JPMorgan Leads $5B Debt Package for Volta’s AI Data Center Buildout
JPMorgan has begun approaching lenders about a $5 billion debt package to fund Volta Infra Holdings’ AI data center buildout, according to people familiar with the financing. This comes weeks after the seven-month-old company raised $300 million at a $2.4 billion valuation.
The borrower is Volta, founded this year by Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, former executives from Brookfield’s infrastructure business. They operate out of London, Palo Alto, and New York.
Volta has moved quickly, securing a $10 billion agreement for computing capacity from Anthropic just days after emerging from stealth, backed by investors like Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, Nvidia, and Michael Dell.
The company has leased Bitdeer’s 121-megawatt Tydal campus in Norway, utilizing local hydropower with dual grid connections and Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems. The lease terms are notable: worth roughly $4.7 billion over 16 years, extendable to up to $8 billion, with Volta holding a termination right at year ten.
There’s another intriguing aspect. Volta announced an exact $5 billion non-dilutive infrastructure program with Spanish asset manager Azora in August, leaving questions about JPMorgan’s role.
Renting from a bitcoin miner is no longer unusual; Anthropic has signed similar deals with other miners like Riot Platforms. The scale is immense: companies have borrowed approximately $600 billion for data centers and AI since last year, with expectations that the buildout will cost close to $5 trillion by 2030.
The first facility funded by this money will be located in a Norwegian valley, owned by a bitcoin miner, leased by a startup, and used by a company based in San Francisco.
By Ana-Maria Stanciuc, Editor-in-Chief, TNW
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I am the Editor in Chief for TNW, covering technology not as a parade of launches and valuations, but as a system of influence, persuasion, and change. I write about startups, venture capital, digital policy, and Europe’s ecosystem, focusing on the bigger story beneath them: who gets to build the future, who profits from it, and how.