Mitch describes speed to token as how fast the users who need a data center, such as neoclouds, can start computing and generating revenue. Logan lays out the chain that has to happen before any tokens flow: land acquisition, power procurement, entitlements and permits, construction and fit out, commissioning, and finally live compute. Each of those steps has about 500 subcomponents, and every week of delay compounds. A month lost in site qualification is a month of zero revenue.
Chips are close to a commodity at this point. What is scarce is the ability to plug them in, cool them and get approval to operate them. Utilities have long interconnection queues, transformers have long lead times, and sites that are already zoned with power available are rare. Permitting, environmental reviews and community pushback can easily add 12 to 24 months to a site, and construction financing for data centers is still evolving because lenders don't always understand the asset class.
Traditional hubs like Northern Virginia and Phoenix are hitting walls on power queues and available land, and Logan has heard of buyers paying up to $6 million per megawatt in Loudoun County. The Midwest offers available land, shorter power queues, lower land and power costs, a cooler climate and fewer natural disasters. Kansas City also has a carrier hotel with strong fiber connectivity, which matters for inference and edge data centers. Kansas, Missouri and other states are competing with tax breaks, grants and fast track permitting.
Many groups are shifting from greenfield sites to existing industrial and office buildings that can be repurposed into AI inference campuses. When Mitch looks at a building, the first two questions are zoning and power. Is a data center a permitted use, or will it need a special use permit, a conditional use permit or a rezoning? Was power once there, as in an old manufacturing plant or paper mill, and how close are new and existing substations? In this market there is an 8-week minimum just to get a response on a power request. Water, natural gas and fiber come next. Both Logan and Mitch stress bringing the community in early.
Validating and de-risking a site can take 3 to 6 months, so owners who think they may have a data center site should start early. Midwest Commercial Real Estate Advisors has a Midwest site qualification toolkit to grade a property's potential. Episode 2 of the series covers site selection.
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