AirTrunk wants to borrow A$4.3bn, roughly $3bn, to build a single data centre in Sydney. The Blackstone-owned operator is in talks with banks to fund SYD3, a hyperscale facility of more than 400 megawatts, according to people familiar with the matter. The scale of the loan is a measure of how large, and how power-hungry, the buildings behind the AI boom have become.
The structure under discussion is a five-year facility, with banks approached to underwrite it. Terms are not final and could still change, the usual caveat for a deal at this stage, but the headline figure is striking on its own.
A single Australian data centre now commands debt financing comparable to the cost of a major piece of public infrastructure, raised from a syndicate of lenders rather than a government.
SYD3’s defining feature is its appetite for electricity. At more than 400MW, it sits among the most power-intensive facilities in the country, the kind of load that draws scrutiny from grid operators and local communities alike.
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That tension, between the capital rushing into AI compute and the physical limits of the power systems meant to feed it, has become the central constraint on the entire sector, and Sydney is now one of its front lines.
AirTrunk is the vehicle through which Blackstone has been pressing one of the largest bets in the industry. The private-equity group acquired the operator in 2024 in a transaction valued at about A$24bn, and has since used it to expand aggressively across the Asia-Pacific region.
That expansion has run on debt: AirTrunk has been assembling financing on a scale that tracks the ambition, including plans for its first data-centre-backed bond earlier this year.
The geographic push has been relentless. AirTrunk has laid out a $30bn plan to build five gigawatts of capacity in India by 2030, and acquired Lumina CloudInfra to seed that entry with 600MW of planned capacity.
SYD3 is the home-market counterpart to that overseas drive, a flagship in the country where AirTrunk built its business before Blackstone took it global.
Australia has become an unlikely magnet for this capital. A combination of renewable-energy resources, political stability, an English-speaking workforce, and proximity to Asia has drawn a wave of hyperscale investment, with Nvidia-backed Firmus heading for a $2bn ASX listing on the back of a $10bn Blackstone-led debt package.
The same logic that makes Australia attractive to AirTrunk is pulling rivals into the same market, and the same grid.
The financing also illustrates how the capital structure of the AI buildout has evolved. Operators like AirTrunk are no longer funding facilities purely from equity or corporate balance sheets; they are raising project-specific debt, asset-backed bonds, and syndicated loans tied to individual sites, treating data centres more like toll roads or power plants than like technology assets.
That shift lets Blackstone deploy capital at far greater scale, but it also loads the sector with leverage whose servicing depends on AI demand staying as strong as the models project.
Power is where that bet meets its hardest limit. A facility drawing more than 400MW needs grid capacity that does not appear overnight, and Australian operators are increasingly building their own generation and storage, or queuing for connections, to secure it.
The constraint has begun to draw political attention as communities weigh the jobs and investment data centres bring against the electricity and water they consume. SYD3, as one of the country’s most power-hungry projects, sits squarely inside that debate.
What the SYD3 loan will ultimately cost, and on what terms, is not yet settled, and AirTrunk and Blackstone have not commented publicly on the talks. The proceeds, if the financing closes, would fund construction of a facility whose power draw alone marks it out. For now, the number on the table is the story: $3bn of debt for one building, in a market where the constraint is no longer money but megawatts.
