AI gear is pricey, and this deal shows what it costs when you do not have a blue-chip sponsor. JPMorgan is leading a $5 billion leveraged loan for Volta Infrastructure Holdings, a new AI cloud player, at a discount in the high 90s and with a spread of roughly 6.25 to 6.50 percentage points over the benchmark. That math lands near an 11% all-in yield at current base rates, among the richer borrowing tabs in this corner of the market. Volta and JPMorgan declined to comment.
Unlike investment grade borrowers that can tap cheaper financing - think the $35 billion Broadcom-backed debt package that helped Anthropic access tensor processing units developed by Broadcom and Alphabet - smaller neocloud outfits are leaning on leveraged loans. CoreWeave, Lambda and Crusoe have all raised chip-backed loans, though at lower overall costs than what Volta is seeking here.
The borrower is a special-purpose entity called Volta Tydal Holdings S.à r.l., and lenders must buy a slice of both tranches to participate, a strip structure. One piece, about $3.7 billion, finances roughly 36,000 Nvidia GPUs. The other, around $1.3 billion, cash collateralizes a letter of credit tied to a data center lease.
Those funds will be kept in a dedicated account to cover lease payments to Bitdeer for use of the facility. The loans fully amortize, so principal gets paid down over time, a feature common in AI financings but not in typical corporate loans.
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Proceeds will help fund a Norwegian data center complex that Volta Infrastructure will manage with Bitdeer Technologies Group. People familiar with the plan say Anthropic has committed to a six-year arrangement to secure compute capacity at the location. Earlier this year, Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio founded Volta, after serving as executives within Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.'s infrastructure unit. Bitdeer is a Bitcoin miner that runs data centers.
A few quirks matter here. An unrated status is unusual for this corner of leveraged loans and, in most cases, excludes many collateralized loan obligations - the dominant purchasers in this asset class. A lender call took place Monday at 11 a.m. in New York, and commitments are due Oct. 14. JPMorgan began canvassing investors in August.
Wall Street is financing an AI infrastructure wave that Bloomberg tallies at roughly $625 billion of borrowing over the past two years, and Bloomberg projects the full buildout cost to edge toward nearly $5 trillion by 2030's end. Recent chip-loan milestones include CoreWeave's May 6 financing that drew about $19 billion of demand, a July 30 update on how its stock swings affected financing costs, Lambda's Aug. 12 loan tied to Nvidia hardware, and Crusoe's Sept. 23 pricing of a $509 million chip loan with Jane Street involvement.
For your money, here is the punchline: investors are being asked to accept an unrated, fully amortizing, strip-structured loan at around 11% to fund GPUs plus a lease-backed data center, and without the CLO bid that usually drives demand. If allocations stick at this price, it tells you how hungry lenders are to fund AI infrastructure without the safety net of an investment grade backer.
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