TierPoint Spokane and the economics of redundant distance

The first bill arrives before the first cabinet

TierPoint Spokane should be valued first as a cost stack, not as a logo on a map. Before a customer rents a cabinet, cross-connects a circuit or signs a disaster-recovery agreement, the operator has already committed to utility service, switchgear, generators, fuel storage, cooling, building security, remote hands, compliance audits, carrier access, and the labor needed to keep a regional facility credible at 3 a.m. The useful question is therefore not whether Spokane is glamorous. It is whether Liberty Lake can make power, cooling, interconnection and distance cheap enough, reliable enough and auditable enough to justify keeping enterprise workloads outside the Seattle core.

The local power reference is concrete. Avista's Washington Schedule 25 for extra-large general service applies to customers with demand of at least 3,000 kVA, requires a five-year or longer written contract, and lists energy charges of 5.745 cents per kWh for the first 500,000 kWh, 5.160 cents for the next 5.5 million kWh and 4.211 cents above 6 million kWh, with a monthly demand charge of $47,891 for the first 3,000 kVA and $12.98 per additional kVA (https://www.myavista.com/-/media/myavista/content-documents/our-rates-and-tariffs/wa/wa_025.pdf). Schedule 25A then lists an annual minimum of $1,177,388. That is not TierPoint's bill, and it should not be treated as a disclosed facility cost. It is the right kind of public benchmark, however: a tariff that shows how quickly a data-center electricity discussion moves from a headline cents-per-kWh number to demand charges, transformer responsibility, contract duration and minimum annual commitment.

The broader state benchmark supports the same reading. In the U.S. Energy Information Administration's April 2026 table, Washington's average industrial electricity price was 7.01 cents per kWh, while the commercial average was 11.74 cents (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a). California's industrial average in the same table was 19.87 cents and its commercial average was 25.75 cents. A Spokane data center is not paid simply for being in Washington, but the spread explains why eastern Washington can be part of a West Coast continuity plan. If a customer needs a secondary environment away from Puget Sound, the buyer sees distance, lower-cost regional power, and a service provider with a national sales channel rather than a bare warehouse in a smaller market.

TierPoint's own Spokane page gives the facility surface that sits on top of that cost stack. SPO01/02 at 23403 E. Mission Avenue in Liberty Lake is listed with 32,000-plus total square feet and 21,000-plus square feet of raised floor; SPO03 at 23017 E. Mission Avenue is listed with 16,500-plus total square feet and 9,900-plus square feet of raised floor (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/washington/spokane/). The same page says the Spokane data centers connect to TierPoint's Seattle data center and other TierPoint data centers over a 100 Gb backbone, and describes Spokane as more than 250 miles from major cities in a region with low natural-disaster risk. Those numbers make the business intelligible: roughly 48,500 square feet of total Liberty Lake building surface, roughly 30,900 square feet of raised-floor surface, and a sales thesis based on redundant distance rather than metropolitan density.

The capital intensity is visible in the resilience claims. TierPoint says SPO01/02 has A-side and B-side power distribution, four 1.25 MW and six 800 kW redundant generators with at least 48 hours of runtime, and a 100 percent uptime SLA; it says SPO03 has A-side and B-side power distribution, two 2.5 MW redundant generators with at least 48 hours of runtime, and the same SLA (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/washington/spokane/). That is 14.8 MW of listed generator nameplate across the two Spokane entries, although generator nameplate is not IT load and should not be confused with sellable critical capacity. The economic point is narrower and stronger: redundancy is purchased long before revenue is recognized. Diesel, UPS, security, audits, cooling and support capacity are not decorative; they are the inventory a regional colocation provider sells.

A 2019 data-center acquisition report puts a separate real-estate price beside one of the two Liberty Lake addresses. Five 9s Digital's End of Year 2019 acquisition report lists a "TierPoint Data Center" at 23017 E Mission Ave, Liberty Lake, WA, with 16,500 square feet, a $6 million December 2019 transaction price, $364 per square foot, TierPoint as the single tenant, 12.4 years remaining on the lease, and a 6.65 percent cap rate (https://assets.ctfassets.net/o03ihmgd94o7/5YHhGB6rcJqmAm7uQuD3Zl/e680ebdc9fe08051f863bac527d74285/2019_EOY_Data_Center_Acquisitions_Report_copy.pdf). Broker reports are market signals rather than public deeds, but the figures are useful. A 6.65 percent cap rate on $6 million implies roughly $399,000 of annual net operating income as valued by that report, before buyer-specific financing and assumptions. Set that beside Avista's extra-large-service annual minimum and the lesson is plain: for a data-center building, real-estate income, power procurement and customer contract duration are part of one underwriting problem.

