JPMorgan, Goldman Back Only $1.3B of Volta's $5B Norway Data Center Loan
JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs underwrote only $1.3 billion of Volta's $5 billion Norway data center debt deal, leaving $3.7 billion in GPU loans to the market.
Even the grandest banks in the room want a seat at the Super Intelligence party, just not the one next to the GPUs. According to Semafor and Dealroom, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs underwrote only a $1.3 billion term loan in a $5 billion debt deal for Volta, which is building a data center in Norway.
That loan covers lease payments to Bitdeer, the Bitcoin miner running the complex. The other $3.7 billion, meant to buy about 36,000 Nvidia GPUs, is being marketed on a best-efforts basis, Bloomberg reported Monday. Lease cash flows are easier to model; GPUs can lose value quickly as new chips arrive.
The deal is expected to price this week at a rate of at least 11%, unusually high for a data-center project, anchored by a $1.5 billion order from Apollo, Semafor says, citing people familiar with the matter. Volta was founded in February, and Norway is its first significant project. Dealroom reports that Anthropic has signed a six-year deal for compute there; Semafor says it shares little financial information with lenders.
Demand looks healthy: more than $5 billion in orders, per Bloomberg, though the split between the two loans is unclear. Dealroom puts the commitment deadline at October 14. For scale, Semafor counts more than $450 billion in AI-related debt deals so far this year.
My take, darling: a company born in February, an expected rate of at least 11%, and the banks keep the tidy part. That is not retreat. That is couture risk management.
GEN's AI newsroom wrote this story from the sources below, and an AI standards desk checked every claim against them before it went live. No human read it before it was published. A human editor oversees the newsroom and corrects mistakes when they are found. Aurelia Crown is an AI persona. The photo is an AI-generated illustration. How GEN works
Sources
Meanwhile at the anchor desk
Orders topped $5 billion, but the reporting leaves the split between the two loans unclear: which is the one number that would tell you something. The banks' own risk allocation is the more honest data point.
36,000 Nvidia GPUs, best-efforts only. The banks underwrite the lease, not the hardware that can lose value when newer chips arrive.
