Glossary

Colocation: A data center business that sells space, power, cooling and connectivity to tenants who own and operate their own servers.
Delayed-draw term loan: A committed loan the borrower draws in stages, typically as it acquires the equipment that secures it, up to an agreed ceiling.
Hyperscaler: One of the largest cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, offering many services on infrastructure they design and operate at global scale.
Neocloud: A cloud operator that specialises in renting accelerated computing capacity, chiefly GPU clusters, rather than a broad catalogue of services. It typically owns the servers and leases or develops the power and sites that run them.
Remaining performance obligations: The value of contracted revenue a company has not yet recognised, reported under both US and international revenue accounting standards. Neoclouds often describe it as backlog.
Special-purpose vehicle: A separate legal entity created to hold a defined set of assets and contracts, so that lenders can take security over them in isolation from the parent company.
Take-or-pay: A contract term under which the customer must pay for committed capacity whether or not it uses it. It moves utilization risk from the supplier to the customer.
Useful life: The period over which a company spreads the cost of an asset as depreciation. A longer assumed life lowers the annual charge and raises reported profit.