Finance
Inside the data center financing boom — and the teams Wall Street is building to win it
Wall Street banks are racing to finance AI data centers, as deals swell into the tens of billions, forcing a rethink of how these projects are funded.
“If you can’t invest a billion dollars, we don’t even want to talk to you,” said Adam Lewis, a managing director at Citizens, a regional lender that has emerged as a key player in the sector. Just a few years ago, a $100 million financing was a milestone; today, it’s a rounding error.
For Lewis, that billion-dollar floor reflects the rising cost of land and electricity, which has pushed these projects beyond the limits of traditional commercial real estate loans and into the realm of large-scale infrastructure finance.
As deal values surge, banks are focused on seizing what could be Wall Street’s largest-ever financing opportunity. Over the past two years, lenders including Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan have formed integrated teams across disciplines to become fluent in the mechanics of how data centers are actually constructed.
Citigroup estimates the buildout could require $3 trillion by 2030, according to an internal memo sent in late February by leaders of the firm’s investment banking unit. In the memo, senior bankers from across investment banking, corporate banking, and financing said that Citi would establish a dedicated AI infrastructure group to break through internal silos and evaluate “all pockets of capital” as deals grow larger and more complex.
The sheer scale of the AI buildout is beginning to exhaust the cash reserves of the world’s largest tech giants. While hyperscalers cannot afford to fall behind in the infrastructure race, the costs have become too great to carry on their own balance sheets. To Fred Turpin, the global chair of investment banking at JPMorgan, this represents the “largest investment cycle in the history of capitalism.”
To bridge that gap, Turpin helped organize a firmwide working group that pairs technology and energy experts with bankers versed in private capital markets. The approach allows the bank to jump-start projects using its own balance sheet before connecting them to “long-term” capital from sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and dedicated infrastructure investors looking for stable, generational returns.
Integrated teams
To put together the unprecedented amount of money to build AI infrastructure, bankers are drawing on multiple sources of capital, from bank loans and bonds to private credit and institutional investors, often assembled into a single structure from the outset.
At Goldman Sachs, the shift has taken shape inside its Capital Solutions Group, a unit formed last year to bring together origination, structuring, and capital distribution as deal sizes and complexity have grown. The group pulls in bankers from across investment-grade and high-yield debt, infrastructure and real estate financing, and equity capital markets, allowing the firm to consider multiple financing options at once.
“We’re elbow to elbow with the bankers that cover sponsors so that we can ensure a direct line between our origination efforts and distribution efforts to financial sponsors,” said John Greenwood, a partner who serves as global head of the infrastructure and real asset finance group within Capital Solutions.
Goldman Sachs
At Morgan Stanley, Richard Myers and William Graham, two top investment bankers, are members of a data-center-focused task force launched in 2024. Last year, Myers and his team arranged a $2.6 billion financing for CoreWeave that used Nvidia chips as collateral. They later pioneered a first-of-its-kind $27 billion bond deal for a joint venture between Meta and Blue Owl. That work increasingly requires bringing together specialists from across the bank — from power and project finance to real estate — to arrange multiple sources of capital.
And Graham, the firm’s global cohead of leveraged finance, has led a $3.2 billion senior secured note offering for TeraWulf and a $2.35 billion raise for Applied Digital — two specialized infrastructure firms that have pivoted from crypto mining to hosting the high-density power loads required for AI.
New vocabulary
Unlike traditional corporate financings, data centers sit at the intersection of real estate, energy, and technology, which means bankers have to weigh not just financial risk — but whether a project can actually be built, powered, and brought online as planned. Bankers said they’ve had to become fluent in a new language — the lexicon behind how these massive projects are built.
“We can read electrical diagrams and mechanical diagrams and understand land use permits and power configurations,” said Lewis, the managing director at Citizens, whose team of more than 30 bankers focuses on advising, structuring, and financing data center projects. Bankers are now required to understand what could delay or derail a project, and to give investors confidence that it will actually come online as planned.
“Most of us just assume it happens magically in some ephemeral thing called the cloud,” said Scott Wilcoxen, who leads digital infrastructure investment banking at JPMorgan. “But physically, what that actually means is there is effectively an unbroken physical connection between individual users and the data sources.”
