Colocation, wholesale, powered shell and build-to-suit
Rent space, power and cooling for your own machines, or a building made ready for you.
Definition, not a sourced statistic
What it is
Colocation rents rack space, power, cooling and connectivity in someone else’s data centre for machines you own or lease. Wholesale takes a whole hall or building. A powered shell is a building with power and connections in place that the tenant fits out. Build-to-suit is a facility designed and built for one tenant. In each case you, or your cloud partner, run the servers.
Who it suits
- Organisations that own or lease hardware and need somewhere to run it.
- Large tenants that want control over design, density and cooling.
- Clouds and labs that need capacity at campus scale.
Common contract shapes
- Retail colocation. Racks or cages on a term, priced by space and power.
- Wholesale lease. A hall or building on a long lease.
- Powered shell lease. A building with power where the tenant fits out the inside.
- Build-to-suit. A facility designed and built for one tenant, on a long contract.
Providers use their own names for these shapes, so compare what is promised, not what it is called. The contract shapes guide explains each one.
What to ask
- Egress and data transfer. Which carriers and exchanges are in the building, and what do cross-connects cost?
- Service levels. What is promised for power, cooling and access, and how is the design rated, for example by Uptime tier?
- Data residency and access. Where exactly is the site, who owns the land and building, and what local rules apply?
- Security certifications. Which certifications cover the facility, such as ISO 27001 or an Uptime rating, and are they for design or for operation?
- Export controls and sanctions. If you import accelerators into the site, have you checked export and import rules for that country?
- Exit. How much notice to leave, who removes the equipment, and who owns any fit-out you paid for?
- When will the power be ready, and is the grid connection signed or still in a queue?
- Is the power density and cooling, for example liquid cooling, enough for current accelerators?
The full list is on the printable buyer's checklist. For rules on chips and where they can go, see export controls and compute thresholds.
On this site
Entries listed here because their own summary or checked facts on this site fit this type. An entry can fit more than one type, and a provider missing here may still offer it. This is a list, not a ranking, and in name order. We link to providers for prices.
Providers
- Applied Digital: A company that designs, builds and operates large data centre campuses for AI training and inference.
- Digital Realty: A colocation and interconnection operator with data centres in many metros, including high-density AI deployments.
- Fluidstack: A company building and operating large AI data centres in the USA. Its homepage describes gigawatt-scale sites, closed-loop cooling and off-grid solar power.
- Khazna Data Centers: A Middle East data centre operator that designs, builds and operates facilities. It sells data centre capacity, not a self-serve GPU cloud.
- TeraWulf: An energy and data centre company hosting high-performance computing and AI workloads under a brand called WULF Compute.
- Yotta (Shakti Cloud): An Indian data centre operator whose Shakti Cloud offers GPU virtual machines, bare metal and serverless GPU compute hosted in India.
Related
- Glossary: Colocation, Powered shell, Tier levels (Uptime Institute), Redundancy (N+1), IT load, Liquid cooling, Interconnection queue.
- Guide: Can I build a data centre in X?
- Data centre records
- Grid queues
- Compare offer types
Other offer types: Hyperscale cloud instances · GPU clouds and bare metal · Marketplaces and aggregators · Decentralised and community networks · Regional and sovereign clouds · Managed inference and serverless GPU · Chip-maker and accelerator clouds · National and institutional HPC, and free or funded programmes · On-premises hardware, and leasing or financing it · Capacity brokers, reserved contracts, secondary and spot markets · Edge and telecom sites, and converted sites
Definitions and questions written in our own words, checked on 3 October 2026 and due for review by 3 January 2027. Sourced facts stay on the provider, programme and policy pages this page links to. This is general information to help you ask better questions. It is not legal, tax or procurement advice. For export controls, sanctions and contracts, check the primary rules and talk to a qualified adviser. Something wrong? Tell us.