Data center capacity, sourced and negotiated on your behalf.

Buyers walk into colocation negotiations focused on the rate and walk out having conceded most of the terms that determine total cost over the life of the contract. These are the clauses we work, roughly in order of what they are worth.

1. The ramp schedule. When you begin paying for capacity you cannot yet fill is often worth more than the headline rate. A twelve-month ramp against a six-month ramp on the same rate is a materially different contract.
2. Contracted versus installed capacity. Paying on contracted kW when your actual draw is a fraction of it is the most common quiet overspend in this market. Where the operator's economics allow it, there is room here.
3. Redundancy tier against actual need. Training workloads and inference workloads do not need the same resilience. Buying 2N across the whole footprint when N+1 would carry half of it is an avoidable premium.
4. Cross-connect and interconnection fees. Recurring, rarely benchmarked, and in carrier-dense facilities they compound. Caps and included allowances are negotiable and almost never volunteered.
5. SLA credits with teeth. A credit capped at one month's fee on a workload that costs you far more than that per hour of downtime is not a remedy, it is a gesture. What counts as an outage, how it is measured, and what the credit is worth all move.
6. Term length itself. Colocation is underwritten on five to ten years because that is what the operator’s financing case needs. That requirement is real, which makes term one of the few things you have that the operator genuinely wants — length is worth trading for rate, ramp or expansion rights rather than conceding for free.
7. Escalators. A fixed annual escalator versus one indexed to inflation is a different number over a ten-year term. So is whether the escalator applies to power pass-through.
8. Power pass-through mechanics. Whether you pay metered, at a blended rate, or with a PUE factor applied — and who carries the risk when the regional power price moves.
9. Expansion rights. Right of first refusal on adjacent space, held at a pre-agreed rate, for a defined window. Cheap to secure at signature and expensive to buy later.
10. Exit and assignment. Termination for convenience, assignment on a change of control, and what happens if your own capacity plan changes. Most standard forms are written to make leaving difficult.

None of this is exotic. It is simply what a counterparty who negotiates these contracts every week knows and a buyer negotiating one every few years does not.

Which market you are negotiating in changes what is winnable on every one of these. The same requirement priced in the United States, EMEA and APAC produces three different sets of movable terms, and where nothing existing fits the requirement it becomes a powered shell or build-to-suit negotiation instead. The Capacity Desk covers what the desk sources at density.