This technical knowledge is ever more important as bankers say projects are increasingly constrained by limits on power, equipment, and labor. But those constraints don’t appear to be cooling demand, raising questions about how far the buildout can stretch — and what it will take to sustain it.
Goldman’s Greenwood noted that in a recent meeting with a client, someone in the room used a surprising adjective: “terrestrial.”
“I was in a meeting last week, and they were talking about terrestrial data centers,” he said, suggesting the next frontier could be “on the bottom of the sea, or in space.”
Sezzle found in a March consumer survey that engagement with its financial literacy tool MoneyIQ correlates with improved consumer habits.
Tokenization, the representation of real-life assets on a blockchain, could reshape both crypto markets and traditional finance, while introducing new risks that regulators are not yet equipped to manage, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF).
In a new report, the IMF described tokenization as more than a technical upgrade to markets. By moving assets like money, bonds and funds onto shared blockchains, transactions can settle instantly, cutting out intermediaries and reducing delays that define today’s markets.
The IMF says the “atomic settlement” that tokenization brings to the financial world could lower counterparty risk and force firms to manage liquidity in real time.
“Stress events are likely to unfold faster, leaving less time for discretionary intervention,” the report reads. “Therefore, ensuring stability requires that tokenized asset management remains anchored in safe settlement assets, legally recognized finality, and robust governance arrangements.”
The report points to stablecoins — tokens whose value is pegged to a fiat currency — as a key bridge between crypto and traditional finance. These could become widely used settlement assets across tokenized platforms, the report said.
Still, their reliability depends on reserves and redemption systems, leaving them exposed to runs under stress.
The IMF also warned that faster, automated markets could amplify volatility, while smart contracts that trigger margin calls or liquidations may accelerate selloffs during downturns. Such rapid declines have been seen in crypto markets,
Tokenized assets also can move instantly across jurisdictions, complicating oversight and raising concerns about capital flight and currency substitution in emerging markets, the IMF wrote.
The organization called for clearer legal frameworks and stronger global coordination, arguing that without them, tokenized finance could deepen fragmentation rather than improve efficiency.
Tokenization has been a growing theme in the crypto sector. Real-world assets added to blockchain rails have already topped $23.2 billion according to DeFiLlama data. Excluding stablecoins, the majority of that figure is in the form of tokenized gold or money market funds.
Some people are relying on potentially risky workarounds to manage their finances, a report has found.
Friends, family, carers and neighbours are spending hours each month patiently helping others with basic banking tasks, yet many “financial helpers” are doing so without any formal authority and help is often based on trust, according to a survey.
The research was led by consumer finance expert Faith Reynolds, with support from cash access and ATM network Link.
YouGov surveyed nearly 850 people across the UK who had helped someone with their banking or money management between December 2024 and December 2025.
The report found that people being helped often log in themselves with a helper beside them.
But a quarter (26%) of people surveyed said the person they help shares passcodes or security details with them.
And 17% said the people they help allow them to log in on their behalf on the helper’s device.
The report said: “Financial help is increasingly essential because, as branches have closed and banking has become digital, the responsibility for navigating complexity and preventing fraud has quietly shifted from institutions to individuals and families.”
More than half (54%) of people said they have no formal authority or access rights at all, meaning many people are relying on informal workarounds to provide the help needed.
While many helpers said they worry they will be accused of taking advantage of the person they are helping, 43% highlighted the risk of fraud and scams as a top concern for the person being helped.
Three in 10 (28%) said they had helped to stop or prevent scams or fraud.
The top tasks helpers selected include checking account balances, assisting with online payments or passcodes when shopping online, and making or scheduling payments.
To provide this support, financial helpers use mobile banking apps the most, followed by online banking via websites and ATMs.
The support provided is also not limited to banking, with 45% of helpers assisting others to use digital devices, 41% helping with managing utilities or bills, and 31% helping with using or setting up their television.
Nearly a third (31%) help setting up health appointments and 28% set up broadband or internet services.
Financial helpers are often fitting in helping alongside work and family commitments, such as children and jobs.
One helper told researchers they had been helping “about five years when their bank branch closed… They asked me for help after throwing their phone across the room because they couldn’t even log in.”
Another helper said: “Because of the rise of AI and scams, my father fell victim to this and couldn’t believe that the person wasn’t real.
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