The Information · Tech & AI
TIER 4 Fri, 22 Aug 2025 22:08:54 +0000 (UTC)
There were no August vacations for bankers who do data center financing deals.͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ ͏ | | | | Aug 22, 2025 ---|--- | # The Briefing --- | | By Ken Brown ---|--- | | | | Supported by | ---|--- | | _Thanks for reading The Briefing, our nightly column where we break down the day’s news. If you like what you see, I encourage you tosubscribe to our reporting here._ * * * Greetings!There were no August vacations for bankers who do data center financing deals.At the start of the month, Meta reached a deal to borrow $26 billion and get $3 billion in equity tied to its data center build-out, according to Bloomberg. This week, JPMorgan Chase and Japanese lender Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group agreed to underwrite $22 billion in debt to Vantage Data Centers. Other nonvacationing bankers worked on xAI’s $10 billion debt and equity deal in July and CoreWeave’s $2.6 billion debt deal. I’d bet these bankers won’t get much time off this fall, either. The market is expected to grow to $60 billion this year, double the size of 2024, according to Project Finance News, which tracks the industry. The August deal tally might call for an upward revision of those estimates.Few doubt the numbers will keep growing. The borrowers are often the tech giants, which have some of the world’s best balance sheets. They are borrowing because the numbers are so big and because the debt generally sits on the data centers they are building rather than on the company. At the same time, the boom in private debt funds has meant more money is looking for higher returns. Data center deals satisfy that need. The spread between safe Treasury bonds and riskier, higher-paying debt remains small. Data center loans can offer higher yields than typical corporate loans, so investors are jumping at the opportunity to make a little extra cash. With Fed Chair Jerome Powell more open to rate cuts, the search for yield will grow more desperate. Data centers also allow private debt funds to put a lot of money to work all at once.What could stop this? Many of the AI debt deals are based on the idea that the data centers they build will generate enough revenue to pay off the borrowings. The debate over costs for the top AI providers will be closely watched. If AI prices resume their tumble, that might make some investors worry about getting repaid.The situation with electricity needs could also be a game ender for the borrowing frenzy. Data centers guzzle electricity, and power prices are up nearly 7% this year. Regulators are blaming surging demand from data centers. At minimum, higher electricity prices mean it costs more to run a data center. Unhappiness about rising prices is particularly acute in Texas, which passed a law giving the electric grid operator the ability to reduce power to data centers in a crisis. The Vantage data center project that just agreed to borrow $22 billion will be in Texas, along with projects tied to the Stargate project. One place where skepticism is growing is the stock market. Usually it’s the risk-averse bond market that shows signs of worry first, but not this time. The poster child for artificial intelligence risk and reward is CoreWeave, the data center company that had a spectacular IPO earlier this year. The company’s stock is down nearly 50% from its peak. Maybe bankers will get to take their summer vacations next year. ### The Information’s Stories of the Week If you ask investors, you might think Google is lagging in AI. But there are growing signs that Google is playing a central role in the AI sector, both through its own state-of-the-art Gemini models and in powering other companies’ efforts. Two stories we ran this week spotlighted Google’s role with other companies: Google is inadvertently supplying search data OpenAI uses in its chatbot and is more intentionally providing cloud services to another AI rival, Meta Platforms. The two stories are worth reading in tandem. On the same theme, Bloomberg reported Friday that Apple is in discussions with Google about using its Gemini AI model to power an improved version of Siri. In a similar vein, Jessica Lessin’s TITV interview with two AI agent founders, Bret Taylor and Winston Weinberg, delved into the far-reaching issue of how the economics of AI agents will evolve. As we wrote in this story, the computing cost for agents is causing some AI firms problems. But Taylor made the argument that long term, things will be different. What does his vision of the future remind you of?Also on the AI front, news publishers are paying attention to our reports about how much money OpenAI is making, and they’re beginning to push for a piece of the action, as we discussed in this story.On the AI dealmaking front, we broke the news that Character.AI is looking for a buyer or to raise money. Eight Sleep, which makes a smart mattress topper, raised money for AI, as we discussed.We also delved into prospects for the IPO market. OpenAI’s data center developer, Crusoe, is trying to raise money at a $10 billion valuation.On a related topic, Nvidia’s hopes of retaining its China market foothold were dealt another setback, we revealed.On other topics, we explained why Solana is making a comeback. On another crypto front, we revealed that the Trump family has partnered with a father-son duo to sell $1.5 billion of crypto tokens—and that pair has a history of run-ins with financial regulators.We dug into Walmart’s latest efforts to persuade big brands to sell on its marketplace—by pruning the ranks of small sellers! And our True Value financial columnist Anita Ramaswamy pointed out a flaw in investors’ reliance on the net revenue retention metric for evaluating software firms.Start your weekend off with this deep dive into Snap’s struggles to prosper, headlined with the big news that it is looking for financial backers to help its AR Spectacles effort. ### In Other News **•** Meta Platforms announced its AI unit would partner with Midjourney, a popular AI-powered image generator.**• ** OnlyFans’ revenue is still growing, but not at the same rapid pace as in recent years. Revenue rose 9% to $1.4 billion for the year ending in November 2024 compared to the prior year, according to a U.K. filing from the adult content site’s parent company, Fenix International, on Friday. Last year, revenue rose about 20% year over year. • Cloud security firm Netskope, the latest enterprise software firm to prepare a public offering, showed sales that grew 31% to $171 million in the quarter that ended in July.• Japanese financial services conglomerate SBI Holdings is teaming up with Singapore blockchain firm Startale Group to build a new trading platform for tokenized stocks—digital assets backed by shares in publicly traded companies.• TikTok is planning to lay off hundreds of staff in London working on content moderation and security as it outsources more of these efforts to AI, the Financial Times reported.• The U.S. government will take a nearly 10% stake in Intel, President Donald Trump said, reflecting grants it received under the CHIPS Act, The Wall Street Journal reported. ### Today on The Information’s TITV Check out today’s episode of TITV in which Luxe Capital’s Josh Wolfe shares his views on the current venture capital landscape. ### Recommended Newsletter Dealmaker was named the “Best in Business” newsletter for its insightful coverage of private technology and the AI hype cycle. 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