Hyperscale
The projects that make headlines. Built by or for the largest cloud and AI operators.
- Power: 100 MW or more at site level, with the largest AI campuses running far beyond
- Land: roughly 100 to 500+ acres, allowing for phasing, on-site power infrastructure and setbacks
- Transmission: 345kV territory
- Timeline: years. Interconnection alone runs 24 to 36 months in constrained markets.
- Counterparty: sophisticated, well capitalised, with a full site selection team
Very few parcels in America qualify. If yours does, you are in an unusual position and should be professionally represented.
Edge and colocation
Smaller facilities serving regional demand, enterprise colocation, content delivery and latency-sensitive workloads.
- Power: roughly 1 MW to 30 MW
- Land: far smaller — tens of acres rather than hundreds
- Transmission: 138kV can work; sometimes robust distribution suffices at the low end
- Timeline: shorter, because the interconnection ask is smaller
- Location: proximity to population and network density matters more than cheap land
Why this matters to a landowner
The screening question is not "is my land a data center site." It is "which kind of project could my land serve, if any."
A 40-acre parcel near a 138kV line outside a mid-sized metro is not a hyperscale candidate and never will be. It may be a perfectly good edge or colocation site — a market that is less covered, less competitive, and where a landowner is less likely to be screened out before the conversation starts.
The flip side: edge projects involve less money. A 20-acre edge site is a good outcome, not a generational one. Calibrate accordingly.
The in-between
There is a growing middle — facilities in the 30 to 100 MW range serving AI inference and enterprise workloads, on 50 to 150 acres. These are often the most realistic target for a landowner with good but not exceptional land, and they are being built in exactly the emerging markets where land is still reasonably priced.
Specifications as publicly described by Build.inc and others, reflecting practice through 2026. Requirements vary by operator.