Leased Suite, Powered Land, or Build-to-Suit: Which One Fits
Leased wholesale suite (1-5 MW, fastest path)
You lease a dedicated suite inside an existing facility. The operator handles power delivery, cooling, and security. You bring your own hardware. This is the fastest way to get to power-on, typically weeks to a few months once a contract is signed, and it requires no construction management on your side.
Best for: teams that need power live within a year and don’t want to own real estate.
→ See wholesale colocation pricing and provider options
Powered land or shells (3-75 MW, more control, longer timeline)
You buy or lease land or an existing structure that already has grid power, fiber, water, and in some cases existing gear. Greenfield sites need full construction. Mining-conversion sites and existing shells can move faster since power and some infrastructure are already live. You control the asset for the long term.
Best for: institutional buyers, developers, and funds modeling a 5-10 year infrastructure position rather than a single deployment.
→ See current AI & HPC land and powered-site listings
Build-to-suit (custom, largest deployments)
For loads that don’t fit any existing site, a developer builds to your specification on land you control or they control under a long-term agreement. This is the longest timeline and the highest control. It’s the right call when no existing facility or site can deliver your power, cooling, or footprint requirement at the scale you need.
Best for: hyperscale-adjacent AI training campuses and multi-phase roadmaps.
Reading an MW-Scale Listing Like Someone Who’s Done This Before
| What’s Quoted | What It Actually Means | What to Verify |
| Price per kWh | The headline economics | Does it include transmission and demand charges, or just the generation rate |
| Load available (MW) | What’s being offered today | Is it live now, or “available with a Letter of Authorization” months out |
| Substation distance | Interconnection cost driver | Closer isn’t automatically cheaper if the substation itself is at capacity |
| Physical structure | Greenfield, shell, or conversion | Greenfield means you build everything; a mining-conversion shell may already have power and gear in place |
| Land / building price | The asset cost | Separate from the power cost. A cheap site with expensive interconnection can cost more all-in |
| “AI-ready” | Marketing language | Ask what cooling infrastructure, if any, already exists versus what you’d need to add |
The Teams We Work With at This Scale
| Profile | What They’re Solving | What We Help Them Find |
| AI training operator, multi-phase roadmap | Modeling 10-75 MW over 5-10 years. Needs to know price per kWh and available load before committing capital to any single path. | Direct introductions to landowners and developers with current listings matched to the load and timeline. |
| GPU cloud provider scaling fast | Needs power to live within a year, doesn’t want to manage construction. | Wholesale suite operators with contiguous MW capacity and realistic delivery timelines. |
| Enterprise consolidating from multiple smaller sites | Moving from several leased deployments into one larger footprint, evaluating lease versus own. | A side-by-side of leased suite options against powered land, so the decision is based on numbers, not instinct. |
| Fund or developer evaluating a site acquisition | Needs to underwrite a powered site before committing capital. | Off-market listings and data-room access where available, plus direct introductions to the parties involved. |




