Vantage Obtains $5B for Data Center Development
Nearly half of the total will go toward building a 1.5 million-square-foot campus.
Vantage Data Centers has received $5 billion in financing to further its expansion in the sector. Some $2.25 billion will fund the development of the firm’s campus in New Albany, Ohio, while the remainder will augment the company’s credit facility.
Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group and Société Générale led the construction financing portion. A bank syndicate led by Wells Fargo Securities, along with joint bookrunners TD Securities, Truist Securities and Scotiabank, arranged the expanded corporate facility.
Both deals were under the aegis of Vantage’s Green Finance Framework. The goals of the framework include designing and building data centers that reflect improvements in Power Usage Effectiveness, low water use (measured as Water Usage Effectiveness) and greenhouse gas emissions.
READ ALSO: Securing Sustainable Energy for Data Centers
The Ohio data center site is near Columbus, Ohio, on 70 acres that will be home to three preleased hyperscale data centers. Combined, the 1.5 million-square-foot development that broke ground in October represents a capacity of 192 megawatts.
Turner Construction is the general contractor of the New Albany facility, which Vantage calls OH1, as it is the company’s first development in the state. The campus is aiming for LEED Silver certification, with its first building slated for completion late in 2025.
The company’s existing credit facility totals $3 billion, and with the $2.75 billion expansion, will increase to $5.75 billion, for the support of data center development and site acquisition in North America.
In 2024, Vantage completed a $9.2 billion equity raise to fund U.S. growth and expansion in Europe and the Middle East. The fundraise was oversubscribed by $2.8 billion, a mark of global investors’ eagerness to get a piece of the data center pie.
Boomtime for data centers
The current expansion of the data center sector amounts to a boom in capacity as demand for computing power accelerates, in large part because of the wide adoption of AI tech, which is data-intensive. Supply in primary U.S. data center markets increased by 34 percent in 2024 to 6,922.6 megawatts, outstripping the 26 percent increase in 2023, according to CBRE.
The overall data center vacancy rate in primary markets came in at 1.9 percent at the end of 2024, a record low, with only a few facilities with 10 megawatts or more capacity—and which are slated for delivery in 2025—not leased yet, CBRE noted. As soon as projects break ground, or even before, they tend to be leased (as was OH1) .
The average monthly asking rate for a 250-to-500-kilowatt requirement in primary markets was up 12.6 percent at the end of 2024, compared to a year earlier, to $184.06 per kilowatt. That is another indication that supply is tight in the face of brisk demand.
You must be logged in to post a comment.