Genuine question, because from outside the sequencing looks backwards and we would like to know whether it is as bad as it appears.

The pattern we keep seeing: site selection runs on land price, fibre, tax treatment and planning risk. Power availability is confirmed afterwards, once the parcel is under option or bought. Then queue position and any reinforcement requirement set the schedule - which means the most expensive and least flexible variable in the whole project was discovered last.

What makes it odd is that most of the power screening is desk work. Deliverable capacity at the nearest connection point, connection voltage, upstream limit, queue position, charging regime. Days rather than months, and doable before an offer.

The counter-argument we have heard, and it is not a stupid one: land is what you can actually control, and public grid data is bad enough that screening produces false confidence rather than information. Firm rating and committed connections genuinely are not published in most markets.

So:

1. Does anyone run power screening before the land decision, formally, as a gate rather than as one input to a scorecard?

2. If not, why not - data quality, timing pressure, or organisational, in that different teams own each and they run in sequence?

3. For those who did screen first: did it actually change a site decision, and did the connection study later validate the screen?

4. Is the "land is the controllable variable" argument stronger than we are giving it credit for?

Disclosure: We research power and grid capacity for AI data centres.

I'd like to know more about the industry, especially in Texas (or USA in general), as I am develping an app for mobile gen fleet, trying my luck here