That is the governing argument. TierPoint Spokane is not a miniature version of Ashburn. It is a regional continuity asset whose margin depends on converting Liberty Lake's cost and geography into a reliable alternative to the places where customers already concentrate risk.

Identity is clearer than the original clues suggest

The public identity of TierPoint Spokane is stronger than a sparse network clue would imply. TierPoint itself identifies the Spokane data centers, the two Liberty Lake addresses, the facility specifications, the compliance posture and the service portfolio (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/washington/spokane/). PeeringDB lists "TierPoint Spokane" as facility 500, owned by TierPoint, LLC, at 23403 E Mission Ave, Liberty Lake, with the TierPoint website, latitude/longitude, 13 networks, two internet exchanges and one carrier in the PeeringDB facility fields as retrieved on July 3, 2026 (https://www.peeringdb.com/fac/500). ARIN's RDAP record for AS17378 lists TierPoint, LLC as the registrant, with the autonomous system registered on August 24, 2000 and last changed in 2018 (https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/17378). ARIN's organization record for TL-801 lists TierPoint, LLC at 12444 Powerscourt Drive, Suite 450, St. Louis, Missouri, with an update date of July 23, 2024 (https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/TL-801.json).

The older AS7181 clue is also real but not the center of the story. ARIN RDAP lists AS7181, named AS-TIERP-7181, as registered to TierPoint, LLC, with a 1996 registration date and a 2017 last-change date (https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/7181). PeeringDB's AS7181 page names "Tierpoint 7181", gives the TierPoint website, lists 1,000 IPv4 prefixes and 300 IPv6 prefixes in its self-reported fields, and shows a heavy-inbound North America scope, but the same record has no active exchange LAN entries (https://www.peeringdb.com/net/10351). The more current public routing surface for the broader TierPoint network is AS17378, which PeeringDB lists as "TierPoint LLC", with a 200-300Gbps traffic level, balanced traffic, open policy, 13 exchanges, 52 facilities, 3,000 IPv4 prefixes and 500 IPv6 prefixes in the PeeringDB fields (https://www.peeringdb.com/net/3064). The Spokane analysis should therefore treat AS7181 as an identity and legacy-resource signal, while leaning on AS17378, the facility record and TierPoint's own data-center pages for current operating evidence.

The ownership history explains why a Spokane facility sits inside a national platform. In May 2012, Thompson Street Capital Partners, Charterhouse Group and Cequel III announced the acquisition of TierPoint, LLC, describing TierPoint as a Pacific Northwest provider of colocation, internet connectivity, managed services, cloud and disaster-recovery services operating three premium facilities in Spokane with more than 30,000 square feet of data-center space (https://www.tscp.com/news/thompson-street-capital-partners-charterhouse-group-and-cequel-iii-continue-data-center-platform-expansion-with-the-acquisition-of-tierpoint-llc/). The Spokesman-Review reported the same week that TierPoint in Liberty Lake was the Spokane area's largest data center, that the deal involved Cequel Data Centers, and that the campus had more than 30,000 square feet of data-center space and almost 4.4 MW of power at the time (https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/may/22/tierpoint-data-center-sold/).

That early Spokane asset was not swallowed and forgotten; it helped name the roll-up. Data Center Knowledge later described TierPoint as a secondary-market data-center platform, noting that when Cequel acquired the Spokane facilities in 2012, it chose to rebrand its data-center products and services as TierPoint, and that the three Spokane facilities lifted the platform from 70,000 to 100,000 square feet (https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/business/how-tierpoint-quietly-built-a-data-center-empire-in-secondary-markets). RedBird Capital's 2014 recapitalization announcement said the company then offered colocation, managed services and cloud computing through six WAN-connected data centers in Dallas, Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Spokane, Seattle and Baltimore, and that the combined company had been rebranded as TierPoint in July 2013 (https://redbirdcap.com/management-investor-group-announce-acquisition-of-tierpoint/).

This matters because TierPoint Spokane is not only a local building. It is a local building inside a national managed-infrastructure seller. The buyer is not asked to believe that Liberty Lake alone can out-compete Seattle, Ashburn or Phoenix. The buyer is asked to believe that a national provider can use Liberty Lake as a resilient regional node where distance, power, staff and compliance fill a role that a pure hyperscale region or downtown carrier hotel does not fill as neatly.

