To grow our OCI business, which requires increased computing capacity, we must incur significant capital and operating expenditures to increase our existing data center capacity and to establish data centers in new geographic locations. In connection with these investments, we have entered, and expect to continue to enter, into long-term lease commitments with third-party data center providers and other significant commitments with suppliers of chips and other data center infrastructure. If we underestimate customer demand or our data center capacity needs, we may face shortages of available infrastructure, limiting our ability to support customer growth and potentially causing us to lose business to competitors. Conversely, if we overestimate customer demand or any of our key customers are unable to pay or otherwise perform under their contracts with us, we could be locked into multi-year commitments for excess data center space and related capital expenditures, as well as associated financings, without receiving corresponding revenue. In addition, the terms, renewal options and pricing adjustments in our long-term data center leases typically do not align with the duration and pricing of customer contracts, and if customers do not renew their contracts, we may be unable to re-lease, repurpose or assign such capacity on acceptable terms, if at all. Our business is, and may continue to be, exposed to risks of customer non-payment and non-performance. Our customer base and our policies and procedures to manage our exposure to credit risk, including through receipt of prepayments under some of our committed contracts, credit analysis and monitoring procedures, cannot fully eliminate customer credit risk, and to the extent our policies and procedures prove to be inadequate, it could negatively affect our business, operating results and financial condition. In addition, some of our customers may be highly leveraged and subject to their own operating and regulatory risks and, even if our credit review and analysis mechanisms work properly, we may experience risks of non-payment and non-performance in our dealings with such parties. In certain OCI offerings, we are more concentrated among a number of large customers, which could increase these risks.
Our data center expansion depends on access to suitable, permitted build sites; reliable and predictable power sources; networking hardware; and server availability, including graphics processing units, memory devices and other critical components. Data centers in geographies that we rely on may be unavailable on commercially reasonable terms or at all. Government-imposed limits or moratoria on data center construction in a given market could hinder our ability to execute our expansion plans or prevent us from completing planned data center projects. Even where suitable sites and capacity are available, our data center expansion plans are complex and subject to execution risks, including, among others, delays or cost increases related to design, engineering, permitting, construction, utility interconnection, equipment delivery and contractor performance. Our ability to build and operate data centers also may be affected by existing and evolving laws, regulations and policies relating to land use and zoning, environmental permitting, energy usage, grid reliability, greenhouse gas emissions, water usage, building codes, health and safety, tax incentives and data localization. These requirements, or changes in their interpretation or enforcement, could increase our capital and operating costs, delay or prevent planned projects, limit where or how we build or operate data centers, or adversely affect our ability to meet customer commitments and anticipated demand.
In addition, we depend on third parties to develop and deliver certain data center capacity and related infrastructure, and their inability to obtain financing, complete construction on schedule or manage construction cost overruns could delay the availability of data center space or increase our costs. We have faced, and may continue to face, challenges with securing reliable and cost-effective power sources for our data center energy demands, which are constrained globally due to the significant increase in demand for and limited availability of energy to power AI compute. These constraints on available power sources could disrupt operations at affected data centers or restrict our capacity to grow, adversely impacting our business, operating results, financial condition and prospects. In addition, power prices can be volatile, including due to extreme weather events and market structure in certain regions, and increases in energy costs can adversely affect our margins, particularly where customer pricing is fixed or committed. We also may enter into long-term power supply arrangements, including power purchase agreements or similar arrangements, that may extend beyond customer contract terms and expose us to counterparty risk, pricing risk and potential collateral or credit support requirements. We also may be unable to secure sufficient energy resources on acceptable terms to meet customer expectations or our sustainability goals. These investments and commitments may require significant cash outlays before, or in excess of, the revenues or cash flows generated by the related capacity, which could adversely affect our cash flows, increase our need for external financing or require us to reduce, delay or reprioritize other investments.
We also rely on third-party suppliers to provide equipment and components required to outfit these data centers on a timely basis. We do not control the operation of these third-party data centers, and they may suffer interruptions in service from events beyond our control, including from acts of government, natural events, power loss, break-ins or misconduct by those third parties. Ongoing or future delays or the inability to meet customer demand could cause the loss of additional sales, delay our revenue recognition or increase our costs, all of which could adversely affect the margins of our business. We typically depreciate these assets over their estimated useful lives, which could be shortened should our cloud strategies change, which could adversely affect our profitability. Further, evolving customer requirements and technological changes in data center design and equipment may require retrofits or other incremental capital expenditures, and physical damage to data centers or key energy infrastructure from natural disasters, geopolitical events, terrorist events or other catastrophic events could adversely affect our profitability.