Anchor Tenant

An anchor tenant is the first or largest customer that commits to a major share of a data center campus. It usually signs a long lease before or during construction, which lets the developer finance and build the rest. In AI campuses the anchor often takes most of the capacity: CoreWeave leases the entire 400 MW Polaris Forge 1 campus from Applied Digital under 15-year agreements. Anchor leases reduce vacancy risk and support debt at lower cost, but concentrate counterparty risk in one company; lenders look at the tenant's credit, take-or-pay terms and termination rights. Smaller colocation sites use the same idea at rack scale, with a carrier or cloud on-ramp drawing other networks in.