JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc. are leading a roughly $38 billion debt package to fund data centers connected to Oracle Corp. in Wisconsin and Texas, according to people familiar with the matter.
Several banks had already committed to financing a $23 billion loan for the campus in Shackelford County, Texas. Together with the funding for the Wisconsin data center, the deal would mark one of the largest ever debt packages for artificial intelligence infrastructure.
Banks and private credit firms have been competing to underwrite debt deals supporting the development of large data centers. These types of properties are being built to house the technology needed to train and deploy the world’s most powerful AI models.
Both the Wisconsin and Texas campuses, which will be developed by Vantage Data Centers, would be used by Oracle to power OpenAI, separate people with knowledge of the matter said.
OpenAI has agreed to rent 4.5 gigawatts of additional data center capacity from Oracle, expanding on an existing partnership. One gigawatt can provide electricity to roughly 750,000 houses.
While Oracle already plans to use the Texas site, talks for the Port Washington, Wisconsin campus have not yet been finalized, according to some of the people, who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information.
Preliminary pricing for the debt package is being discussed at about 2.5 percentage points above the US benchmark, the people said. The banks plan to eventually distribute the debt to traditional loan investors and private credit funds, they added.
JPMorgan declined to comment. Representatives for MUFG, Oracle, OpenAI and Vantage didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Many companies, including OpenAI, have estimated developers of large language models will need trillions of dollars of funding to run and deploy their AI tools.
Among recent notable deals for data centers, Meta Platforms Inc., the parent of Facebook, picked Pacific Investment Management Co. and Blue Owl Capital Inc. to lead a $29 billion transaction for its data-center expansion in rural Louisiana. The social-media company had been working with Morgan Stanley to raise funds in a competitive process.
But the race to finance this business comes with significant risk. As private credit in particular is rapidly becoming an important source of capital for AI development, UBS Global Research analysts have warned that investors should keep a close eye on the health of the asset class.
“This phenomenon could sustain significant growth plans for AI and other hyperscaler companies, sowing the seeds of an upside scenario and increasing overheating risk,” UBS strategists led by Matthew Mish wrote in a note last month.
OpenAI, the most visible face of the industry, released its latest chatbot, GPT-5, to tepid reviews last month, adding to concern about whether gains in the quest for super intelligence are slowing down. In January, technology companies were rattled after Chinese AI startup DeepSeek emerged with a model that performed comparably to the world’s best, but cost less to develop.
Source: finance.yahoo
