JPMorgan Chase has started reaching out to lenders about a $5 billion debt package to fund AI data center development by Volta Infra Holdings, a company that barely existed in public consciousness a year ago and now finds itself at the center of Wall Street’s favorite new obsession: powering artificial intelligence.
A startup with very deep pockets
Volta is not your typical startup seeking its first big loan. The company raised $300 million in venture capital earlier in August, a round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital that valued Volta at $2.4 billion post-money. Among the investors who joined that round: Nvidia, and the family office of Michael Dell.
Around the same time as the equity raise, Volta also locked in a $5 billion non-dilutive infrastructure program with Azora, a Spanish asset management firm. Whether the JPMorgan debt package is part of that Azora arrangement or represents additional capital on top of it remains unclear.
The contracts driving the capital
What gives lenders comfort in a deal this size is the revenue pipeline Volta has already assembled. The company holds a six-year, $10 billion compute procurement agreement with Anthropic, the AI safety company behind the Claude AI system. That single contract is worth more than four times Volta’s current valuation.
Volta’s inaugural data center campus in Tydal, Norway, will feature 121 megawatts of capacity, powered by hydropower. That facility is spoken for under a 16-year colocation agreement with Bitdeer Technologies, a deal valued at roughly $4.7 billion. Between the Anthropic contract and the Bitdeer lease alone, Volta has nearly $15 billion in contracted future revenue.