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.”
SAN JOSE, Calif. – A San Jose high school is taking a leading role in redefining vocational education as one of the first schools in the nation to pilot a new suite of Advanced Placement courses focused on real-world financial and professional skills.
Closing workforce readiness gap
Dig deeper:
The East Side Union High School District has partnered with the College Board to launch the AP Career Kickstart program. The initiative currently features two primary courses: AP Business and Personal Finance and AP Cybersecurity. Unlike traditional AP classes that focus primarily on academic theory, these courses are designed to blend academic rigor with practical professional skills, allowing students to earn college credit alongside industry-recognized credentials.
Students at Silver Creek High School will be among the first to test the program out. which arrives at a time of growing concern regarding student readiness for the modern economy. According to “The New Hire Readiness Report 2025,” a study conducted with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 84% of hiring managers say most high school students are not prepared to enter the workforce. Furthermore, 96% of those managers identified financial literacy as an essential skill for young professionals.
“Every day I hear, ‘How are we going to use this in the real world?’” said Jeff Smith, a teacher at Silver Creek High School. “Everything that we teach [in this program] has real-world applications.”
Student innovation
Why you should care:
Students involved in the field test are already seeing tangible results. Senior Ethan Nguyen has used the curriculum to work with multiple businesses on website and mobile application development. Another student, Celina Tran, developed a financial literacy app called “Revenue,” which uses a gamified experience to teach teens money management. That work has already earned both statewide and national awards.
“It creates just a generous amount of pride in seeing the kids apply what they’re learning,” said Imani Butler, a business design and technology teacher at the school. Butler noted that the curriculum addresses a long-standing gap in secondary education, adding that many adults often wish such practical financial training had been available during their own school years.
National expansion
Big picture view:
The AP Career Kickstart courses will be available to students nationwide over the next year. Parents and students interested in the program are encouraged to visit the College Board website for more details on local availability.
The Source: Interviews with College Board team and Silver Creek High School staff.
Canada is to establish a new and powerful law enforcement agency to investigate financial crime, in stark contrast to the US, where weakened federal investigators have struggled to pursue fraudsters and the White House has pardoned convicted money launderers.
A bill to create the Financial Crimes Agency (FCA) completed its first reading in parliament this week. The legislation was introduced by the governing Liberals and with their parliamentary majority, the party is likely to move it through both levels of government quickly.
The new agency, tasked with investigating and prosecuting financial crimes, is the result of a public inquiry that found Canada lacked a cohesive strategy against money laundering, placing it behind its international peers.
Jessica Davis, a former intelligence analyst with Canada’s spy agency who focuses terrorism and illicit financing, said: “The fact we’re actually seeing the creation [of a] new enforcement agency is a meaningful investment and hopefully signals the understanding of the seriousness of the challenge.”
In addition to a new law enforcement agency, Canada will ban cryptocurrency ATMs, which officials say have been used by scammers to defraud victims and by criminals to launder the proceeds of crime. Canada has nearly 4,000 cryptocurrency ATMs, the most per capita in the world.
For more than a quarter of a century, the financial transactions and reports analysis centre (Fintrac) has functioned as Canada’s financial intelligence unit. Last year, the agency uncovered $45bn in transactions from money laundering, counterterrorist financing, sanctions and evasion disclosures.
“It’s a figure that could be too high or far too low – we just don’t fully know the scope of financial crime in this country,” said Davis, who runs the consulting firm Insight Threat Intelligence.
Fintrac does not track and arrest criminals, instead handing off its investigations to the police and prosecutors. Under the new legislation, the newly formed FCA will investigate and prosecute – a move that lessens the scope and mandate of Fintrac and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the country’s federal law-enforcement authority.
“The challenge for the RCMP is that it has been unable and unwilling to actually investigate and sustain investigations related to financial crimes,” said Davis. “There is a lack of funding, a lack of skills, lack of resources and a lack of political will. But financial crimes investigations are long, complex and require sustained resources, which I’m hopeful we’re now going to see put in place.”