The product is distance, wrapped in operations

The strongest product claim on TierPoint's Spokane page is not a single server feature. It is the claim that Spokane is connected to Seattle and other TierPoint data centers by a 100 Gb backbone while sitting more than 250 miles from major cities (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/washington/spokane/). That is a disaster-recovery sentence disguised as a location sentence. A Seattle-area customer can read it as: far enough away to avoid putting primary and secondary environments in the same urban risk envelope, close enough to keep operational control, support visits and latency within a familiar regional corridor.

TierPoint's Washington page sharpens the same pitch. It says the Washington data-center footprint spans more than 48,500 square feet combined, references Seattle and Spokane locations, describes seismic-zone compliance, mentions a multitenant cloud pod, and says the facilities enable communication between the carrier hotels at The Westin in Seattle and 422 W Riverside in Spokane (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/washington/). The Westin Building in Seattle is not just a landmark; it is a carrier-dense interconnection reference. By linking Spokane to that corridor, TierPoint is positioning Liberty Lake as a continuity and edge-colocation complement to the coastal hub rather than as a substitute for it.

The service portfolio fits that positioning. TierPoint's data-center overview says its 40 world-class data centers are connected coast to coast and support colocation, disaster recovery, managed hosting and cloud services, with carrier-neutral connectivity and direct connections to cloud providers (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/). Its colocation page sells SLA-guaranteed 100 percent uptime across a network of 40 colocation data centers and frames the value proposition around offloading capacity, security, performance and management overhead (https://www.tierpoint.com/services/data-center-services/colocation-services/). Its DRaaS page states the business-continuity case directly: disaster-recovery tools have to work when needed, and the underlying data centers are built with physical redundancies to support 100 percent uptime (https://www.tierpoint.com/services/it-disaster-recovery-services/draas/).

Those claims are marketing claims, but they line up with the economics. Colocation alone can become a commodity if all the provider sells is a rack and a power whip. Managed colocation with disaster recovery, remote hands, security, compliance, cloud connectivity and local staff is more defensible because the customer's switching cost rises with every operational dependency. A cabinet can move. A production recovery process, audit history, access routine, remote-hands practice and network design are harder to move.

Spokane's role in that model is not scale maximalism. It is a controlled alternative. A buyer with a headquarters, customer base or application dependency in the Pacific Northwest might not want its secondary environment in the same dense Seattle market. It might also not want the latency, travel and operating unfamiliarity of a distant desert campus. Spokane gives the buyer a third choice: outside the coastal concentration, inside the same regional operating culture, and attached to a provider that can sell the local node as part of a national footprint.

Interconnection records make the campus more than a powered room

The public interconnection evidence does not prove customer count or revenue, but it does show that TierPoint Spokane is not merely a powered shell. PeeringDB's facility record lists TierPoint Spokane with 13 networks and two internet exchanges (https://www.peeringdb.com/fac/500). PeeringDB's SpokaneIX page says participants can connect at the US Bank Building or TierPoint SPO, and lists TierPoint Spokane as one of the exchange's facilities (https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/3090). SpokaneIX's own locations page names TierPoint Spokane at 23403 E Mission Ave, Liberty Lake, says all switches have 1/10/25G and 40/100G ports available, and says inter-switch links use dark and wave capacity with diverse 100G minimums (https://spokaneix.net/locations.html).

The exchange peer page adds a historical but useful local routing clue. SpokaneIX lists TierPoint on AS30340, at 206.83.139.7 and 2001:504:9f::7, at the LBLK location, with 10G speed, route-server use and an open policy (https://spokaneix.net/peers.html). PeeringDB's AS30340 page says that AS30340 has been migrated to AS17378 and asks active IX peers to move to AS17378 (https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1787). The clean interpretation is that SpokaneIX's public page still carries the older AS30340 presentation, while TierPoint's main PeeringDB routing identity has moved to AS17378. That is not a defect in the article's evidence; it is the sort of migration residue that often appears in public exchange data.

SeattleIX gives the other half of the corridor. Its participant JSON, current to a July 3, 2026 timestamp, lists TierPoint as AS17378, an active member since 2007, with two active 10G Seattle connections and IPv4/IPv6 addresses 206.81.80.59, 206.81.80.20, 2001:504:16::43e2 and 2001:504:16::20:0:43e2 (https://www.seattleix.net/autogen/participants.json). That does not mean Spokane workloads necessarily traverse SeattleIX, and it should not be overstated as customer evidence. It does support the broader product claim: TierPoint's Pacific Northwest story includes both Spokane and Seattle exchange surfaces, not just a static facility listing.

