Financing the AI Buildout

AI demand has altered the physical economics of data centers, raising power and cooling intensity and favoring purpose-built campuses, and triggered an infrastructure-scale investment wave. Because these assets are expensive, specialized, and rapidly evolving, funding is shifting from on-balance-sheet corporate finance toward leases, project finance, securitization, private credit, and SPV structures. This financial architecture expands debt capacity but transforms rather than eliminates risk, concentrating exposures through tenant dependence, technology obsolescence, power and compute constraints, opacity, and circular credit linkages.