Growth-powering strategy: Data centre financing for a sustainable future

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not a new topic for discussion. However, there is a pivotal step that many have missed before the evolution really began – how will our infrastructure enable this next big step of digital evolution?

To put it simply, data centres are buildings that host all the information you process online, from questions you ask AI to cloud storage. To provide the complex computing power and storage functionalities required to train and deliver AI, we need a data centre network as a backbone for the rapidly evolving digital economy.

That brings us to the next question – how are we going to facilitate the exponential growth of AI and the digital economy, which is entirely reliant on data centres? This growth in data centre demand will require a substantial volume of capital investment for the buildout.

Gathering billions of funding within a relatively short period of time is not a straightforward process – it requires specially designed solutions and access to a variety of credit and debt financing sources including project finance, securitisation and private credit, to accumulate sufficient investment. Banks play a critical role in this complicated process – they can help tailor suitable financing structures and tap the right liquidity pools, such as seeking funds from private debt providers or issuing credit facilities themselves, and line up independent credit rating and legal reviews for funding.

One of the most successful data centre companies that has been able to secure capital from the bank market is Australian-founded AirTrunk. The company has the largest hyperscale centre platform in Asia-Pacific and Japan (excluding mainland China). To date, AirTrunk has raised over A$6 billion in ESG financing, making it one of the largest issuers of sustainable financing in the global data centre industry.

Data centres around the world are looking to decarbonise their emissions while expanding to cater to global demand. Reaching out to partners with deep sector knowledge like Crédit Agricole CIB brings advantages as they can customise innovative financing solutions with specific features to support decarbonisation trajectories. When designed thoughtfully, sustainable finance can also address ESG priorities beyond climate goals, such as diversity and community engagement.

Read more: How the world’s global carbon footprint is being impacted by our technology advancement globally, and how every step we take to decarbonise data centre industry emissions has an impact Will open in a new tab

As time goes by, rating agencies are getting more comfortable with the reliable, long-term cash flow generated from the underlying customer contracts, leading to more data operators, especially in the Americas, securitising the offtake contracts and thereby opening up a new avenue for data centre financing.
 

Beyond the Americas, which is often considered as the hub for data centres, there has also been a surge of build-out of data centres in Asia-Pacific, spurred by digitalisation of local economies and a deep talent pool for data centre operation.

In 2023, Crédit Agricole CIB supported AirTrunk in issuing the world’s largest data centre sustainability-linked loan in history. The transaction featured innovative industry-specific environmental key performance indicators (KPIs) such as carbon, energy and water efficiency, as well as gender diversity and pay equity to align the company’s human development goals. Within the same year, the Bank has helped at least three other data centres in Asia-Pacific – AirTrunk in Australia, Digital Edge (Singapore) in South Korea, and ESR in Hong Kong – in exploring ways to achieve sustainable growth while implementing their ESG objectives.

AirTrunk has adopted sustainable financing to ensure it scales responsibly as the demand for AI and cloud computing skyrockets. With sustainability at the heart of both its financing and operations, linking financing to its sustainability strategy has been one of the key differentiators for AirTrunk in successfully securing large volumes of capital from the bank market. AirTrunk has gone a step further, investing the margin incentives from its sustainability-linked loans (from the achievement of its loan KPIs) into its social impact programme to deliver material and lasting benefit to the community.

To ensure accountability and transparency, AirTrunk has developed a comprehensive sustainable financing framework outlining the rationale of the KPIs included in their sustainability-linked loan.