TierPoint also announced in 2020 that Megaport's software-defined interconnection services had expanded into seven more TierPoint data centers, including Spokane, giving clients access to Network-as-a-Service connectivity from that facility set (https://www.tierpoint.com/news/with-latest-expansion-megaport-now-available-in-15-tierpoint-data-centers/). For a regional data center, that type of cloud-connectivity option matters because the customer may not be choosing between private colocation and public cloud. It may be trying to run a hybrid pattern where some workloads stay in a controlled rack, some services live in cloud regions, and recovery depends on the ability to move traffic without rebuilding the network every time the business changes.

This is why the routing and exchange evidence matters even though it is not a customer list. A regional colocation facility without exchange access can still host cabinets, but its value is more local and less strategic. A regional facility with exchange access, a national ASN, software-defined interconnection and a Seattle corridor claim can sell a more complicated promise: not just "put equipment here", but "put dependency here and still reach the rest of your operating world."

Cooling and support turn geography into margin

Cooling is where Liberty Lake's geography becomes operational rather than rhetorical. The 2012 Spokesman-Review article said TierPoint's third data-center building had pioneered the use of geothermal cooling water to control building heat (https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/may/22/tierpoint-data-center-sold/). TierPoint's current Spokane page does not build its public pitch around that historical claim; it emphasizes power distribution, generator runtime, compliance and remote hands. The older cooling reference should therefore be read as part of the campus history, not as a verified current design. Still, it points to the right issue: in a smaller regional market, cooling efficiency can matter as much as sales coverage.

The current public facility sheet for 23403 E. Mission Avenue says the site has diverse points of entry, MDFs and IDFs, 24x7x365 on-site support, UPS redundant systems, N+1 redundancy on HVAC units, monitoring of HVAC and electrical systems, 21,000-plus square feet of gross production data-center space, exterior loading dock and staging/receiving space (https://web.tierpoint.com/hubfs/data-center/wa-spokane-data-center-spec-sheet.pdf). These are mundane details, and that is why they matter. A customer does not renew because a data-center brochure says "cloud." It renews because freight, access, staged equipment, remote hands, electrical monitoring and cooling discipline are reliable enough that the customer's own staff can stop worrying about the basics.

The compliance list reinforces the same margin logic. TierPoint's Spokane page says the facilities are audited under SOC 1 Type II, SOC 2 Type II, SOC 2 + HITRUST, GLBA, HIPAA, PCI-DSS and NIST SP 800-53 annually, are ISO 27001 certified, and are ITAR and Data Privacy Framework registered (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/washington/spokane/). Compliance does not prove operational excellence. It does create procurement value for customers in healthcare, finance, public-sector, SaaS and professional-services environments that cannot simply rent un-audited space from the cheapest local host. The more regulated the customer's own stack, the more valuable it is to buy from a provider whose facility paperwork fits the audit folder.

This is also where support labor becomes a pricing lever. A regional data center can lose margin if every small request consumes scarce local technicians. It can gain margin if 24x7 remote hands, documented access control and disciplined escalation are priced into a broader managed-services relationship. Gartner Peer Insights shows a 4.8 rating from 10 TierPoint colocation ratings and includes a February 2026 review praising power, cooling, connectivity and 24-hour staff help (https://www.gartner.com/reviews/product/tierpoint-data-center-colocation-services). That is only a review sample, not audited uptime. As a market signal, it identifies the value customers claim to feel: fewer worries about the fundamentals and a human team available for physical tasks.

The negative signals point to the other side of the same model. Cloudtango lists TierPoint at 3.6 from eight reviews and includes complaints about billing, extra fees, power overages, cancellation friction and data-center-to-data-center notices, alongside positive customer statements about support, reliability and managed infrastructure (https://www.cloudtango.net/providers/6907/tierpoint). Trustpilot shows a thin TierPoint profile, with three reviews and a 2.8 TrustScore as retrieved on July 3, 2026, and warns that it does not fact-check specific review claims (https://www.trustpilot.com/review/tierpoint.com). These are not facts about Spokane facility performance. They are buyer-side signals about what can hurt a managed colocation provider: not only outages, but perceived billing opacity, power commitments and contract administration.

That mixed signal is economically useful. TierPoint Spokane's revenue likely depends on selling more than wholesale power and floor space. But the more it sells bundles, the more the customer judges contracts, support process, overage handling and exit mechanics as part of the infrastructure. The facility can be technically strong and still lose goodwill if customers feel the commercial wrap is too hard to predict.

