In this edition of DCD>Talks, DCD’s Emma Brookes sat down with Eric Thompson, MD of Landgate, a data-based marketplace listing land for sale and lease. With demands for available land to erect new data centers at a high, Thompson talks about the value in suitability metrics for site selection.

Landgate offers a range of services for commercial property buyers and developers from across multiple sectors, ranging from sourcing sites to cash flow analysis. “The easiest way I know to describe it would be that we deal with data analytics and software for the energy and data center industry, says Thompson.

The data is analyzed and quantified, based on three core competencies: 1) Land itself, covering things like the size of the plot, current owner, risk factors, and the likelihood of availability; 2) Siting, covering suitability in terms of environment, proximity to flood plains and hazardous materials, as well as local zoning and other legislative factors (allowing Landgate to calculate a ‘buildable acreage’); 3) The third is the most pressing of issues for our industry – that of power provisioning.

“The biggest problem that the data center industry is facing today is the lack of power available through grid solutions,” explains Thompson. “A lot of companies are looking at alternatives to that, but a load study at a utility can cost anywhere from $50,000 to a quarter of a million dollars, and it takes a long time to get that power flow study done. What we're able to do is determine that right away, and the developers can instantly find sites that have power available and what type of power is available.”

Thompson goes on to explain that the company creates a heatmap for every substation in the US, built using a bespoke model that examines the load on systems, iterating higher and higher loads “until something, essentially, breaks.”

“That tells us not only how much headroom and available capacity is at a particular location without the cost of upgrades, but it also helps us to identify what areas of the grid need to be upgraded, and whether it’s financially viable to do so.”

Armed with this information, Landgate can produce a property report that will indicate to stakeholders the site’s potential, best use cases, restrictions, proximity to resources including water and electricity (with a forensic breakdown of positives and negatives), access to fiber, and more esoteric factors, such as the existence of endangered species that could cause issues with permitting.

For energy provision, Landgate uses the term ‘off-take capacity’ to describe energy access holistically, taking into account whether it could be cost-effective to upgrade existing grid access to make an otherwise ‘perfect’ parcel of land viable for development. As Thompson says, “It could be that you're uncovering a hidden gem on the grid, where the upgrade cost to make it usable is not that expensive, whereas, on the surface, the utility may tell you, ‘Oh no, there's no room at this location, there's no available power.’”

Additionally, Landgate can assess the power mix for the location, which is an essential tool for data centers’ ability to report their environmental impact, at a time when self-regulation is being overtaken by local and federal targets.

He enthuses, “We work with all of the top renewable energy developers in the US and they all want to be working with data center developers to provide generation for these projects. It's cool to know that data center developers need generation, and the generators want to provide clean power to the data centers, and our customer base is finding ways to work with each other.”

The conversation turns to the wide variety of shapes and sizes that data centers come in, from the hyperscale campus to the Edge facility. The assessment helps stakeholders to understand the best use case for a given plot of land, or even if existing brownfield sites can be converted using existing structures, often bypassing the need for new grid connection.”

“It can also point to existing data centers in the area that are looking to expand, which could lead to competition for power, and the quality and bandwidth provided by the existing long-haul data connections. It can even look at existing facilities in terms of their remaining white space, which can help to assess if densification may be favored over an expanded footprint.

So with all that valuable intelligence, does Thompson believe that the data center industry is in good health? His answer is definitive:

“I'm bullish on the whole industry. From everything that I'm hearing, whether it's from data center developers or investors or capital firms, the economics of the data centers themselves are off the charts, and then there’s such a large demand, primarily fueled by AI.”

With so much demand, and so much potential, it makes sense to use all the information available to pick the best location for your next build, and services like Landgate have the potential to offer a competitive advantage.

Watch the full DCD>Talk here