Two of Wall Street's largest banks, JPMorgan Chase & Co. and Goldman Sachs Group Inc., have moved to cap their own financial exposure on a $5 billion debt package arranged for artificial intelligence infrastructure company Volta Infrastructure Holdings Ltd., a step driven by investor pressure for higher returns on lending tied to the AI sector.
Volta, a newly formed cloud company built around artificial intelligence, has lined up the two banks to arrange its debt financing. People with knowledge of the arrangement told reporters that lenders had fully underwritten a $1.3 billion term loan tied to Volta, whereas the separate $3.7 billion facility earmarked for chip financing carries no such underwriting commitment — a structural distinction that keeps those lenders at arm's length from exposure on the larger tranche.
Volta's debt is being marketed at a yield of around 11%, placing it among the pricier end of the leveraged loan segment that has drawn growing interest as a funding route for AI ventures. Because no credit rating has been assigned to the deal, collateralised loan obligations — the dominant purchasers of such debt — would ordinarily be barred from taking on these loans. Spokespeople at JPMorgan, Goldman, and Volta each chose not to offer any comment on the matter.
In debt markets, an underwrite covering the full financing package is typically extended by lenders so that borrowers have assurance the transaction will proceed regardless of whether outside investors ultimately participate. Debt underwriting tied to buyouts generates revenue for lenders, though that activity exposes them to potential losses if the bonds or loans placed with investors fetch less than the price guaranteed to the borrower, or find no buyers at all.
Financing structures built around debt obligations tend to appear far less frequently in AI-related transactions. Lenders remain alert to a repeat of the 2022 episode, when a swift cycle of interest-rate increases caused credit markets to lock up and left them holding underwritten debt at a loss on their books. Bankrolling the AI expansion — particularly through arrangements tied to newer or unproven ventures — has pushed lenders toward non-standard deal structures within the leveraged finance space, according to sources with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity because they lacked authorisation to comment on the record. Lenders are working to assess where vulnerabilities lie and position themselves to avoid being caught off guard.
Volta sits within a broader cluster of technology firms — collectively labelled neoclouds — whose business model centres on leasing out access to AI chips and the surrounding computing infrastructure. Proceeds from the agreement will fund a Norwegian data centre campus, with day-to-day operations handled through a joint arrangement between Volta Infrastructure and Bitdeer Technologies Group, the latter a Bitcoin mining company with existing data centre operations.
According to individuals with knowledge of the matter, Anthropic PBC has entered into a six-year deal covering compute capacity at the facility, as one news outlet reported. Lease obligations tied to Bitdeer's data centre facility will be covered by drawing on the $1.3 billion term loan.
The $3.7 billion loan — structured around the acquisition of roughly 36,000 Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units — sits within a broader pattern of neocloud financing, where debt arrangements backing chip purchases by companies such as CoreWeave Inc., Lambda Inc., and Crusoe Inc. have drawn active participation from financial institutions. Financing costs on those prior deals were notably lower than what Volta faced when it arranged its own transaction.
Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio, both of whom previously held executive roles within Brookfield Asset Management Ltd.'s infrastructure division, launched Volta together at some point during the current calendar year. Making Nvidia's high-end chips available to both long-established AI research organisations and companies newer to the field forms the core of what the company is pursuing.
Pledges to back the transaction are due by 14 October. Outreach to potential lenders on the loan had been taking place at JPMorgan since at least August, a prior report from another news outlet indicated.
