Why two hundred kilowatts is the interesting number
The binding constraint on compute in Europe and the United States is not silicon and not capital. It is a grid connection, and the rules that govern one.
Ask what limits the build-out of computing capacity and you will usually be told chips, or capital. Both are real. Neither is what stops a specific project on a specific site.
What stops a specific project is a grid connection.
The rules are the constraint
The Netherlands limits hyperscale data centres to ten hectares, caps their grid connections at seventy megawatts, and admits new development in three regions only[src]. Amsterdam and Haarlemmermeer layered further municipal restrictions on top in December 2023, driven by a shortage of capacity rather than a shortage of interest[src].
In the United States the mechanism is different but the effect is the same. Large-load interconnection is set per state and per utility, and the queue is measured in years. The question is never whether the power exists in principle. It is whether this substation will connect this load this decade.
The threshold below the threshold
There is a second set of numbers worth knowing, because they mark where a deployment changes category administratively rather than physically.
Article 12 of the Energy Efficiency Directive obliges data centres at or above five hundred kilowatts of installed IT power to report annually[src], against a schema of twenty-four data points[src]. Below that, at Union level, nothing is owed — though Member States may lower the threshold and may not raise it[src].
Germany scopes its own requirements from three hundred kilowatts and attaches hard numbers to them: a Power Usage Effectiveness ceiling for new facilities from July 2026[src], and an Energy Reuse Factor rising from ten percent in 2026 to twenty in 2028[src].
Where that leaves twenty to two hundred
A system in that band does not need a new connection. It draws on capacity a building, a campus or an industrial site already holds. It does not trigger a large-load interconnection study. It does not require a rezoning conversation, a substation, or a five-year horizon.
It is installed rather than developed. That is a different verb, a different budget line, and a different set of people signing.
This is not an efficiency argument. We are not claiming a system in this band uses less energy per unit of work than a large facility — often it will not, and the honest reasons are well documented. The argument is narrower and harder to dispute: the large facility cannot be built here, and this can.
The part that is a choice
None of the above obliges anyone to measure anything below five hundred kilowatts. That is where most of the category stops, and where we deliberately do not.
The reporting schema is a good schema — the product of a long argument about what is actually worth knowing about a data centre. Being exempt from filing it is a poor reason to be unable to produce it. Our systems produce the full return at any size, with the measurement category printed beside every value[src].
A number you can reproduce is worth more than a number that flatters you.