Wholesale colocation

Wholesale colocation means leasing an entire data hall, building, campus or block of megawatts to a single customer, usually a hyperscaler, on a long lease. The wholesale market counts in megawatts: at QTS, Vantage, Digital Realty or CyrusOne the lease runs ten to fifteen years, with rent quoted per kW per month and reserved capacity. Retail colocation sells racks or cages to hundreds of customers, with interconnection and services around them. The two models produce very different risks. In wholesale, the rent roll of a site rests on one or two tenants: losing a building means a concentrated loss of rent. The lease clause that often lets the tenant walk away if restoration runs past a set deadline then weighs as much on the claim as the length of the works. The operator generally supplies power and cooling up to the hall and the customer installs its servers, so the boundary between insurable interests moves close to that of a powered shell. In retail, the same fire hits a hundred customers at once, each with its own service credits and possible recourse. The submission should therefore ask what share of rent the top three customers carry, and what their leases say about prolonged unavailability. One caveat: those concentrated customers rarely default, and a lease signed by a hyperscaler refinances far better than a book of small business tenants, which is why infrastructure funds pay more for these sites.