Forget The Bubble Talk: AI Tenants Are Bidding On Data Centers Before They’re Even Switched On

Key market indicators for the physical capacity AI continue to show strong demand even before it is switched on, according to leasing data. CBRE reports that more than 80% of North American data center capacity under construction is already pre-leased, up from 74% a year earlier and well above the 40% to 50% historical norm. In practice, CBRE’s research director says tenants are now bidding for capacity that hasn’t been delivered yet.

Singapore-based Bitdeer (NASDAQ: BTDR) shows what that looks like inside one company’s order book. In August, its AI cloud arm secured five-year offtake commitments for all of A102, a 9.5MW facility in Malaysia, representing more than $800 million in total expected revenue. The site is scheduled to energize in early 2027.

Then came A201, a 21.7MW liquid-cooled facility in Johor Bahru. On September 14, Bitdeer said talks on A201 were at an advanced stage. Fifteen days later, it announced offtake commitments covering more than 70% of the site, representing more than $1.7 billion in expected revenue over five years. That takes Bitdeer AI’s total expected AI cloud revenue backlog to approximately $2.9 billion. A201 is scheduled to energize in the first quarter of 2027.

Earlier in the month, Bitdeer had already secured A202, an additional 65.1MW on the same campus, under a 10-year data center services agreement. Energization is expected in the third quarter of 2027. It lifts Bitdeer AI’s secured AI cloud data center capacity to approximately 206.5MW, about 59% of its target of up to 350MW by the first quarter of 2028. Demand for liquid-cooled, rack-scale capacity in 2027, Chief Financial Officer Michael G. Potter said, is “running well ahead of what the market can supply.”

Some commitments run far longer. In August, Bitdeer announced a 16-year lease for its Tydal campus in Norway with a base contract value of approximately $4.7 billion. The tenant plans to fill 121MW of IT capacity with Nvidia GPUs for an unnamed AI lab.

Bitdeer says its GPU investment strategy follows contracted demand. The company says it develops capacity consistent with contracted demand and deploys GPU capital against executed contracts. It generally seeks customer prepayments covering more than half of the associated capital spending, alongside operating cash flow and financing secured against contracted cash flows. For A201, it has already procured more than 100 racks of Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems ahead of energization, and part of the site is designed for Nvidia’s next-generation Vera Rubin platform, which the company says lets one site serve customers across multiple platform generations.

Bitdeer is careful to separate what is contracted from what is under discussion. Its estimated active AI cloud pipeline has grown from more than $2 billion in mid-August to more than $10 billion by the end of September, and the company is explicit that this is management’s estimate of the potential value of deals under discussion, not backlog or revenue. Bitdeer AI expects to contract A202 ahead of energization, as it did with A102.

Preleasing does not settle the AI bubble debate. But Bitdeer’s recent agreements show customers committing to capacity before it comes online. The next test is delivering that capacity on schedule and converting those commitments into revenue and cash flow. The scarce asset is capacity with power already attached, and for now it is the customers doing the waiting.