JPMorgan leads a $5B debt package for Volta’s AI data centre buildout

JPMorgan has begun approaching lenders about a $5B debt package to fund Volta Infra Holdings’ AI data centre buildout, weeks after the seven-month-old company raised $300M at a $2.4B valuation. Its first major site is a 121-megawatt campus in Norway leased from bitcoin miner Bitdeer.

JPMorgan has started sounding out lenders for a $5B debt package. The money would fund Volta Infra Holdings’ buildout of AI data centres, according to people familiar with the financing, and neither company would comment.

The borrower is seven months old. Volta was founded this year by Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, two former executives from Brookfield’s infrastructure business, and operates out of London, Palo Alto and New York.

It has moved at an unusual pace. Volta raised $300M at a $2.4B valuation this month, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, Nvidia and Michael Dell.

Its anchor customer arrived almost immediately. Anthropic signed a six-year, $10B agreement for computing capacity days after the company left stealth.

The building itself is Norwegian. Volta is taking Bitdeer’s Tydal campus, 121 megawatts of IT capacity running on local hydropower with dual grid connections and Nvidia’s Vera Rubin systems.

The lease terms are where it gets interesting. Bitdeer puts the deal at roughly $4.7B of contracted revenue over 16 years, extendable towards $8B, with the tenant holding a termination right at year ten.

That leaves a gap in the arithmetic. A six-year customer contract sits underneath a commitment Volta cannot walk away from for a decade, which is the question any lender will ask first.

There is also another $5B in this story. Volta announced a non-dilutive infrastructure programme of exactly that size with Spanish asset manager Azora in early August, and nobody has said whether JPMorgan is syndicating that or raising a second one.

Renting from a bitcoin miner is now unremarkable. Anthropic separately signed a $9.1B, 20-year deal with Riot Platforms, another miner that turned its sites over to AI.

The scale behind all of it is enormous. Companies have borrowed roughly $600B for data centres and AI since last year, against a buildout Bloomberg expects to cost nearly $5T by 2030.

Europe keeps supplying the real estate without keeping the tenants. Anthropic’s $45B Nscale deal sends a London company’s flagship to West Virginia, while this one runs an American lab’s models on Norwegian water.

So the first thing built with this money will sit in a Norwegian valley. It will be owned by a bitcoin miner, leased by a startup younger than most probation periods, and used by a company in San Francisco.