The paper is running ahead of the leases. This week a county in Alabama voted to give away a billion dollars of tax revenue for a 1.5 GW campus, a Michigan utility locked a hyperscaler into a 20-year power contract with a floor under it, and a village in Wisconsin traded buildings for square footage. The one deal with a price on it was a 4 MW building from 1989 in the Atlanta suburbs. Entitlements and power agreements are being signed by the gigawatt. Rent is being signed by the megawatt.

If you underwrite this market, that gap is the story. Approvals tell you where capital wants to go. Leases tell you what it will pay. Four deals below, three of them approvals and one of them a lease, and I have marked every spec the sources would not give me as n/d rather than guess. It was a thin week for signed, priced paper, and I would rather say so than pad it.

Carrier Connect Re-Leases a 1989 Building in Five Days

Start with the only deal that has a rent attached. Carrier Connect, through its PureColo USA subsidiary, closed on a legacy data center in Alpharetta, Georgia, and five days later announced a five-year customer contract worth CAD $88.9 million. The customer is not named. The customer did put down a multi-month deposit, which is the only credit support disclosed.

Run the numbers and the pricing is the news. The contract pays CAD $17.8 million a year for the initial 3 MW, rising to a potential CAD $23.7 million a year at 4 MW. Both figures work out to about CAD $5.9 million per megawatt-year. Compare that with a powered-shell lease, which in the markets I track clears at a small fraction of that figure, and you can see this is not a shell deal. It is retail-style colocation pricing on a building that is 37 years old, 184,553 rentable square feet, and drawing 4 MW. That works out to about 21.7 watts a square foot, a density that would embarrass any building designed for GPUs.

So why does it lease? Power. The building carries a historical 10 MW Georgia Power allocation that the operator says is potentially restorable, and this first customer is the first 4 MW of a 25 MW letter of intent. In Atlanta, where new capacity is queued for years, an old building with a utility allocation is worth more than its walls. The initial 3 MW starts November 1, and the last megawatt follows three to six months later. The escalator, the customer's credit and the Canadian-dollar conversion are all undisclosed, so treat the headline as a rent roll, not a comp.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Carrier Connect (PureColo USA) · Site: Alpharetta, GA, Atlanta metro; miles to city limits n/d · Footprint: 184,553 rsf, 1989 vintage · Load: 4 MW today (~21.7 W/sf), 10 MW allocation potentially restorable · Lease: 5-yr customer contract, CAD $88.9M total, deposit-backed, escalator n/d, credit n/d · Source: Newsfile release.

Lowndes County Votes Split on a Gigawatt-Class Campus

Now the other end of the scale. Lowndes County, Alabama, approved roughly $1.1 billion in data center tax breaks for Project Red Clay, a campus planned near Burkville, west of Montgomery, along the US-80 and AL-21 corridor. Cloverleaf Infrastructure is the developer. The end user is an unnamed AI hyperscale operator.

The package is a development agreement plus a 50 percent abatement of county non-educational property tax and sales-tax exemptions. The vote was 3 to 2. Opponents, including the NRDC and the Southern Environmental Law Center, say the vote came without adequate public notice, and litigation is the expectation. I cannot tell you how a court would rule. I can tell you what a lender will do with a split vote taken on short notice: ask for a title and entitlement opinion before funding a dollar.

The site specs are large. Six buildings, about 3 million square feet, on 1,100 acres at the start with room to grow to 2,200. The developer is requesting 1,500 MW from the utility. Divide one by the other and you get 500 watts a square foot, but treat that as a ceiling, since the megawatts are a request and not a contract. Local tax revenue is projected at $124 million a year once built, and construction is targeted for early 2027. No lease terms, no tenant credit, no rent. This is a land and power position, and the abatement is what makes the economics pencil.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Cloverleaf Infrastructure (developer), unnamed hyperscale user · Site: Burkville, Lowndes County, AL, west of Montgomery; miles to city limits n/d · Footprint: ~3M sf across six buildings on 1,100 acres (cap 2,200) · Load: 1,500 MW requested (~500 W/sf ceiling) · Lease: n/d; development agreement with 50% county property-tax abatement · Deal value: ~$1.1B in tax breaks · Source: GovTech.