The revenue logic is regional, not generic

TierPoint does not publish simple public cabinet pricing for Spokane. That absence is itself revealing. The product is quote-driven because the economic unit is not just a rack; it is space, power density, cross-connects, remote-hands assumptions, backup design, cloud-connectivity options, compliance requirements, contract term and the amount of managed service the customer wants wrapped around the hardware. A cheap list price would not tell the real story, because two customers in the same building can consume very different amounts of power, support labor, network capacity and audit overhead.

The public clues do allow a reasonable revenue model. SPO01/02 offers cabinets and cages across 21,000-plus square feet of raised floor; SPO03 offers cabinets and cages across 9,900-plus square feet of raised floor (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/washington/spokane/). The 2019 report's $6 million transaction for 23017 E Mission Ave indicates that at least one Spokane building had enough single-tenant lease value to be sold as a data-center real-estate income asset with a 12.4-year lease term (https://assets.ctfassets.net/o03ihmgd94o7/5YHhGB6rcJqmAm7uQuD3Zl/e680ebdc9fe08051f863bac527d74285/2019_EOY_Data_Center_Acquisitions_Report_copy.pdf). TierPoint's service pages then show how the operator tries to lift revenue above real-estate rent: colocation, disaster recovery, cloud, managed hosting, security, advisory and remote operations (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/).

The buyer's willingness to pay comes from avoided failure, not from Spokane prestige. A regional bank, hospital, SaaS company, public agency, manufacturer or professional-services firm may not want to build a second site, staff it, certify it, maintain generators, negotiate multiple carriers and prove disaster-recovery readiness to auditors. If TierPoint can supply that bundle in Liberty Lake and connect it into Seattle and a national network, the customer is buying insurance, operational continuity and procurement simplicity. That is a better margin story than "Spokane has racks."

Customer dependency is therefore more subtle than a public logo list. The 2012 Spokesman-Review report named regional customers at the time, including banks and Northwest companies, but those names are historical and should not be treated as a current customer roster (https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/may/22/tierpoint-data-center-sold/). What matters now is the type of dependency a facility like Spokane can create. Once a customer has built recovery procedures, firewall rules, carrier handoffs, access permissions, backup windows, audit evidence, remote-hands habits and cloud-connectivity paths around a specific site, the monthly contract is no longer only a real-estate payment. It becomes embedded operating memory. That is why managed colocation providers often defend revenue through process familiarity as much as through square footage. It is also why dissatisfied customers complain loudly about billing and contract terms: the harder it is to move, the more every surprise charge feels like an infrastructure risk rather than an ordinary vendor dispute.

The cost side is less forgiving. Power is the largest visible operating input, but not the only one. Cooling, diesel runtime, UPS refresh, security staff, compliance audits, sales engineering, customer success, network engineering, insurance, property costs and taxes all sit under the monthly invoice. Avista's Schedule 21 for large general service, one tier below extra-large service, lists 8.338 cents per kWh for the first 250,000 kWh, 7.431 cents above that, a $900 demand charge for the first 50 kW and $10 per additional kW, plus a five-year contract requirement (https://www.myavista.com/-/media/myavista/content-documents/our-rates-and-tariffs/wa/wa_021.pdf). The tariff step between Schedule 21 and Schedule 25 shows the commercial cliff a growing load can cross: once demand gets large enough, the negotiation becomes less about retail power and more about long-term utility capacity.

That matters for customer segmentation. A small tenant buying one cabinet may be priced mostly on standard colocation economics. A larger customer with higher density, cloud connectivity, recovery testing and managed services consumes a different cost envelope. A very large AI or HPC load would be different again and could overwhelm the regional continuity value proposition if utility service, water, permitting or community politics became the main constraint. TierPoint Spokane's likely sweet spot is not the most power-hungry hyperscale buyer. It is the enterprise customer that values distance, compliance and support more than raw megawatt scale.

Avista's large-load debate changes the local risk premium

Spokane's power advantage is no longer a quiet background fact. In June 2026, Avista confirmed that a potential large-load customer in its Washington service territory was a data-center developer, with local reporting describing a 125 MW starting request in 2029 and potential expansion to 500 MW by 2032 (https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jun/09/avista-confirms-negotiations-with-company-seeking-/). Avista then said on June 12, 2026 that it was pausing negotiations concerning energy service to the potential 500 MW data-center development after community interest and concern, and that such projects require broader coordinated planning because no single entity decides whether a project proceeds (https://investor.avistacorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/avista-pauses-processing-energy-service-request-500-mw-data).

