- Backlog coverage
- The ratio of an integrator's booked orders to its annual production output. A long, growing backlog at firm prices signals durable pricing power and deters new entry, making it a headline metric for judging whether an integrator genuinely holds a chokepoint.
- Capacity reservation agreement
- A forward contract in which a buyer pays to hold a future factory production slot, guaranteeing a delivery date. It functions as a real option on time-to-power whose value rises with scarcity, turning reserved factory capacity into a competitive weapon and a balance-sheet asset.
- Chokepoint
- A point in a supply chain where the entire flow must pass through a single narrow link that is scarce and hard to widen or bypass. When one such link is unavoidable, it captures control of schedule, price, and risk from the many buyers who depend on it.
- Coolant distribution unit (CDU)
- The interface module in a liquid-cooling system that isolates the clean coolant loop running directly to the chips from the wider facility water loop. It is the pivotal cooling product for high-density artificial-intelligence racks that cannot be cooled by air alone.
- E-house (power module)
- An enclosed, weatherproof, climate-controlled module — effectively a factory-built room — with switchgear, protection relays, and often the uninterruptible supply and batteries installed and commissioned before shipment. Unlike an open skid, it is the building itself, so it arrives ready to energize with minimal site work.
- Factory acceptance test
- The energized, loaded test a module passes inside the plant before shipment, often witnessed by the customer. It moves commissioning risk off the site and off the critical path to an earlier, cheaper point, so the module arrives as a known-good, de-risked product.
- Power skid
- An open steel base frame carrying a transformer, switchgear, and controls, wired and tested as a single unit at the factory and craned into place on site. It packages part of the power train into one shippable, pre-tested product rather than dozens of field-assembled parts.
- Time-to-power
- The elapsed time from a decision to build to the moment a facility can energize live load. In the artificial-intelligence build-out it is the binding constraint that modular delivery is designed to compress, and it is the number that most determines a project's value.