A wave of heavy borrowing is sweeping through the data-center world as companies race to supply OpenAI with the compute needed for its next generation of models.
SoftBank, Oracle and CoreWeave have already taken on more than $30 billion in loans to either invest in OpenAI directly or build the data-center capacity required to serve the ChatGPT creator’s accelerating demand, the Financial Times reports.
SoftBank is among the largest borrowers, having raised roughly $20 billion this year for AI investments, with OpenAI as the primary destination. A person close to the company says $1 billion of its $8.5 billion bridge loan tied to its OpenAI capital injection has been repaid, while several billion more were used to redeem existing bonds.
Oracle has leaned heavily on debt markets to keep pace with its OpenAI infrastructure commitments. The company has already sold $18 billion in corporate bonds and is now in talks with banks to add another $38 billion to fund two new Vantage-built data-center sites in Texas and Wisconsin. Analysts at KeyBanc estimate Oracle may need to borrow as much as $100 billion over the next four years to fulfill its OpenAI contracts.
CoreWeave, one of OpenAI’s closest compute partners, has borrowed more than $10 billion to lease data-center space and supply cloud capacity. While some of that infrastructure serves Microsoft, analysts note that part of the capacity ultimately flows to OpenAI through Microsoft’s exclusive supply agreement with the startup.
Two additional players, Blue Owl Capital and Crusoe, have layered on about $28 billion in loans through special-purpose vehicles created specifically to build OpenAI-linked sites. A joint SPV formed by the two firms borrowed roughly $10 billion from JPMorgan to construct OpenAI’s Texas data center.
A separate Blue Owl SPV secured $18 billion from a group of Japanese banks for a second site in New Mexico. Both facilities are leased to Oracle, which intends to use them for OpenAI workloads.
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