Powered Shell · Colocation & Offtake

Powered shell, with the power already generated

Most powered shells are a building waiting on a utility. The structure is finished, the fibre is in, and the whole thing sits idle until an interconnection is granted. A GRECO shell generates its own power on site, so the delivery date is a construction schedule rather than a position in a queue.

What is a powered shell?

A powered shell is a purpose-built data centre building delivered with its structure, utility service and connectivity in place, but with the interior left as conditioned raw space. The developer provides the envelope and the power; the tenant designs and builds everything inside it.

It sits between two other options. A bare industrial building is cheaper but has no meaningful power and no data-centre engineering behind it. A turnkey suite arrives fully fitted and commissioned, costs more per kilowatt, and gives the tenant far less control over cooling and electrical topology. Powered shell is the middle: you inherit the hard part — power and building — and keep authorship of the interior.

The term "powered land" is sometimes used for the same idea one step earlier: a serviced site with power secured, but without the building.

Who delivers what

The line between landlord and tenant scope is the thing most worth agreeing early — it is where powered shell deals usually go wrong.

GRECO delivers

  • ·Building envelope, slab and structure
  • ·Electrical service into the building
  • ·On-site generation and switchgear
  • ·Fibre entry and pathways
  • ·Site works, security perimeter, access

You fit out

  • ·Cooling plant and distribution inside the demise
  • ·UPS, PDUs and internal electrical topology
  • ·Racks, containment and structured cabling
  • ·Building management and monitoring
  • ·Internal security and access control

Powered shell vs turnkey vs managed

Three ways to take capacity on a GRECO campus. The right one depends on whether you want to own the interior design.

You control the interior

Powered shell

The building and the power, delivered. You design and build the fit-out to your own reference standard.

Operators with an established internal design
You bring hardware only

Turnkey capacity

Fitted, cooled, commissioned capacity leased by the kilowatt. GRECO carries the fit-out.

Teams who want to skip the build entirely
You bring the workload

Managed deployment

GRECO specifies, procures, racks and operates the fleet as a managed service, including Dell PowerEdge.

Buyers without a data-centre operations team

Why the power question decides everything

No queue to join

A new large load waits five to seven years for utility interconnection across much of North America. Generation behind the meter does not enter that queue, so the shell energizes on a construction timeline.

Power that scales with you

Capacity is added in modular blocks as load arrives, rather than being capped at whatever the utility was willing to grant on day one.

Heat as a revenue line

Halls are engineered for liquid cooling from the outset, and recovered heat is metered into district energy at 50 °C instead of being rejected into the air.

Powered shell data centres: common questions

A powered shell is a purpose-built data centre building delivered with the structure, utility service, and connectivity in place, but with the interior left as conditioned raw space. The developer delivers the envelope, the slab, the power capacity to the building and usually the fibre entry. The tenant fits out everything inside: cooling plant, electrical distribution, racks, containment, security and controls. It sits between a bare industrial building and a fully fitted turnkey suite.

Scope and who carries the fit-out. A turnkey suite arrives complete — cooling, UPS, distribution, containment, commissioning — and the tenant brings only hardware. A powered shell delivers the building and the power, and the tenant designs and builds the interior to their own standards. Turnkey costs more per kilowatt and moves faster; powered shell costs less and gives the operator full control over their cooling and electrical topology, which matters if you have your own reference design.

Any figure quoted without a site is guesswork, because the number is driven by the things that differ most between sites: how much power is actually available and when, land and construction cost in that market, and how much civil and utility work the shell needs. The more useful question is what the delivery date is worth. A cheaper shell that cannot energize for five years while it waits in an interconnection queue is not cheaper in any sense that matters to an operator with hardware on order.

Usually yes, because the building work overlaps with the tenant fit-out design rather than following it. But the honest constraint is rarely construction — it is power. Across much of North America a new large load waits five to seven years for a utility interconnection, and no amount of construction speed compresses that. A shell is only genuinely fast if the power is already secured.

The power is generated on the campus rather than drawn from a utility connection that has to be granted first. Solid oxide fuel cells below roughly 20 MW and combined cycle above it sit behind the meter, so delivery is a construction schedule rather than a queue position. The other difference is heat: halls are engineered for liquid cooling from the outset, and the recovered heat is sold into district energy at 50 °C instead of rejected.

Typically a long-term triple-net lease, priced either per square foot or per kilowatt of committed critical capacity, with terms commonly running ten to fifteen years to underwrite the development. The tenant carries the fit-out capital and usually the operating costs inside the demise. Exact structure is a negotiation rather than a published rate, because it moves with the capacity committed and the phasing.

Talk to us about a shell

Scope, phasing and commercial structure are all site-specific. The useful first conversation is about how much capacity you need and when you need it energized.

Start a capacity conversation Compute and heat offtakeHow the power is generated