The One Line Every AI Infrastructure Checklist Is Missing

The checklist has to start before land, not after.

The old checklist for an AI infrastructure deal ran: land, power contracts, hardware, financing. Roughly in that order.

The new checklist has to start earlier. Before land. Before hardware. Queue position, verified, not asserted.

Here’s why the old order breaks down. Land, power contracts, and hardware are all things a good lawyer and a good term sheet can paper over, restructure, or insure against. Queue position can’t be papered over. It’s a physical, adjudicated fact about grid capacity, decided by a utility or ISO on a timeline that nobody at the closing table controls, no matter how good the lawyers are.

I’ve sat in diligence calls where queue position came up as a footnote, if it came up at all, buried after twenty minutes on financing structure. That ordering isn’t an accident. It’s what happens when a checklist gets built for a world where interconnection wasn’t the binding constraint, and nobody’s gone back to rewrite it for the world we’re actually in now.

And it’s the variable everyone quietly assumes away. Sponsors assume their project clears because the last one did, or because a developer said so, or because a deck says “Q3 2026 energization” with no footnote explaining what that’s actually conditioned on. Assumed-away risk is still risk. It’s just risk nobody’s put a number on.

2,300-plus gigawatts is stuck in queues today. If your diligence process doesn’t have a specific line item asking exactly where a project sits in that queue, and exactly what’s required to clear it, you don’t have a diligence process for this asset class. You have a diligence process for a different one, one where physical grid capacity wasn’t the scarce resource, and you’re applying it to a market where it is.

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