Twelve questions worth settling before you sign for capacity.

Capacity marketing is optimistic by design, and mostly not inaccurate. What it tends to be is general: total site figures, best-case densities, dates whose dependencies are not stated. None of that is concealment. It is what happens when a complex product has to be described in a paragraph.

The work, then, is not suspicion — it is specificity. The list below is what we settle before a shortlist goes to a client, and any buyer can use it directly. In our experience strong operators answer these quickly and sometimes with bad news, and the willingness to give the bad news early is one of the better signals you will get about who you are dealing with.

On the power

1. What is the energisation date, and what is it contingent on? Building completion and utility power are separate milestones with separate owners. Ask which utility milestone the date depends on, and whether a signed interconnection agreement sits behind it or a study result.
2. What is uncommitted today, as opposed to total site capacity? Sites are frequently marketed at full build-out, some of which is committed to other tenants or held against options. This is a fair question and a fast one to answer.
3. If the utility slips, what happens to my ramp? Whether billing commences on actual energisation or on a calendar date. If it is the calendar, you are carrying the utility's risk, and that should be a priced decision rather than an inherited one.
4. How is power billed? Metered, blended, or with a PUE factor applied — and who absorbs a regional price movement. Over a long term this often matters more than the rate itself.

On density and cooling

1. What density is deliverable in the specific hall I would occupy? Not the site's best case. Halls inside one facility differ substantially, and the honest answer often differs from the brochure once the question is specific.
2. Has liquid cooling been deployed here, or designed for? Direct-to-chip and rear-door heat exchangers on a drawing are not the same as in operation. Ask what is running today and at what density.
3. What is the cooling headroom at my full draw with a unit down? Electrical redundancy is usually well documented. Cooling redundancy at high density is where the surprises live.
4. What is the water position? Consumption, source, and any regulatory or community exposure in that jurisdiction. This is the fastest-moving permitting risk in several markets and it affects the operator as much as you.

On the counterparty

1. Who owns this facility? Whether your counterparty is owner, lessee or reseller determines what your contract is worth if something goes wrong.
2. How concentrated is the tenancy? A site carried by one anchor tenant has a different profile from a diversified one — for expansion availability, for operational priority, and for the operator's own resilience.
3. What are the expansion rights, and are they already granted? Adjacent space is often optioned to an existing tenant. Better to know now than in year three of your growth plan.
4. What is the actual remedy if you miss? Not the SLA percentage — the credit mechanism, the cap, what counts as an outage, and whether a termination right exists at the outer bound. A credit capped at one month's fee on a workload costing far more than that per hour is not a remedy, and both parties usually know it.

Reading the answers

Direct answers, including unwelcome ones, are the good outcome. What is worth noticing is a pattern: an answer that redirects to a different metric, defers to a party not in the room, or arrives as a total-site figure when you asked about one hall. Usually that is not evasion — it is that the specific answer is not known yet, which is itself the information you needed.

You are not testing anyone's honesty. You are testing whether the number you were given survives being made specific.

Where a deal falls over on one of these twelve, it almost always falls over later and more expensively. Settling them early is as much in the operator's interest as yours, which is why the good ones do not mind the list.

Related: the capacity sourcing mandate, power procurement, and for operators, capacity commercialization.