- Behind-the-meter generation
- Electricity generated and consumed on-site, from dedicated gas engines, turbines, or a co-located renewable project, without drawing through the utility's grid connection. It lets a data center bypass the interconnection queue entirely, a technique pioneered in rural Texas by crypto miners and increasingly used for AI compute.
- By-right zoning
- A land-use designation that permits data-center development without a discretionary rezoning approval, removing a source of political and schedule risk. Loudoun County's by-right treatment helped seed Ashburn; its absence, or reversal through moratoria, is a real risk in emerging markets facing local pushback.
- Emerging market
- A location that convincingly offers one or two of the key inputs, usually available power and low cost, and is racing to prove the rest before the demand wave moves on. Examples include Indiana, Ohio's second tier, Wyoming, rural Texas, and Louisiana. Some graduate to primary; most absorb a wave of projects and plateau.
- Entitled powered land
- A parcel that is both entitled (zoned, permitted, and cleared for data-center use) and has a firm, contracted path to enough electricity delivered on a known date. The course's central thesis holds this to be the scarcest and most valuable asset in the industry, because it removes the longest and least controllable item from a project's schedule.
- Interconnection queue
- The ordered line of projects waiting for a utility to connect them to the electric grid. A newcomer joins at the back, so a market with abundant generation but a long queue is functionally power-poor for a new project. Reading the queue, not the press release, reveals a market's true power availability.
- Liquidity (market)
- The depth of a market's operational ecosystem: the ability to lease space on short notice, sell to many buyers, hire experienced crews, and get a utility to energize a project quickly. Liquidity is what customers pay a premium for in a mature hub and what fundamentally separates a primary market from a place with only a handful of facilities.
- Primary market
- A location that has proven, at real scale, that it can deliver power, fiber, entitlement, and a favorable fiscal posture, earning deep operational liquidity and customer trust. The six discussed are Ashburn/Northern Virginia, Phoenix, Dallas-Fort Worth, Columbus, Chicago, and Atlanta.
- Transmission constraint
- The bottleneck created by the wires, substations, and large transformers needed to move electricity from where it is generated to a specific parcel. Because this infrastructure takes years to permit and build and depends on tight transformer supply, it, rather than raw generation, is the structural reason firm power on a timeline is scarce even where land is abundant.