The opportunity
Asian data center financing is likely to grow rapidly. There is a large-scale opportunity for investors, bankers, lawyers and other debt capital markets participants.
What is happening
Based on currently announced spend and our estimates of expected spend, we may see over $100 billion of data center capex in APAC per year for the next few years.
The amount of financing work to be done is materially higher – as these deals go from build stage (corporate balance sheet or project financing) through to take-out financings once data centers are built. Many of these deals are also short duration – meaning regular refinancings. The end result is that this could be a multi-billion-dollar per year fee market for intermediaries and an opportunity to find outsized return opportunities for investors.
This needs to be financed.
The scale of this spend creates large opportunities for debt capital markets participants. The size and newness of these financings mean that novel approaches need to be developed, capable credit distribution will be valuable, and participants who can understand the businesses and evaluate risk and market dynamics better than others can have a large advantage (particularly over established markets where relative value is already priced).
Some deals/data points
ByteDance raised US$29.6 billion from around 30 banks (Chinese, US, European, Asian) in a three-year facility earlier this month (September 2026). The loan is unsecured. The funds are expected to be used largely to finance ByteDance’s AI and data center projects outside China. The deal was upsized from $20 billion on strong demand.
Indonesian data center operator Zankore (with credit support from NVIDIA) signed a senior syndicated loan deal of up to $3.1 billion earlier this month (September 2026) to fund the purchase of NVIDIA GPUs to be used across Indonesia and South East Asia.
HyperVault – the JV between US PE firm TPG ($300 billion+ AUM) and Indian tech firm Tata Consultancy Services announced earlier this month (September 2026) a new $7.4 billion data center in India – which will be one of India’s largest AI data centers once completed.
Digital Connexion – the JV between US manager Brookfield ($1 trillion+ AUM), US data center REIT Digital Realty Trust ($50 billion assets) and Indian conglomerate Reliance announced plans to invest $11 billion by 2030 to build an AI data center in India.
Google announced it plans to spend $15 billion over 5 years to build a data center in India.
Amazon announced plans to invest $13 billion to build its cloud infrastructure in India.
Blackstone bought Australia headquartered data center company AirTrunk for AUD 24 billion (US$16 billion) which operates data centers across Australia, Singapore, Japan, Malaysia, Hong Kong and India. AirTrunk closed an AUD 16 billion (USD 10 billion) financing from 60 banks and investors.
Access the subscriber-access section on this article. In the subscriber-access section, we cover what this means for issuers and investors going forward, and what bankers, investors, issuers and other market participants might want to do now.
