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Define the requirement before naming facilities
Use the notes under each category as the minimum response structure for every provider. Add workload-specific requirements, then ask providers to state assumptions and exceptions instead of simply marking “compliant.”
Provider response template
| Response field | What the provider should supply |
|---|
| Facility and option | Address or anonymized facility ID, room or phase, operator and option expiration |
| Capacity | Usable IT kW now, future kW, density limits and physical footprint |
| Delivery | Contractual service-ready date and every utility, construction or customer dependency |
| Technical exceptions | Requirement-by-requirement variance, proposed alternative and operating limitation |
| Recurring cost | Space, power, cross-connects, bandwidth, support, pass-throughs and taxes |
| One-time cost | Installation, cage, cabinets, distribution, cooling, cabling and commissioning |
| Commercial terms | Term, ramp, deposit, escalators, renewal, expansion and quote-validity period |
Normalize before you score
- Convert every proposal to the same usable IT kW and deployment period.
- Separate provider capacity from customer-responsibility equipment and work.
- Build a year-one and full-term total, including NRCs and escalators.
- Score technical compliance separately from price.
- Identify delivery dependencies and assign schedule risk.
- Resolve exceptions in writing before selecting a finalist.
Commercial pages to support the RFP
Qualify 10 to 100+ kW rack designs, cooling and floor loading.
Plan four to 20 racks, security and expansion rights.
Compare 250 kW to 5 MW delivery models and terms.
Start with Ashburn, Dallas, Atlanta and Chicago market context.
Published per rack, per cabinet and per kW figures to sanity-check responses.
Federal per-cabinet, cross-connect and remote-hands rates by contract number.
Two of those are worth keeping open while you score. Federal contracts publish what the government pays for a defined cabinet specification, so the published GSA and EIS rates give you an outside benchmark for any response you receive, and the commercial pricing page shows the retail and wholesale bands that response should fall inside.
The scoring model
An RFP without a scoring model becomes a discussion about which provider was most persuasive. Fix the weights before responses arrive, so the decision is made against the requirement rather than against the last presentation.
| Category | Suggested weight | What it tests |
|---|
| Deliverable capacity and date | 30% | Usable kW at the density you need, on a contractual date |
| Normalized total cost | 25% | Cost per usable kW over the full term, all charges included |
| Technical fit | 15% | Density, cooling method, redundancy topology, floor loading |
| Network and connectivity | 10% | Carrier choice, cloud on-ramps, diverse entrances |
| Commercial terms | 10% | Escalator, renewal, expansion rights, exit |
| Operations and support | 5% | Remote hands, response times, maintenance practice |
| Compliance and audit | 5% | Certifications in scope for your regulatory position |
Adjust the weights to your situation, but keep two rules. Capacity and date should outweigh price, because a cheaper option you cannot energize on time has no value. And commercial terms should never be zero, because the escalator and renewal clause often outweigh the opening rate over a full term.
Score before you meetComplete the scoring on the written responses first, then take meetings. Reversing that order lets presentation quality contaminate a technical evaluation, which is the most common failure mode in facility selection.
The questions providers find hardest to answer
Most RFP questions get a confident answer from everyone, which makes them useless for discrimination. These do not. A provider who answers them quickly and specifically has done this before.
- What is the maximum sustained kW per rack this specific hall supports today, with the cooling that is installed? Not the building design ceiling.
- Is the quoted kW usable IT load or allocated capacity, and how is overage billed? This single definition can move a comparison by double digits.
- Is this capacity energized today? If not, which substation serves it, what is the contractual date, and what are the remedies if it slips?
- What is the PUE, how is it measured, and will you cap it contractually? Without a cap, declining efficiency becomes your operating cost.
- What is the escalator, and if it is CPI linked, what are the floor and cap? Model it compounded to term end.
- How is renewal priced? Fair market value or a fixed strike. Digital Realty reported renewal rents up 25.4% on a cash basis in Q2 2026, which is what market can mean. What is still negotiable on a renewal.
- What are my expansion rights on adjacent capacity, and at what price? Capacity you cannot grow into is a migration later.
- What is the total of every recurring charge outside space and power at my expected cross-connect and remote-hands volume?
- Who owns the cooling loop to the rack, and what is its redundancy? For liquid deployments this is a new failure domain.
- What does exit cost? Notice, early termination, restoration obligations and overlap during migration.
Normalizing responses onto one basis
Responses will arrive in incompatible formats. This is the sequence that makes them comparable, and it is the work that determines the quality of the decision.
| Step | Action | Why it matters |
|---|
| 1 | Restate every price as cost per usable kW per month | Removes per-cabinet and per-square-foot distortion |
| 2 | Fix the power basis identically across bids | Allocated against metered is a real difference, not semantics |
| 3 | Add all recurring charges at your actual volumes | Cross-connects alone can rival space cost at small scale |
| 4 | Amortize one-time charges across the term | Install and build costs distort year one |
| 5 | Model escalators compounded to term end | A 2% and a 5% escalator diverge substantially over ten years |
| 6 | Price the ramp month by month, including any floor | Cash timing differs even when totals match |
| 7 | Value the renewal and extension terms | Frequently the largest single difference between bids |
| 8 | Add exit cost | Makes the term comparison honest |
Two bids with identical headline rates routinely differ by a double-digit percentage once normalized this way. Benchmark the result against published figures on the pricing benchmarks page to see whether the winning bid is actually competitive with the market or merely with the other bid.
