This Is What It Takes to Get a Data Center Financed
Understanding an extremely complicated asset.
An Amazon Web Services data center in Ashburn, Virginia.
Photographer: Lexi Critchett/BloombergListen to Odd Lots on Apple Podcasts
Listen to Odd Lots on Spotify
Watch Odd Lots on YouTube
Subscribe to the newsletter
Data centers are weird things. They're partly real estate assets. They're partly extremely advanced technological products. And they have to find a way to consume a tremendous amount of electricity from the grid -- or they increasingly have their own power plants on site. And beyond that, they've become extremely controversial, with more and more communities pushing back on their development. So how do you get all your ducks in a row when a new project is proposed? Who provides the financing at which stage of the agreement? What are the legal complications that arise? On this episode, we speak with Travis Wofford, a partner at the law firm Baker Botts, who works in the firm's AI practice. We discuss all the intricacies of these projects, the challenges that arise, and how things have changed in this space just since the beginning of the year.