Build-to-suit (BTS)

Build-to-suit (BTS) is a development model in which a data center developer constructs a facility to a specific tenant's requirements — location, capacity, density, cooling technology, and security specs — under a long-term lease signed before or during construction. The tenant, usually a hyperscaler or large GPU cloud provider, gets a custom facility without deploying its own construction capital; the developer gets a committed anchor tenant that de-risks financing, typically on 10-15+ year triple-net leases. BTS contrasts with speculative development, where capacity is built first and leased later. In today's supply-constrained market with North American vacancy under 2%, most large-scale development is effectively BTS or heavily preleased, and BTS deals for AI capacity frequently exceed 100 MW per campus.