Hyperscale data centre specialist AirTrunk has secured a 9.5 billion ringgit loan from a consortium of 30 local and international financial institutions, including the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation (IFC).
This is the largest green project finance transaction for a single data centre in Malaysia, and the largest single-asset financing AirTrunk has done.
The financing was led by ten global coordinators, including BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole, DBS, Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, and HSBC. The other financial institutions involved in the transaction include the National Bank of Kuwait, ING Bank, and CIMB Bank.
DealStreetAsia had reported earlier this month that the IFC is considering an investment in AirTrunk’s hyperscale data centre expansion in Johor.
This is the largest green project finance transaction for a single data centre in Malaysia
The funding supports AirTrunk’s expansion in Malaysia, in particular the development of the JHB2 data centre campus, which is designed to be more energy-efficient with a target Power Usage Effectiveness of 1.37, and the use of water-efficient cooling technology, the company said in a statement.
AirTrunk is also planning to invest another $3 billion to develop two additional campuses in the state of Johor.
It is reportedly planning to list a real estate investment trust (REIT) in Singapore later this year, which could raise some $1.5 billion.
The Australian data centre operator had also announced in June that it would invest $30 billion within the next four years to build out 5 gigawatts of new data centre capacity in India—a market it entered in April with the purchase of Lumina CloudInfra.
AirTrunk was acquired by Blackstone and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB) in late 2024 for A$24 billion in what was the world’s largest data centre transaction.
Global investors are pouring money into data centres because of rising demand from cloud computing and AI companies.
