AirTrunk funds new Singaporean data centre with $2.7b green loan
Australian data centre giant AirTrunk, now owned by Blackstone, has struck a $2.7 billion green loan to back its development of a major new facility in Singapore, making it the largest ever such loan deal in the island nation.
The Singapore funding follows on the heels of the novel $4.6 billion debt deal – linked to carbon, energy and water usage – that AirTrunk struck two years ago to fund its growth, winning support from more than 40 banks.
This time around more than 20 banks and financial institutions, led by Credit Agricole CIB, DBS Bank and ING Bank, were involved in the green finance deal to bankroll AirTrunk’s second data centre in Singapore.
“This landmark transaction – Singapore’s largest loan and green loan for a data centre – strengthens AirTrunk’s leadership in sustainable finance and reflects strong market confidence in AirTrunk’s growth and sustainability strategy,” AirTrunk founder and chief executive Robin Khuda said.
“This financing structure highlights the strength, depth, and international scale of Singapore’s financial ecosystem. We’re proud to contribute to the nation’s momentum as a world-leading green finance hub while scaling our platform responsibly to deliver lasting social impact for the Singapore community.”
The Singapore deal underlines AirTrunk’s rapid expansion and the potential to grow further because of the AI boom. It was those factors that caught the interest of Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, which led a $24 billion buyout of AirTrunk in the biggest Australian deal of last year.
The company’s facilities are used by the world’s biggest cloud computing companies, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Google, and are in hot demand as artificial intelligence development increases the need for the infrastructure that is housed in specialised data centres.
The new Singaporean data centre will be at Loyang, and have 70-plus megawatts of essential cloud and artificial intelligence compute capacity for Singaporean and the Southeast Asian region, AirTrunk said.
Data centres measure their capacity in gigawatts as a standardised way to quantify their power consumption and processing capability.
In February this year, AirTrunk unveiled its first big move since Blackstone took control, spending about $2.5 billion to establish a facility in Malaysia to support artificial intelligence and cloud computing services.
The company unveiled the new data centre in the Johor region, its second in the country and taking AirTrunk’s total investment there to $3.5 billion.
