Critical IT load (IT MW)

Critical IT load is the electrical power available to a data center's IT equipment alone, expressed in MW (megawatts); the market uses it to size, lease and compare facilities. When a broker pitches a 48 MW site, it almost always means critical IT load: what servers, storage and network gear can draw, excluding cooling, lighting and conversion losses. Grid connection capacity is higher by the PUE (Power Usage Effectiveness) ratio: 48 IT MW at a PUE of 1.3 needs about 62 MW at the substation. Both figures circulate in the same submissions and often get mixed up, which skews comparisons by 30% to 50%. The market settled on IT MW because that is what the customer buys. Wholesale rents are negotiated in dollars or euros per IT kW per month, construction costs in millions per IT MW, and deals are read as value per MW. For the underwriter, the number works as a sanity check on the statement of values. A building declared at €20 million for 30 IT MW is either underinsured or described with a MW that is not an IT MW, grid capacity instead, or even capacity promised by the utility and not yet delivered. The submission is better off separating built MW from MW that is only reserved. One caveat: rack density distorts the reasoning, since one MW of AI at over 100 kW per rack carries far more insured hardware than one MW of conventional hosting at 10 kW, for the same power bill.