A data center tenant can negotiate its lease price without negotiating the electricity economics underneath it. That distinction is becoming more consequential as utilities introduce new tariffs, demand charges, and infrastructure requirements for large loads, and 2026 securities filings show how those costs can move from operator to enterprise customer.
Csquare, Inc.'s 2026 SEC filing breaks its data center contracts into two categories: bundled all-in agreements and metered-power agreements. As of March 31, all-in contracts represented about 70.6% of the company's portfolio recurring revenue. Yet the filing states that substantially all of those all-in contracts still contained mechanisms allowing power costs to move, including power indexation, utility-rate pass-throughs, and extraordinary-cost adjustment clauses. The filing is direct about why: the company says its own exposure to utility-rate volatility is significantly reduced through its ability to pass power costs to customers. The operator, in short, has moved the risk rather than eliminated it.
What "All-In" Actually Covers
A separate May 2026 colocation and master services agreement between Digi Power X Inc. and Cerebras Systems Inc., filed with the SEC, shows what that transfer looks like in contract language. The 40-megawatt agreement runs for an initial 10-year term and prices the base colocation fee as all-in, including delivered power, as of the effective date. But Section 6.8 carves out certain future electricity-related costs, including new or increased demand, capacity, and transmission and distribution charges, along with specified government assessments, invoiced separately once the operator documents the increase. The contract excludes ordinary commodity-price swings from that provision; only discrete new or increased governmental and regulatory charges qualify. The fee is fixed at signing, but the pass-through provision reaches across a full decade, capturing charges introduced years after the contract is executed. A lease that includes electricity is not the same as a lease that fixes electricity costs for its entire term.
Why This Matters More Now
Utilities are changing how they treat enormous data center loads. Minimum-take requirements, infrastructure contributions, and special large-load tariffs are increasingly being adopted to keep the cost of serving new capacity from falling on other ratepayers. Those utility obligations generally arise upstream of the enterprise tenant, and the colocation agreement then determines which costs the operator keeps and which it passes along. An enterprise evaluating colocation capacity needs to understand not just the operator's quoted rate but the utility territory underneath the facility and which future utility costs the lease allows the operator to pass through. The risk moves in a chain, from utility to data center operator to enterprise tenant, and the terms utilities are now attaching to large loads determine how much of that chain reaches the tenant's own budget.
Diligence Has Not Caught Up
Enterprise data center diligence traditionally covers uptime, redundancy, cybersecurity, latency, physical security, and price, and power availability has increasingly joined that list as capacity has tightened. Power contract exposure is a different diligence question, one that can be easy to miss when electricity is bundled into the quoted colocation rate. The EPA's ENERGY STAR guidance for colocation tenants specifically recommends determining how power is accounted for in lease rates, whether the tenant pays for capacity or actual consumption, and whether power procurement is addressed at all in the service agreement. EPA also notes plainly that energy efficiency and power procurement requirements typically are not included in a colocation lease unless the tenant asks for them. That gap is where the diligence belongs: which utility serves the facility, what tariff applies, who bears future tariff changes, whether demand and capacity charges are fixed or passed through, who pays new transmission or distribution costs, whether power is indexed and whether any cap limits the adjustment, and what happens if the utility rewrites the rules years into a ten-year commitment.
There is a sustainability dimension too. In many colocation arrangements, the enterprise consuming the computing capacity is not the party directly procuring the facility's electricity, and that separation is part of a broader set of power-management questions enterprise buyers are only beginning to formalize in colocation arrangements. That can leave a tenant financially exposed to power costs while retaining limited control over the sourcing decisions behind them, a problem that touches finance, IT, and sustainability functions at once.
The Power Terms Belong in the Underwriting
For enterprise buyers, the data center lease is no longer just a real estate or IT infrastructure agreement. It can also determine who bears the financial consequences of utility decisions made years after the contract is signed, which makes the power provisions part of the underwriting rather than an afterthought to it. The question is no longer simply what a megawatt of colocation capacity costs when the lease is signed, but what can change that cost over the next five or ten years, and who has already agreed to pay when it does.
