Data Center Feasibility Study in Maryland

A small-dollar loan class with an unusual concentration

Maryland holds eighth place among 52 states for data center loans, written 8 of 52 in the ranking, and a location quotient of 2.07x shows these businesses drawing about double their national weight in Maryland's SBA lending. At home the class stands 20 of 39, a specialty rather than a mainstream use. The 31 loans approved in FY2017 to FY2026 total $22.5 million, but the median loan is just $170,000, or 0.83x the national median for the class, with $97,300 to $1.0 million bracketing the central half. The typical loan is small, and a few large ones pull the dollar total up.

Who lends and where

Every one of the 31 loans was made under SBA 7(a), and none under SBA 504, so no loan in this record financed the kind of fixed real estate that program usually supports. No loan is franchised (0.00%). Manufacturers and Traders Trust Company holds 15 of the loans and $6.7 million, far ahead of any other lender in the cell. Montgomery County accounts for 11 loans and Howard County for 8, with Baltimore County at 4 and Anne Arundel at 3, a geography that tracks the Washington and Baltimore corridors. Annual approvals ranged from none in FY2019 to 7 in FY2025.

A coding limit that matters here

Colocation space cannot be told from hosting, and the code is shared with data processing firms. Many borrowers in this cell may therefore be small hosting or IT service firms rather than owners of a purpose-built facility. A reader should not equate a $170,000 median with the cost of a server hall. Maryland's cancellation and charge-off rates stay unprinted, as too few loans exist to publish them, and neither is reported as zero.

Tests for a Maryland facility

A study of a data center here has to separate the two businesses the code blends. For a facility, the study should test power: the utility capacity at the site, the cost and timing of an interconnection, and the cooling load. Tenant demand needs testing against the colocation and network competition in the region, the lease terms tenants will sign, and the construction or fit-out cost against a loan that SBA data suggest is usually modest. Debt service coverage should be run on contracted rather than hoped-for revenue, and the appraisal will treat specialised equipment and power infrastructure differently from the building shell.