed, commenced and renewed. Commenced leases ($167) were struck earlier at earlier prices — a quarter's revenue is not set by today's price list. That is the argument for a monthly grid in a data centre model.
• The expiry schedule is strikingly uneven: about thirty per cent of megawatts roll over in the next five years and more than sixty per cent only after 2033. A model with even rollover misplaces both the risk and the mark-to-market.
• The $10.7 million per megawatt build cost is shell and core only. Land and the tenant's compute are excluded, and liquid cooling adds another ten per cent.
• The bottleneck is not concrete but electricity. Eighteen months to build a fifty-megawatt facility against more than four years waiting for a grid connection. A model that starts construction the moment the land is bought is years out, not quarters.
• The spread in tariffs between states is one and a half times — 6.12 cents in Texas against 8.99 in Virginia. At equal capacity that operating-cost difference outweighs almost any saving on construction.