This week the market showed how AI capacity is being locked up before a single server is racked. Anthropic committed to a 19 billion dollar, 20-year lease for a Kentucky campus that TeraWulf has not finished building, one of the largest capacity contracts we have seen signed against a site still under construction. Meta stood up a new business, Meta Compute, to rent out the AI capacity it is not using, treating its own build-out as a product. And in Memphis, the city council started drafting guard rails for where data centers can go. Capacity is being pre-sold, power is being pre-committed, and communities are writing the rules as fast as the projects arrive.

For vendors and service providers, the takeaway is the same one we have flagged all quarter, only sharper. When a tenant signs a two-decade lease before the concrete cures, the equipment, power, and fit-out decisions behind that building are being made right now. Partners who can speak to speed of delivery, behind-the-meter power, and community approval are the ones getting into the room early. As always, if a project or account below is on your target list and you want the people and timeline behind it, reach out and we will pull the thread.

For vendors, this is the clearest sign yet that AI tenants will sign for capacity years ahead of energization, and pay for it. When a lease of this size lands on a site still under construction, the power, cooling, and fit-out scope behind it moves to the front of the schedule. It rewards partners who can commit to a delivery date and hit it.

The industry moves to 800-volt DC power to feed the one-megawatt rack. As AI racks head toward 1 MW and beyond, the traditional 415-volt AC distribution inside the white space is running out of headroom, and 800-volt direct current is emerging as the answer. Borrowing from the electric-vehicle world, an 800 VDC architecture carries far more power over less copper, cutting conversion steps and heat between the utility feed and the chip. NVIDIA has laid out an 800 VDC reference design for its next-generation racks and is pulling a deep bench of power vendors, including Texas Instruments, Eaton, Analog Devices, Infineon, and onsemi, into building the components around it, with deployments framed for 2027 and beyond.

Source: NVIDIA and Data Center Dynamics, 2026.

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