Blackstone Inc. is reported to be arranging financing for AirTrunk Pty. for a new data center project in Australia, despite broader concerns about rising debt levels tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure. Bloomberg reports that Blackstone is finalizing a group of banks to underwrite an approximately A$4.3 billion (about $3 billion) loan to support the construction of AirTrunk’s new facility. The reporting indicates the loan is for the development phase of the project and reflects growing lender and investor worry about the scale of leverage accumulating across data center build-outs linked to AI demand.
Free Malaysia Today similarly states that Blackstone lines up a roughly US$3 billion loan. It adds that the financing is structured as a five-year loan and that the proceeds are intended for building AirTrunk’s SYD3 hyperscale data center.
Across the sources, the main points center on the size of the proposed loan, Blackstone’s role in underwriting/arranging it, the AirTrunk project it supports, and the context of increasing scrutiny of debt exposure in the data center sector.