Google Gets a Power Floor Near Detroit Metro

The Michigan deal is the most interesting piece of paper this week, and not because of the real estate. Google's Van Buren Township campus, west of Detroit Metro Airport between I-94, I-275, Haggerty and Hannan roads, cleared its final site plan this month. Panattoni is the developer, Walbridge the builder, Google the user. Regulators approved DTE's 20-year service contract on October 1, and it carries a minimum 80 percent payment with early-termination penalties.

Read that clause the way a landlord would. An 80 percent minimum payment is a take-or-pay floor, written into a power contract instead of a lease. It protects the utility's capital, which in turn is what lets the utility build 1 GW of service for a single customer. For the tenant it converts a flexible ramp into a fixed obligation, and that is a real cost of getting power by late 2027. Google also pays $15.4 million toward infrastructure, and the township granted roughly $125 million of tax relief over 12 years.

I am leaving footprint as n/d. The reporting I could find gives conflicting building counts and square footage, from about 800,000 square feet to 1.5 million, so any watts-per-square-foot figure would be a guess. I am not going to print a guess in a spec block people use for comps.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Panattoni (developer), Walbridge (builder), Google (user) · Site: Van Buren Township, Wayne County, MI, west of Detroit Metro Airport; miles to city limits n/d · Footprint: n/d (reported figures conflict) · Load: 1 GW · Lease: 20-yr DTE power contract, 80% minimum payment, early-termination penalties; real estate lease n/d · Source: Bridge Michigan.

Microsoft Swaps Two Buildings for More Square Feet

In Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, the Plan Commission cleared Microsoft's amended site plan in mid-October. The campus goes from nine buildings and 5.2 million square feet to seven buildings and 5.8 million. Fewer, larger buildings let a builder energize capacity in bigger blocks, and the village is taking the trade: taxable value per acre drops from about $10 million to about $7.7 million.

That is a 23 percent haircut on the tax base per acre in exchange for speed and a bigger envelope. The Village Board vote comes later this month. Microsoft owns and occupies, so there is no lease, no escalator and no credit story, and the sources give no megawatts. If you are a municipality watching this, note what the buyer asked for and what the village gave. Buyers with the best credit in the market are now negotiating the assessed value of the land under their buildings, not just the rate.

Deal specs. Sponsor: Microsoft (owner-occupier) · Site: Mount Pleasant, Racine County, WI; miles to city limits n/d · Footprint: 5.8M sf, seven buildings (was 5.2M sf, nine buildings) · Load: n/d · Lease: owner-occupied, n/a · Source: WPR.

Who Eats the Risk Before a Tenant Signs

Only one of these four has a counterparty who will say what a megawatt costs. The other three are about who bears the risk before a tenant signs: the county through its tax base, the utility through a minimum bill, the village through its assessed value. Each is a different way of pricing the same thing, which is who eats the cost if the load does not show up. Developers have noticed. The structures that get done fastest are the ones that move risk to a public counterparty or a utility ratepayer, and the structures that get challenged are the ones that do it quietly.

For brokers, the practical read is that comps are scarce, so the CAD $5.9 million per megawatt-year figure from Alpharetta will get quoted well beyond its worth. It is a retail-colo price on a small, old, power-rich building. Do not set a campus rent off it. And when a headline says gigawatt, ask for the contract that goes with it. Today the contract is usually a tax abatement or a power tariff, and the lease comes later, if it comes.

One more habit worth keeping: separate what was approved from what was signed from what was paid. Alabama approved. Michigan signed a power contract. Georgia paid, in a small building. Wisconsin rearranged. Four verbs, four different risk profiles, and only one of them produces cash flow you can capitalize today.

What to Watch Next Week

Gilroy, California. The city council is expected to vote around October 21 on extending its data center moratorium by about ten months. The date is approximate in the reporting I found.

Sioux County, Iowa. A final vote on the county's data center ordinance is scheduled for October 27, after a 4 to 1 second reading.

Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. The Village Board takes up Microsoft's amended plan later this month. No exact date was published.

Alpharetta, Georgia. The first 3 MW for Carrier Connect's new customer starts November 1. Whether the other 21 MW of the letter of intent converts is the number to track.

Boulder City, Nevada. Voters decide on November 3 whether to allow data centers in the Eldorado Valley.

Disclaimer: Edge Cases is Barrio Energy's deal-flow product. Nothing here is investment advice, a recommendation to transact, or a substitute for your own diligence. Specs are sourced from public filings, press, and reporting; verify before you wire anything.