This is not evidence about TierPoint's Spokane load. It is evidence about the political and utility environment around data centers in the same region. Avista's own data-center information page says some data centers can consume as little as 5-10 MW, while larger projects can use several hundred MW or even a gigawatt; it says Avista's peak electric usage is just under 2,000 MW and average hourly use is about 1,000 MW; and it says current customers remain the priority and large-load customers would pay costs to serve them rather than shifting costs to existing customers (https://www.myavista.com/about-us/data-centers-and-energy). That page, published after the June controversy, is a public attempt to define the rules of large-load legitimacy.

For TierPoint Spokane, the risk is not that the campus is suddenly a hyperscale project. The risk is that the word "data center" now carries a regional ratepayer and water-use charge that did not feel as politically sharp a decade ago. A smaller, existing, compliance-oriented colocation campus can benefit from being much less dramatic than a 500 MW proposal. It can also be asked harder questions because local residents and regulators now understand that data centers consume power, require infrastructure, use diesel backup and can alter utility planning.

Tax policy adds another layer. The Washington Department of Revenue says a retail sales and use tax exemption is available for qualifying businesses and tenants that operate data centers, covering eligible server equipment, power infrastructure, and labor and services for installing eligible power infrastructure (https://dor.wa.gov/forms-publications/publications-subject/tax-topics/data-centers-sales-and-use-tax-exemption-eligibility). But Washington's SB 6231, now Chapter 266 of the 2026 laws, is described by the state bill summary as removing a tax exemption for replacement equipment for data centers (https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=6231&Initiative=false&Year=2025). The practical effect is that greenfield or original equipment may still have a different tax treatment from replacement or refurbishment cycles, but established data centers face a more contested refresh economics environment.

That is important for older facilities. Data centers are not one-time builds. Servers refresh, UPS systems age, cooling systems are upgraded, security systems are replaced and power infrastructure needs attention. If tax treatment becomes less favorable for replacement equipment or refurbishment, the burden falls more heavily on operational campuses than on pure land-option speculation. A buyer underwriting TierPoint Spokane would therefore ask not only whether the buildings exist and the power is cheap, but how Washington tax law affects the next refresh and whether utility planning can support customer growth without provoking a local rate debate.

Competition comes from three directions

TierPoint Spokane faces local, regional and national substitutes at once. Locally, SpokaneIX itself shows that TierPoint SPO is one of several interconnection points, not the only place to connect. Its locations page lists the US Bank Building, IonSwitch in Coeur d'Alene and TierPoint Spokane, with shared switch capacity and diverse inter-switch links (https://spokaneix.net/locations.html). Its peers page lists networks such as Ptera, Cubed Networks, Ting Fiber, Syringa Networks, Hurricane Electric, IonSwitch, NoaNet and Fatbeam alongside TierPoint (https://spokaneix.net/peers.html). A customer that primarily wants local connectivity has choices.

Neutron is a direct local comparison. Its public site describes Neutron as Spokane's premier data center and colocation provider, offering full colocation services, ultra-secure unescorted access, remote hands, and telecom/data-center consulting, design and implementation (https://www.neutronllc.net/). Its about page says the facility is in the historic Old National Bank Building, now the U.S. Bank building, and calls the location Spokane's "telco-hotel" (https://www.neutronllc.net/about/). That makes Neutron a downtown carrier-density alternative, especially for customers whose primary need is Spokane central-business-district access rather than a larger Liberty Lake managed-services campus.

IonSwitch is the cross-border local substitute. Its CDA01 page describes an owned and operated facility at 600 W Appleway Ave in Coeur d'Alene, with camera coverage, remote monitoring, access-control systems, proximity card and PIN controls, and colocation services (https://www.ionswitch.com/datacenter). IonSwitch's homepage advertises colocation starting at $49 per month and positions the facility in the Inland Northwest (https://www.ionswitch.com/). That is a different buyer segment from a quote-driven TierPoint disaster-recovery relationship, but it still matters: local developers, smaller businesses and price-sensitive infrastructure users can compare Spokane and Coeur d'Alene options before they ever speak to a national provider.

The regional substitute is Seattle. Seattle has deeper carrier density, more cloud-adjacent talent, and stronger brand familiarity for West Coast technical teams. TierPoint's own Washington page references Seattle carrier hotels and its Seattle data center alongside Spokane (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/washington/). That is both an advantage and a constraint. Spokane's best value is not replacing Seattle for every use case. It is complementing Seattle when the customer wants separation. If the customer needs the richest interconnection market, Seattle wins. If the customer wants operational distance but still wants a familiar provider and corridor, Spokane becomes more attractive.