Before you issue it: the pre-sales checklist
An RFP that goes out with a soft requirement gets soft answers. These are the eight things to have settled internally before a provider sees the document. Every one of them becomes a field a provider must answer, and a provider cannot answer what you have not defined.
- Committed IT kW on day one, and the ramp. The figure the rate is quoted against. Give it as usable IT load, not as a cabinet count and not as square feet.
- Density, average and peak, per rack. A 300 kW requirement at 8 kW per rack and at 40 kW per rack are different products in different buildings.
- The cooling method the equipment needs. Air, rear door, direct to chip or immersion, and the supply water temperature if liquid. This decides which halls can respond at all.
- The markets, in order. Two or three, with the reason for each. Network reach, latency to a cloud region, a tax position or a power date. The benchmarks page shows how far the same requirement prices apart by metro.
- The latest acceptable service-ready date, and the cost of missing it. Written down, so remedies for a slip can be priced rather than argued.
- Growth by date, for the full term. The expansion rights you ask for at signature are the only ones you will get in a market at 1.4% vacancy.
- The compliance scope. Which reports and certifications, for which regulator, and whether data residency binds the market choice.
- Connectivity, by name. The carriers, cloud on-ramps and exchanges that must be in the building, and the cross-connect count at go-live.
With those eight fixed, the requirement tab of the workbook fills itself, and the responses come back on a basis that can be scored rather than interpreted.
Cooling and density: the evaluation that separates vendors
Cooling is where confident RFP answers most often turn out to be about the building's design ceiling rather than the hall on offer, and where a facility that looks fine on paper fails a liquid deployment in year two. Ask these of every bidder, in this form, and score the answers on specifics.
| Question | Why it matters | What a good answer looks like |
|---|
| What is the maximum sustained kW per rack this hall supports today, with the cooling installed? | Design ceilings and installed capacity diverge, and the difference is your headroom | A number for the hall, not the building, with the cooling plant it rests on named |
| Air, rear door, direct to chip or immersion, and which are live in this hall now? | A hall built for air cannot host 135 kW racks without rework, and rework has a date | Which methods are operating today, which are designed for, and the schedule for any that are planned |
| Who owns and maintains the coolant distribution unit and the loop to the rack? | For liquid cooling this is a new failure domain, and it needs an owner before it fails | A named party for the CDU, the secondary loop and the rack manifold, with its redundancy stated |
| What supply water temperature and flow rate is available at the rack, and is it guaranteed in the SLA? | Chip vendors specify inlet temperature. A hall outside the range runs your equipment throttled | A temperature range and flow figure, with the SLA clause that commits to it |
| Is the cooling design evaporative or closed loop, and what water source does it rely on? | Water is becoming a permit condition. Aurora, Colorado does not permit new evaporative designs, and Denver Water declared drought restrictions in 2026 | The design named, the daily water draw stated, and the permit or ordinance it complies with |
| What is the PUE, how is it measured, and will you cap it in the contract? | On a metered quote, declining efficiency is your operating cost, not the provider's | A measured annual PUE with the measurement boundary, and a contractual cap with a remedy |
| Is the quoted power in kW or kVA, and what derating applies to the circuits? | Some providers sell a draw cap in kVA, and in North America a 120/208V circuit is typically derated to 80% of its breaker rating | Usable kW at the rack, after derating and at your equipment's power factor, in writing |
| What happens to the cooling on a utility loss, and for how long? | Generators carry the IT load. Whether they carry the chillers, and the thermal ride-through in between, is a separate question | Ride-through in minutes at your density, and whether mechanical load is on generator |
| What is the floor loading, and does it accommodate a fully populated liquid cooled rack? | Liquid cooled racks weigh more, and raised floors have limits | A pounds per square foot figure and the heaviest rack the hall has accepted |
Weight the answers under technical fit in the scoring model above, and score a vague answer as a failure rather than as a neutral. A provider that has delivered liquid cooling answers these in a paragraph. One that has not answers them in a meeting. For the density and cooling requirements themselves, the GPU and high density guide covers 10 to 100+ kW rack designs.
Common RFP mistakes
- Specifying square feet instead of kW and density. Space is not the constraint; power and cooling are.
- Omitting the density figure. A 300 kW requirement at 8 kW per rack and at 40 kW per rack are different products in different buildings.
- Naming facilities in the requirement. This narrows the field before you understand the options and reduces price tension.
- Leaving the delivery date soft. A soft date invites optimistic answers you cannot hold anyone to.
- Asking for a rate rather than a total. You get the answer you asked for, and it will not be the invoice.
- Running too few bidders. Competitive tension is the mechanism that produces a real price. Two bids is not a process.
- Skipping the exit terms. Every deployment eventually moves, and the cost of that belongs in the decision.
Ready to issue the RFP?
A scout can turn this requirement into a targeted provider list, manage responses and normalize capacity, pricing and delivery dates.
