MW Under Management
Executive Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓ MW under management is the total critical IT load capacity an operator has built and is operating across its portfolio, whether or not currently leased, and is the core scale metric for the sector.
- ✓ The metric should always be read alongside utilisation rate, since a rising MW under management figure alongside a falling utilisation rate signals capacity growth outpacing demand.
- ✓ MW under management typically includes capacity under construction or in a pre-leasing phase, and a model should distinguish operational, under-construction, and planned capacity within the total figure.
- ✓ Growth in MW under management represents committed capital deployment, not necessarily revenue growth, since revenue depends additionally on how much of that capacity is actually leased and at what price.
Definition¶
MW under management is the total critical IT load capacity, expressed in megawatts, that a data centre operator has built and is operating across its portfolio, whether or not that capacity is currently leased to tenants.
Why It Matters to the Financial Model¶
MW under management is the core scale metric for a data centre operator, broadly analogous to assets under management in other capital-intensive, capacity-based sectors. It should always be read alongside utilisation rate rather than in isolation, since a rising MW under management figure alongside a falling utilisation rate signals that capacity growth is outpacing demand, a combination the scale metric alone would not reveal. See Data Centre Financial KPIs for how this metric fits within the broader KPI set.
Operational Versus Under-Construction Capacity¶
Reporting conventions vary, but a rigorous model should distinguish operational capacity, capacity under construction, and planned or contracted future capacity within the total MW under management figure, rather than reporting a single blended number that conflates capacity currently generating revenue with capacity that will only generate revenue in a future period.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What is MW under management?
The total critical IT load capacity, expressed in megawatts, that a data centre operator has built and is operating across its portfolio, whether or not that capacity is currently leased to tenants.
Why should MW under management always be read alongside utilisation rate?
Because a rising MW under management figure alongside a falling utilisation rate signals that capacity growth is outpacing demand, a warning combination that the scale metric alone would not reveal, since total built capacity can grow even as the proportion actually leased declines.
Does MW under management include capacity that is still under construction?
Reporting conventions vary, but a rigorous model should distinguish operational capacity, capacity under construction, and planned/contracted future capacity within the total figure, rather than reporting a single blended number that conflates capacity generating revenue today with capacity that will only generate revenue in future periods.
Does growing MW under management mean an operator's revenue is growing?
Not necessarily. Growth in MW under management represents committed capital deployment into built capacity, but revenue depends additionally on how much of that capacity is actually leased and at what price, which is why the metric should be read together with utilisation rate and revenue per kW.
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Data centre financial modelling is the discipline of modelling a data centre operator's revenue, cost, and capital structure from its capacity-denominated drivers, power, space, and cooling capacity, rack density, and tenant contract structure, rather than the generic market-price and headcount-growth drivers used in most corporate models, or the pure occupancy-and-lease-term drivers of conventional commercial real estate. This page is the hub for the Knowledge Centre's data centre financial modelling content: how colocation, hyperscale, and enterprise business models each require a distinct model architecture, how rack revenue and occupancy are decomposed into their separable underlying drivers, and how capacity planning and financial KPIs tie the model together, as this domain expands to cover operations, revenue, investment, and governance practice across the sector.
Data Centre Financial KPIs
A data centre financial model should track a defined set of KPIs spanning scale, utilisation, retention, pricing, efficiency, and profitability, since no single metric captures operating performance on its own. This guide sets out the core KPI set, MW under management, utilisation rate, churn, revenue per kW, power usage effectiveness, and EBITDA per MW, and how to interpret each correctly alongside the others rather than in isolation.
Critical IT Load
Critical IT load is the amount of power a data centre facility delivers directly to IT equipment, servers, storage, and networking, and is the industry-standard unit for expressing a facility's billable and sellable capacity. It excludes the additional, non-IT power drawn by cooling and power distribution overhead, which is instead captured separately through power usage effectiveness (PUE). Critical IT load, in kW or MW, is the capacity figure that data centre revenue, capacity planning, and portfolio scale metrics are all built around.
Data Centre Occupancy & Utilisation Models
Data centre occupancy modelling requires distinguishing three related but distinct capacity states: billed (contracted) capacity, actually utilised capacity, and total available capacity. This guide sets out how to model each state and the ratios between them, and why conflating billed occupancy with actual utilisation misrepresents both revenue durability and the facility's true remaining capacity headroom.