GPU racks draw power at a rate that simply was not on the roadmap for most facilities built even five years ago, which is why power delivery — not floor space — is now the binding constraint.
It is easy to underestimate how much rides on a single colocation decision until you are twelve months into a contract that no longer fits. Getting the early thinking right pays off for years.
Why it matters now
Power has overtaken floor space as the binding constraint in most primary markets. Vacancy rates have fallen to record lows, and the practical effect is that capacity — particularly high-density capacity — increasingly needs to be reserved well ahead of when you actually need it.
The market has split in two. Standard enterprise workloads still run comfortably at three to five kilowatts a rack, while accelerated-compute deployments are pushing twenty, fifty, even a hundred kilowatts. Those two worlds are priced and provisioned very differently, and conflating them is a common and expensive mistake.
Planning for what comes next
Term length is a lever worth pulling thoughtfully. Longer commitments unlock materially better rates and, increasingly, priority access to scarce capacity — but only commit ahead if you are confident in the trajectory.
Whatever you commit to today, leave yourself room to grow. The right partner offers a clear path from a single rack to a private suite, and from standard density to liquid-cooled high-density halls, without forcing a migration.
A practical way to evaluate
Then shortlist on objective data and validate with your own eyes. Marketplace intelligence is excellent for narrowing the field quickly, but a site visit and a couple of reference calls will tell you things no datasheet can.
Model the whole cost, not the monthly line. Setup fees, cross-connects, bandwidth, growth headroom, and exit terms all belong in the comparison. The cheapest rack rate is rarely the cheapest deployment.
The factors that actually move the needle
Headline pricing is the least reliable basis for comparison. Two facilities quoting similar rates can differ enormously once you account for power redundancy, cross-connect fees, remote-hands rates, and the small print around escalations and renewals.
Connectivity richness is frequently underweighted. A carrier-neutral facility with a dense ecosystem of networks and direct cloud on-ramps can save more over a contract term than a modest difference in the rack rate ever will.
A short checklist before you sign
- Request recent incident reports, not just a summary uptime percentage
- Total the full cost of ownership, including the fees that hide in the small print
- Write down your power, space, and connectivity needs before you talk to anyone
- Map the network ecosystem: carriers, internet exchanges, and cloud on-ramps
- Read the exit and renewal terms as carefully as the price
The bottom line
None of this is complicated, but it does reward diligence. The organisations that treat infrastructure procurement as a discipline rather than a purchase consistently end up with better facilities, better terms, and fewer surprises.