A 2024 report on the scale of financial crimes estimated that more than US$3tn in illicit funds had moved through the global financial system in the previous year. Among the largest culprits were money laundering for human and drug trafficking, as well as terrorist financing. A 2024 report from the US treasury department found those efforts had had “devastating economic and social impact” on citizens.
The Canadian effort marks a stark contrast to the approach taken by the current US administration to the scourge of financial crime. Donald Trump’s government issued a high-profile pardon of Changpeng Zhao after the self-styled “king” of cryptocurrency pleaded guilty to money laundering charges. His company, Binance, had been ordered to pay a record $4.3bn penalty for its role in facilitating terrorist financing.
In a January letter to federal watchdogs, senior Democrats called for an investigation into Trump’s decision to shift more than 25,000 personnel away from investigating fraud, tax evasion and money laundering in favour of immigration enforcement.
“The Trump administration is letting white-collar criminals off the hook for all kinds of wrongdoing,” senator Elizabeth Warren, from Massachusetts, said in a statement. “Instead of protecting American families from fraud and predatory behaviour, the administration is diverting resources to pursue its inhumane immigration agenda. Nobody is above the law, and the Trump administration needs to stop treating white-collar criminals with kid gloves.”
“Canada and the US are diverging,” said Davis, adding that the US was still “far ahead of us in terms of its ability to prosecute and invest, investigate and prosecute” financial crimes. “We’re still playing quite a bit of catchup now. Hopefully Canada will shore up our own abilities to protect Canada. Because the things that happen in the US do tend to happen in Canada. And so this new agency is a bulwark against that.”
The creation of a new law enforcement agency was applauded by anti-corruption groups. Salvator Cusimano, the executive director of Transparency International Canada, said: “The [Canadian] government is proposing an ambitious but realistic mandate for this agency, which bodes well as a much-needed first step in improving our enforcement of financial crimes.
“Once established, the agency must coordinate closely with other enforcement and regulatory agencies across the country, and build on their efforts, if it is to achieve its potential.”
It is unclear how easily the agency will work alongside the RCMP, where it will be based and whether it will draw key resources from other units.
Davis said: “This agency is going to matter to Canadians because when you start to combine things like economic pressures, the cost of living and really difficult sort of existence for everyday people, we start to have less tolerance for people making money off of us.
“This is a massive and necessary investment for Canada. But we’ll also have to keep pressuring the government to continue to fund it, continue to prioritise it, to actually get some of those outcomes that we’re looking for.”
Finance
Canada will be the headquarters for a future NATO-linked financial institution, official says
TORONTO (AP) — Canada has been selected as the headquarters for a new, financial institution led by NATO and designed to reduce borrowing costs for members of the alliance, a senior government official said on Wednesday.
According to the official, the decision was reached after negotiations hosted by Canada involving nearly 20 founding members of NATO’s proposed Defense, Security and Resilience Bank, or DSRB.
The financial institution is meant to help NATO members and partner countries meet their defense spending commitments and reduce borrowing costs for military spending by pooling credit strength.
The official spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak ahead of an official announcement. The official said they did not know which city in Canada would be the institution’s headquarters.
Earlier, Ontario Premier Doug Ford cited a report about Canada being selected as the headquarters and pitched in a post on social media that it be in Toronto, saying it’s “an opportunity to put Canada” at the center of global defense finance and manufacturing.
“As our nation’s financial capital, with a skilled workforce and unparalleled global connectivity, there’s no better place for the bank to be headquartered than Toronto,” Ford said.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s government has said it will meet NATO’s military spending guideline.
NATO countries, including Canada, have pledged to spend 5% of their national GDP on defense. Carney said last year the government would meet the earlier 2% target this year, then later the same month committed Canada to reaching 5% by 2035.
European allies and Canada have already been investing heavily in their armed forces, as well as weapons and ammunition, since Russia launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022.
U.S. President Donald Trump has previously complained that Canada doesn’t spend enough on its military.
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