- Entitlement
- The legal right to build a specific type of facility on a parcel, determined by zoning, land-use approvals, and any local restrictions. A site with firm power but unresolved entitlement can still face years of delay, which is why certification programs treat documented entitlement as core evidence of readiness.
- FLAP-D
- Shorthand for Europe's five primary data-center metros: Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris, and Dublin. The label captures interconnection, financial-anchor, and cloud-anchor gravity, but increasingly hides the fact that several of these markets are constrained or restricted for new construction.
- Free cooling
- Cooling servers with cold outside air instead of energy-intensive mechanical chillers. Available for much of the year in cold-climate markets, it lowers cooling load and improves power usage effectiveness, and is a major reason large batch and training workloads are drawn to the Nordics.
- Internet exchange point (IXP)
- A physical location where many networks meet to hand traffic directly to one another without paying an intermediary transit provider. Dense exchanges such as Frankfurt's DE-CIX create a network effect that draws still more networks, making the location structurally valuable for interconnection.
- Moratorium (data-center)
- A temporary official halt on new data-center permits or grid connections in a jurisdiction, imposed to manage land use, power demand, or grid congestion. Amsterdam, Dublin, and Singapore have all used moratoria; each pushed demand into surrounding secondary markets rather than eliminating it.
- Power usage effectiveness (PUE)
- The ratio of a facility's total power draw to the power that actually reaches its computing equipment. A ratio near 1.0 is highly efficient. Cool climates such as the Nordics achieve low ratios through free cooling, lowering both cost and emissions per unit of compute.
- Site certification program
- A structured pre-diligence process, run or endorsed by a state or regional development authority, in which a third party verifies a parcel against a fixed readiness checklist (zoning, power, environmental, geotechnical, access, title). Georgia Ready and the Virginia Business Ready Sites Program are leading examples; certification compresses buyer diligence and signals readiness.
- Spillover ring
- The set of secondary markets that absorb demand a constrained primary hub can no longer accommodate. Examples include Johor and Batam around Singapore, and regional markets around Frankfurt, London, and Amsterdam. Spillover follows available power, entitlable land, and acceptable fiber latency back to the core.