Colocation

Overview

Colocation is the practice of placing computing hardware inside a facility owned and run by a specialist operator, who supplies the physical essentials, redundant power, cooling, security, and network connectivity, while the equipment itself remains under its owner's control. It sits between two extremes: building and running a private data center, which is enormously capital-intensive, and renting abstract cloud instances, where the hardware is entirely someone else's. Colocation keeps the hardware yours while outsourcing the building around it.

How it works

The operator provides the shell and everything that makes it habitable for machines: uninterruptible power with backup generation, cooling sized to the heat load, fire suppression, physical security, and multiple network carriers entering the building. Tenants install their servers into racks and pay for the space and, critically, the power they draw. For GPU deployments, power density is the deciding factor, since a single rack can demand many times what conventional servers do.

Why it matters

For a GPU cluster, the facility is not a detail but a prerequisite. The power feed, the cooling capacity, and the network all have to be engineered for sustained high-density load before a single GPU can run at its rating. Anchoring inside an established colocation campus means inheriting that proven infrastructure immediately, with the resilience and connectivity of a major facility, rather than spending years and a fortune reproducing it.