Colocate

Colocate is a verb meaning to place in the same location or to be located in the same place. The word comes from the prefix co- (“together”) and loco/locus (“place”), and it is closely related to colocated and colocation. In general usage, to colocate something is to bring it into proximity or share a common site.

In information technology and business operations, colocating often refers to placing hardware or services in a third-party facility. Colocation, the noun form, describes a setup where a company houses its servers and networking equipment in a data center operated by a specialized provider. The provider supplies space, power, cooling, and connectivity, while the customer retains ownership and management of its own equipment. This arrangement can reduce capital expenditure, improve bandwidth options, and offer robust physical security and disaster recovery compared to maintaining an in-house facility. Colocation contrasts with cloud hosting and with private, self-managed data centers.

Colocation also appears in organizational and management contexts. Colocating teams, departments, or functions means situating them in the same physical space to facilitate communication, collaboration, and faster decision-making, or to align workflows and shared resources.

In scientific disciplines, colocation or colocalization describes the tendency of two or more phenomena to occur at or near the same location. In biology, colocalization often refers to overlapping signals in microscopy that suggest proximity or interaction of molecules; in spatial analysis, it denotes the tendency of events or species to be found together in space.