DC Spotter
INTELLIGENCE TERMINAL
DC Spotter
INTELLIGENCE TERMINAL
The terms that decide when money moves, explained with live examples from the tracker.
The number in the headline is usually the campus at full build over 10-15 years. The number on site is the current phase, often 10-20MW per building. A "180MW campus" may be pouring concrete for one 10MW hall. Suppliers quoting for the headline number waste their time; suppliers tracking the phase win the order.
IT load is what the servers draw; total power includes cooling and losses. Press releases mix them freely, which is how a "482MW campus" and a "300MW campus" can be the same size. We record IT load where disclosed and flag ambiguity in the notes.
Outline consent settles the principle of development; reserved matters settle the detail (appearance, layout, landscaping) later. For the supply chain, the reserved matters approval is the real starting gun: it means design teams are appointed and construction packages are next.
Before a big application, developers ask the council whether a full Environmental Impact Assessment is needed. This filing is often the first public trace of a project, months before any press release. Our planning radar watches for exactly these.
A planning shortcut where the council pre-approves a type of development for an area, replacing case-by-case applications. Rare and powerful: it can de-risk a gigawatt campus in one decision. Watch the consultation dates.
In most markets the constraint is not land or money but a dated place in the transmission queue. The UK's TEC register lists who is waiting for how many MW and when. A queue position can be worth more than the site itself, which is why "power secured" appears so early in announcements.
Where the grid says no, developers bring their own power: gas or HVO engines, biogas plants, wind PPAs. Ireland made this a playbook. It changes the supplier list entirely: energy contractors join the project before electrical fit-out firms do.
Under the Dutch Netcode Elektriciteit, TSO TenneT and regional DNOs (Liander) declare Code Red when transmission corridors reach thermal capacity. In Noord-Holland and Flevoland, this imposes an allocation freeze on new firm transport capacity for large consumers until 380kV ring expansions are commissioned (2030+). Developers face a 36-month timeline lag unless they negotiate non-firm or flexible off-peak connection agreements.
The Commission for Regulation of Utilities (CRU) binding policy directing EirGrid and ESB Networks to assess data centre connections against three strict criteria: proximity to available grid capacity, on-site dispatchable generation or storage capability, and demand-side flexibility. In Greater Dublin and the East Region, it acts as an effective connection cap, requiring multi-MW campuses to install equivalent on-site generation before securing energized lines.
National Grid ESO and SSEN identified severe 400kV and 132kV transmission capacity exhaustion across the M4 corridor (Slough, Iver, Hayes, and North Hyde). Heavy clustering of hyperscale and colocation facilities consumed headroom faster than sub-transmission assets could be reinforced, pushing standard connection dates for multi-MW data centre schemes into 2032-2035.
Sweden is divided into four bidding zones (SE1 through SE4). Snitt 2 is the major north-south transmission cut-plane separating hydro-rich northern Sweden (SE2) from load centres around Stockholm (SE3). Svenska kraftnät's transmission capacity bottleneck limits high-load multi-MW allocations in Greater Stockholm, accelerating the migration of gigawatt-scale AI and hyperscale builds north to Sollefteå and Luleå.
The date a building can accept customer equipment. Commissioning and testing packages cluster in the 6-9 months before RFS; recruitment for operations peaks just after. Our delivery-year chart on Analytics is built from these dates.
GPU-first cloud providers (Nebius, Fluidstack, Nscale) that lease or build capacity fast and sell AI compute. They sign the largest deals in today's pipeline and can transform a quiet campus overnight, as Newport just learned.
A quiet plot purchase by a known developer, with no announcement attached. Historically 12-24 months ahead of the planning application. The cheapest early warning in the industry, if you are watching.