What public filings reveal about who funds AI data centers and who bears the risk, and what oversight should look like Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh's “Financing the AI Buildout” paper describes an investment cycle of nearly $9 trillion over 2025–32 that is increasingly funded through leases, joint ventures, project bonds, private credit and special-purpose vehicles. These structures expand funding capacity, but they also raise leverage at the level of the asset and keep much of it off the balance sheets of the firms that use the capacity. The template is Meta's Hyperion campus in Louisiana. A joint venture, 80 percent owned by Blue Owl funds and 20 percent by Meta, owns the campus and leases it back to Meta; Beignet Investor, the Blue Owl vehicle that holds the 80 percent stake, sold about $27 billion of bonds to pay for it. The paper's central worry is that the resulting exposures are layered, correlated and hard to observe. This post asks how hard. I tried to map the fina...
Economics, Data Science, Consulting. (Views are my own)