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.”
The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) published a landmark review on Monday that proposes recommendations to regulate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the financial decisions made by consumers.
The review, titled the Mills Review, anticipates that both consumers and firms will start delegating “more financial decision-making to AI systems,” including for agreements, initiating transactions, and executing decisions “within agreed parameters.” One of the key findings of the review outlined that while AI can help bridge advice gaps and “support growth,” there remain risks “associated with fraud, cyber security, and consumer harm.” Conducting the review, Sheldon Mills highlighted that “AI can also amplify risks: bias, discrimination, exclusion, opaque decision-making (particularly when multiple AI models interact), misleading or hallucinatory advice and erosion of consumer trust.”
The review stated that presently, one in five adults in the UK are “already open to AI making decisions for them,” particularly when decisions feel “complex or high stakes.” It found that roughly 26 percent of the population “trust general-purpose tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini for financial advice” with little awareness that such platforms provide no “formal routes to recourse” or protections.
Overall, the Mills Review identified four areas that it anticipates will be impacted by AI in the financial sector: “the transformation of firms,” “new consumer journeys,” “a reshaped competition landscape,” and “amplified financial crime and cyber risk.” The FCA projected the shift in how consumers and firms consult AI to take place by 2030.
The Mills Review put forth seven “priority” recommendations to be considered by the FCA Board. It recommended that any transitions to autonomous AI models be monitored and that regulatory frameworks and perimeters be adapted and secured. The review called for the strengthening of “system-wide coordination and oversight,” the scaling up of the FCA’s AI Lab to enable it to support AI models and innovation for agentic finance, and an “AI-enabled agentic supervisory model” to be built and adopted. Finally, it recommended that a trusted “public-interest AI-enabled financial capability service” be developed.
The FCA announced, in the press release, that it will launch an AI “good and poor practice publication” in late 2026.
Finance
Fayette County Public Schools Board of Education approves audit contract, new finance director position
LEXINGTON, Ky. (WKYT) – The Fayette County Public Schools Board of Education approved a one-year audit contract capped at $131,750 plus $225 per hour during a virtual meeting Monday, along with a new finance director job description.
The contract is with Mauldin & Jenkins Certified Public Accountants, an Atlanta-based firm, and covers the 2025-26 fiscal year and the restatement of the 2024-25 fiscal year and ancillary services through FY 2029-2030. The work is set to be completed by Nov. 15.
The board approved the contract in a 5-0 vote.
Audit contract details
Interim Chief Financial Officer Kyna Koch said the cost is already accounted for in the district’s budget.
“And is actually less than we expected given our current situation — we were thrilled with the bid,” Koch said.
Koch said she believes this is Mauldin & Jenkins’ first school district audit in Kentucky, but that the firm works with school districts of more than 100,000 students throughout the Southeast.
“Quite frankly when I spoke to the folks at KDE they were thrilled because we’re running kind of short of auditors who want to do school district audits — so all around I think this was a win-win for everyone,” Koch said.
New finance director position
The board also approved a new job description for the position of Director of Finance. Acting Superintendent Dr. Bill Bradford said the title will replace two associate director positions.
“Which will not only save the school district money but it’s also going to streamline our work and align internal controls to make room for a more efficient unit,” Bradford said.
Koch said the position will be posted as soon as possible following the board’s approval.
Closed session
The board went into closed session for more than an hour to discuss pending investigations that could lead to employee discipline. When the board returned, it took no action and adjourned the meeting.
Copyright 2026 WKYT. All rights reserved.
The UK’s financial regulator should consider expanding its oversight to cover advanced artificial intelligence models used in financial services, according to a review commissioned by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), as policymakers assess whether existing rules can keep pace with rapidly evolving AI technology.
-
Atlanta, GA3 minutes agoMaryland kidnapping suspect taken into custody in Georgia
-
Minneapolis, MN5 minutes agoMan sentenced to federal prison for armed robberies of St. Paul bank, Minneapolis Walgreens
-
Indianapolis, IN11 minutes agoAdvocates say new public camping ban criminalizes homelessness
-
Pittsburg, PA18 minutes agoAllegheny County park with 200-year-old trees joins network of
-
Augusta, GA21 minutes agoLocal service members get more chances to expand their education
-
Washington, D.C26 minutes agoGreenberg Traurig Adds Former Commerce Official Joe Bartlett to Washington, D.C., Office
-
Cleveland, OH33 minutes agoGUARDIANS WILL SEND THREE TO MLB ALL-STAR GAME IN PHILADELPHIA
-
Austin, TX36 minutes agoTesla leases 683K sf speculative industrial building amid Central Texas expansion spree