The national substitute is cloud and hyperscale colocation. AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Equinix, Digital Realty, Flexential, QTS, CoreSite and regional colocation firms can all be relevant depending on workload. TierPoint's defense is not to claim global scale. It is to sell a hybrid managed pattern for enterprises that still own physical infrastructure, need recovery runbooks, dislike hyperscale egress economics, have compliance requirements, or want a human team close enough to touch the machines. That market is smaller than hyperscale cloud. It can still be durable because legacy enterprise infrastructure does not disappear just because cloud regions exist.

What a buyer or lender would underwrite

A buyer, lender, acquirer, large customer or regulator would pay for the operating proof, not the headline. They would value the 30,900-plus square feet of raised-floor surface, the generator and UPS evidence, the Seattle/Spokane backbone story, the AS17378 and exchange records, the 2019 single-tenant lease signal at 23017 E Mission Ave, the compliance certifications, and the ability to sell colocation, cloud connectivity, DRaaS and managed services from the same campus. They would discount or refuse to underwrite unsupported claims about current utilization, actual IT load, customer concentration, power contract terms, cooling efficiency, SLA-credit history, carrier mix by building, and capex required after Washington's replacement-equipment tax change. The proof they would demand is prosaic: utility bills or contracts, one-line electrical diagrams, generator maintenance records, customer churn, revenue by service line, real cross-connect counts, audit reports, lease documents, service credits, and a clear answer on how much growth Avista can support without creating community or ratepayer opposition.

That paragraph is intentionally practical. The public evidence is enough to establish a real facility operator and a coherent economic role. It is not enough to value the asset like a private lender would value it. The public record can show power tariff structure, building addresses, raised-floor scale, exchange presence, historic acquisition logic and customer-review signals. It cannot show the current margin per cabinet, the actual occupied cabinets, the density per hall, the mix of colocation versus managed cloud revenue, or whether Spokane customers are sticky because they love the service or because moving is painful.

The one fact that would most change the judgement

The one fact that would most change the judgement is current contracted critical load by building, paired with utilization and customer tenure. If SPO01/02 and SPO03 are lightly used, TierPoint Spokane becomes mainly an option-value story: a real campus with power and network surface waiting for the right regional customers. If they are highly utilized on long-term enterprise contracts with moderate density, the campus becomes a steady cash-flow and continuity asset. If they are increasingly demanded by high-density workloads, the thesis changes again because power, cooling and utility politics become more important than regional disaster-recovery positioning.

The next-best facts would be the current Avista service arrangement, actual power usage, cross-connect count by carrier, Megaport utilization, incident history, and the status of the 23017 E Mission Avenue lease after the 2019 report's 12.4-year remaining term. Those facts are not public in a reusable form. Without them, the right judgement is neither skepticism for its own sake nor acceptance of every vendor claim. It is a guarded positive view: the public evidence supports TierPoint Spokane as a real and strategically useful regional colocation campus, but the margin quality remains private.

Public evidence register

TierPoint's Spokane data-center page supports the core facility facts: the two Liberty Lake addresses, 32,000-plus and 16,500-plus total square feet, 21,000-plus and 9,900-plus raised-floor space, redundant generator claims, 48-hour runtime, 100 percent uptime SLA, compliance list, 24x7 support and the 100 Gb backbone to Seattle (https://www.tierpoint.com/data-centers/washington/spokane/).

The TierPoint 23403 E. Mission Avenue facility PDF supports more granular SPO01/02 physical details, including production data-center space, on-site support, diverse points of entry, UPS redundancy, N+1 HVAC and building support areas (https://web.tierpoint.com/hubfs/data-center/wa-spokane-data-center-spec-sheet.pdf).

The Avista Schedule 25 and Schedule 21 tariff PDFs support the local power-cost frame: extra-large and large-service energy charges, demand charges, five-year contract requirements and annual minimum logic (https://www.myavista.com/-/media/myavista/content-documents/our-rates-and-tariffs/wa/wa_025.pdf and https://www.myavista.com/-/media/myavista/content-documents/our-rates-and-tariffs/wa/wa_021.pdf).

The EIA April 2026 table supports the Washington electricity-price comparison used to explain why eastern Washington can be attractive for data-center continuity relative to higher-cost coastal markets (https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.php?t=epmt_5_6_a).

