The vocabulary, defined once
Every term this industry uses that is worth knowing — grid, workload, hardware, security and market language — each in a sentence or two.
Grid and power
Interconnection queue
The waiting list a new power project joins to be connected to the electricity grid. In the United States roughly 2,061 GW currently sits in these queues, with a median wait of more than five years to reach commercial operation.
Secondary power drop
The electrical service already running into an existing building, downstream of the utility connection. Where it has unused headroom, that spare capacity can support equipment without any new grid application.
Substation
The facility that steps grid voltage down for local distribution. Building a new one is the slow, permit-heavy step that conventional data centre projects usually cannot avoid.
Demand charge
The portion of a commercial electricity bill based on the highest power draw in a billing period rather than total consumption. On-site battery storage can reduce it by covering short peaks.
Grid services
Payments earned by making stored energy or flexible demand available to the grid operator. A battery installed for backup can become a second revenue line rather than only a cost.
Compute and workloads
Training
The process of building a model by processing large datasets. It is tolerant of latency and rewards concentrating hardware in one very large cluster.
Inference
Running an already-trained model to answer a request. It is latency-sensitive, runs constantly, and benefits from sitting near the user — the workload that has now overtaken training in volume.
Edge AI
Running AI workloads close to where data is produced and consumed, rather than sending everything to a distant central facility.
Distributed compute
Capacity spread across many small sites instead of concentrated in one campus. Each site is individually modest; the aggregate is not.
Hyperscaler
An operator of very large cloud and data centre estates. Their constraint is increasingly power and permitting rather than access to hardware.
Sovereign compute
Processing that stays physically inside a defined jurisdiction so it remains subject to that jurisdiction’s law — increasingly a procurement requirement rather than a preference.
DAIT hardware
Node
A single sealed, weatherproof DAIT unit containing compute, battery storage, a solar inverter, climate control and fire suppression. It mounts on a wall, pad or roof and needs no building works.
Cabinet
The unit of capacity inside a node. Deployment footprints — Base, Mid and High — differ by how many cabinets they contain, not by design.
Site host
The property owner whose building carries a node. The host contributes space and access to existing electrical service, contributes no capital, and receives backup power plus a licence fee or revenue share.
IP65
An ingress protection rating: fully dust-tight, and protected against low-pressure water jets from any direction. A design target for the DAIT enclosure.
EN 60529
The European standard that defines those IP ingress protection ratings and how they are tested.
ISO 9227
The standard salt-spray test for corrosion resistance — the relevant measure for hardware living outdoors for years.
FM200
A clean-agent fire suppression gas that extinguishes fire without water or residue, so it will not destroy the electronics it is protecting.
Security and compliance
Zero-trust
A security model in which nothing is trusted because of its network location. Every device and request authenticates, every time.
Mutual TLS
An encrypted connection where both ends prove their identity, not just the server. It prevents an unauthorised unit from impersonating a legitimate node.
Hardware-rooted trust
Cryptographic identity held in the physical hardware itself, so it cannot be copied or forged in software.
SOC 2 Type II
An audit of whether an organisation’s security controls actually operated effectively over a period of time, rather than merely existing on paper.
HIPAA
United States legislation governing the handling of protected health information — the reason healthcare workloads often cannot leave a defined environment.
GDPR
European Union regulation governing personal data, including constraints on where that data may be processed and stored.
Market terms
CAGR
Compound annual growth rate — the smoothed yearly rate at which a figure grows over a multi-year period.
CapEx
Capital expenditure. The up-front cost of building or buying an asset, as distinct from the ongoing cost of running it.
Time to capacity
How long from commitment until compute is actually available to serve work. For a conventional build this is dominated by grid and permitting rather than by hardware.
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