JPMorgan and Goldman keep just $1.3bn of Volta Infrastructure's $5bn AI loan
The loan funds a Norway data center with about 36,000 Nvidia GPUs where Anthropic has reportedly signed a six-year computing deal
Published
JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are underwriting $1.3 billion of a $5 billion loan for Volta Infrastructure, leaving the remaining $3.7 billion outside their own books. The money is meant to fund a data center in Norway built around roughly 36,000 Nvidia GPUs, where Anthropic has reportedly agreed to a six-year computing contract.
The debt is unrated and is being marketed at a yield of around 11%, a level that reflects the financing risk involved. Commitments are due October 14, a date that will show whether CLO investors are willing to take on unrated paper tied to AI infrastructure at that price.
The structure marks a shift in how this kind of buildout gets funded. Rather than holding the exposure themselves, the lead banks are keeping about a quarter of the loan and passing the rest to private credit markets, leaving compute demand linked to Anthropic dependent on investor appetite for risk rather than on chip supply. Goldman's own estimates of data center capacity growth, published October 5, track the scale of that broader buildout. Nvidia's buyback programme and order backlog have kept sentiment around AI spending firm, as its September 28 disclosures showed, even as the financing side of these projects grows more selective and the October 14 deadline becomes a real test of how much appetite remains for AI-linked credit risk.