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JPMorgan and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group are in talks to underwrite a $22bn loan to build a 1,200 acre data centre campus in Texas for Vantage Data Centers, one of the world’s largest owners of these facilities.
The two banks are leading the debt financing of Vantage’s planned $25bn Texas data centre campus, which it announced on Tuesday with the backing of local politicians including Republican state governor Greg Abbott, according to people briefed on the talks.
The financing, which is being done by a broader syndicate of banks including Goldman Sachs, underscores the speed at which Wall Street is cobbling together billions of dollars to build properties that big tech companies rely on to power their artificial intelligence models.
US private capital groups Silver Lake and DigitalBridge would commit a further $3bn in combined equity financing to help build the data centre campus, according to the sources, which is set to be among the world’s largest when completed.
The first of 10 data centres within the campus would be completed by mid-2026 with the remainder built by the end of 2028, they said.
Vantage did not respond to a request for comment. JPMorgan, MUFG, DigitalBridge, Silver Lake and Goldman Sachs declined to comment.
The country’s biggest technology companies have turned to large investment funds to finance the tens of billions of dollars they need to rapidly build out new data centres, looking to avoid straining their own balance sheets.
Elon Musk’s xAI raised $10bn of debt and equity in July to finance the construction of its data centres in Tennessee, and has reportedly held conversations with private credit lenders to raise additional billions.
Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, is also working with investors to raise $29bn of debt and equity for its own AI projects, the FT has previously reported. It is nearing a deal with private investment firm Blue Owl and bond giant Pimco, although it has also held discussions with Apollo Global Management and KKR.
Blue Owl has also helped finance a $15bn project for Oracle and OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, in Texas.
Vantage’s $25bn data centre campus, called “Frontier”, is being positioned as part of the state’s heavy investment in AI technologies.
“Everything is bigger in Texas, and that includes innovation and technology,” said Abbott on Tuesday.
Vantage was created in 2010 with an initial investment from Silver Lake and began operating with a data centre it acquired from Intel.
Sureel Choksi, a Silver Lake executive who helped lead the deal, became chief executive of Vantage in 2013 and has overseen its rapid growth into a global data centre juggernaut.
Under Choksi, Vantage initially built data centres for the cloud computing operations of large tech groups, but has more recently been building properties with more advanced specifications needed for AI technologies.
Silver Lake sold Vantage in 2017 to DigitalBridge, a private capital group focused on digital infrastructure technologies, for about $1bn. Last year, Silver Lake reinvested in Vantage by co-leading a $9.2bn financing for it alongside DigitalBridge.