PeeringDB, SpokaneIX and SeattleIX support the network and interconnection reading: TierPoint Spokane as facility 500, SpokaneIX's TierPoint location and AS30340 peer line, AS30340's migration note to AS17378, AS17378's broader TierPoint PeeringDB footprint, and SeattleIX's two current 10G AS17378 Seattle connections (https://www.peeringdb.com/fac/500, https://www.peeringdb.com/ix/3090, https://spokaneix.net/locations.html, https://spokaneix.net/peers.html, https://www.peeringdb.com/net/1787, https://www.peeringdb.com/net/3064, and https://www.seattleix.net/autogen/participants.json).

ARIN supports the legal/resource identity: AS17378 and AS7181 are registered to TierPoint, LLC, and ARIN organization TL-801 identifies the St. Louis address and current update record (https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/17378, https://rdap.arin.net/registry/autnum/7181, and https://whois.arin.net/rest/org/TL-801.json).

The 2012 acquisition announcements and reporting support the historical claim that Spokane was an early TierPoint/Cequel platform asset with three facilities, more than 30,000 square feet of data-center space and a disaster-recovery location thesis (https://www.tscp.com/news/thompson-street-capital-partners-charterhouse-group-and-cequel-iii-continue-data-center-platform-expansion-with-the-acquisition-of-tierpoint-llc/ and https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2012/may/22/tierpoint-data-center-sold/).

The 2019 acquisition report supports the specific real-estate signal for 23017 E Mission Ave: 16,500 square feet, $6 million sale price, $364 per square foot, TierPoint as single tenant, 12.4-year lease term and 6.65 percent cap rate (https://assets.ctfassets.net/o03ihmgd94o7/5YHhGB6rcJqmAm7uQuD3Zl/e680ebdc9fe08051f863bac527d74285/2019_EOY_Data_Center_Acquisitions_Report_copy.pdf).

Avista's June 2026 data-center page and investor release support the regional large-load risk frame: potential data-center demand ranging from 5-10 MW to hundreds of MW, Avista's peak and average load context, the paused 500 MW negotiation, and the utility's position that large-load customers should pay costs to serve them (https://www.myavista.com/about-us/data-centers-and-energy and https://investor.avistacorp.com/news-releases/news-release-details/avista-pauses-processing-energy-service-request-500-mw-data).

Washington Department of Revenue and SB 6231 support the tax-policy frame: existing data-center sales/use tax exemptions for qualifying server equipment and power infrastructure, and the 2026 law removing the exemption for replacement equipment (https://dor.wa.gov/forms-publications/publications-subject/tax-topics/data-centers-sales-and-use-tax-exemption-eligibility and https://app.leg.wa.gov/billsummary/?BillNumber=6231&Initiative=false&Year=2025).

Neutron, IonSwitch and SpokaneIX support the competition frame: downtown Spokane colocation and carrier-hotel alternatives, Coeur d'Alene colocation, and other regional exchange participants that make TierPoint part of a local ecosystem rather than the sole local option (https://www.neutronllc.net/, https://www.neutronllc.net/about/, https://www.ionswitch.com/datacenter, https://www.ionswitch.com/, and https://spokaneix.net/peers.html).

Gartner Peer Insights, Cloudtango and Trustpilot support the unofficial customer-signal frame. They are not facility audits; they show how buyers discuss uptime, staff, billing, overages, cancellation and support in public review venues (https://www.gartner.com/reviews/product/tierpoint-data-center-colocation-services, https://www.cloudtango.net/providers/6907/tierpoint, and https://www.trustpilot.com/review/tierpoint.com).

The bottom line

TierPoint Spokane's economic value is the ability to sell redundant distance. Liberty Lake is distant enough from Seattle to be useful in a continuity plan, close enough to stay within the Pacific Northwest operating corridor, and established enough to have public facility, power, network, acquisition and compliance evidence. The campus does not need to be the largest data-center asset in the region to matter. It needs to keep proving that its power stack, cooling discipline, support labor, interconnection surface and managed-service wrap are cheaper and safer than the customer's alternatives.

The public record supports that thesis, with caveats. TierPoint Spokane is clearly tied to TierPoint, LLC; the facilities are publicly specified; the exchange and routing records are real; the region has a meaningful power-cost argument; and the 2019 transaction gives at least one hard real-estate valuation clue. The uncertainties are also material: current utilization, actual power contract terms, customer concentration, capex needs, SLA performance, tax impact and Avista growth capacity are not publicly disclosed. That leaves a serious but bounded conclusion. TierPoint Spokane looks like a real regional edge-colocation asset, not a generic cloud label, and its economics are best read through the price of reliable distance.