Selling to Data Centers
US data center facilities operations spend ~$25-35B/year and growing 18-22% annually since 2023 (AI buildout). MRO portion ~$3-5B annually. Northern Virginia alone consumes ~25% of national data center power. Hyperscale capex tripled 2022-2025 ($150B → $450B+ projected 2026).
30-90 days for site-level chemistry approvals at colo; 6-18 months for national MSA at hyperscale; 90-180 days for enterprise on-prem; immediate for emergency/break-fix consumables once approved-vendor
$5K-$50K initial trial at site level; $100K-$2M annual recurring per site once approved; $1M-$10M+ for hyperscale national programs
Sub-segments inside Data Centers
Hyperscale Data Centers
100MW+ campuses; multi-building; 250K-1M+ sq ft per building. AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Meta — all build their own.
The big four (Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta) plus Oracle and Apple. They self-build at massive scale. National strategic-sourcing teams in Seattle, Mountain View, Redmond. Site-level Critical Facilities teams run day-to-day. AI training campuses in Virginia (Loudoun County), Phoenix, Columbus, Des Moines, Atlanta, Reno, San Antonio. Selling in requires either a national MSA or local strategic vendor approval at the site level.
Colocation Operators (Multi-Tenant)
Equinix (260+ data centers globally), Digital Realty (300+), CyrusOne (now KKR-owned), QTS (Blackstone), Iron Mountain Data Centers, Cyxtera, NTT, CoreSite, Aligned, Compass.
Operators lease cage and rack space to enterprise customers. Critical Facilities is the Operator's responsibility; cage interior is the customer's. Operators have national vendor programs (Anixter for cabling, ABM/JLL for facility services) but site-level Critical Facilities Managers have meaningful local discretion on consumables and chemistry. Equinix has the IBX network; Digital Realty has the PlatformDIGITAL portfolio.
Enterprise On-Prem Data Centers
Single-building or campus, owned and operated by financial services, telecom, healthcare, federal government, defense. Often 50K-500K sq ft.
Banks (JPM, BofA, Citi), telecom (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile central offices), healthcare systems (Epic-hosted), federal (Pentagon, DoD, IC). Slower buying motion, more relationship-driven, less appetite for new vendors than hyperscale. SOC 2 / FedRAMP / HIPAA compliance often dictates chemistry constraints.
Edge & Distributed Data Centers
Smaller distributed facilities (250 sq ft to 10K sq ft) at metro proximity for low-latency AI inference, CDN, 5G compute. EdgeConneX, Vapor IO, DataBank Edge, telecom-owned MDCs.
Fast-growing segment. Less specialized critical-facilities staffing — often 'smart hands' contracts with the operator. Buying tends to consolidate at the parent operator level.
MSP / Managed Hosting Data Centers
Rackspace, Lumen, Tierpoint, INAP, Flexential. Mid-tier facilities. Customer applications run inside; MSP runs the metal.
More similar to colo than hyperscale. National vendor programs but room for site-level relationships. Chemistry standards typically follow colocation playbook.
Key personas you'll meet
5 researched personas for Data Centers. Each one carries its own vocabulary, pain-point ranking, and discovery question bank — used to make every brief persona-specific.