DataVolt to secure finance for Saudi AI sites ‘within 6 months’
Company builds data centres
CEO to use non-recourse financing
Uzbekistan deal tested structure
DataVolt, a Saudi-backed investor, developer and operator of renewable-powered AI data centres, expects to secure financing for all its facilities under construction in the kingdom “within six months”, chief executive Rajit Nanda said.
The company is pursuing non-recourse financing, in which lenders are repaid mainly from the cash generated by an individual facility rather than from the company’s wider business.
The model is common in power and water projects, where long-term contracts give lenders predictable revenue. It has also been used for data centres, but mainly where a single large technology company leases most of a facility.
DataVolt is seeking to use the funding structure for sites where several customers rent space, power and cooling capacity in the same building. That makes the financing harder because lenders must assess multiple customer contracts and credit profiles.
DataVolt’s Rajit Nanda
“We are going to get all the projects that are [currently] under construction in the kingdom project financed in the same format in the next six months,” Nanda told AGBI.
DataVolt did not disclose the combined value of its Saudi projects or how much debt it plans to raise.
Its Saudi pipeline is led by a flagship project at Neom, part of DataVolt’s $5 billion investment in the kingdom. The company agreed in February 2025 with Oxagon, Neom’s industrial hub, to develop a 1.5GW AI-focused data centre, with a first phase due to be operational by 2028. It is also developing a facility in Riyadh.
Tried and tested
DataVolt tested the non-recourse structure in June, reaching financial close on up to $150 million of 12-year non-recourse financing for TAS-1, a 12MW data centre under construction in Tashkent, Uzbekistan.
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) is contributing $78 million, alongside Germany’s DEG, France’s Proparco and the Opec Fund for International Development. The EBRD puts the project’s total cost at $250 million.
DataVolt is wholly owned by Vision Invest, a Saudi investor in public-private infrastructure spanning power, water and district cooling – sectors where project finance is well established.
It is chaired by Paddy Padmanathan, former chief executive of Saudi utility developer Acwa Power. DataVolt says its parent and affiliates operate more than $95 billion of infrastructure assets.
The financing agreement signing ceremony for TAS-1, a data centre under construction in Uzbekistan
Customers at TAS-1 include cloud providers, telecoms operators, payments companies and other enterprises operating in Uzbekistan. The first six-megawatt phase is almost fully leased, with less than 10 percent of capacity remaining, Nanda said.
DataVolt spent “weeks and months” on stress tests and scenario analysis, Nanda said, to satisfy lenders on “the certainty and creditworthiness of these contracts and the ability to replace them if there are defaults”.
“Our essence is essentially to convert the CapEx into the OpEx model,” he said, describing the shift from a large upfront outlay to recurring payments.
AI CapEx will ‘run out’
Nanda said the funding approach could gain traction as the cost of the global AI infrastructure buildout strains even the largest technology companies. “Very quickly the big techs will run out of their ability to finance this on their own balance sheet.”
Recent US deals were “project financed purely on the back of a single big customer,” Nanda said.
“So essentially the whole operational risk is transferred in the form of a credit risk to a AA or a single A-rated entity.”
Data centres are critical for AI because they provide the massive computational power and data storage required. They require heavy upfront spending on land, buildings, power connections and cooling systems.
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle are expected to spend about $750 billion on capital expenditure in 2026, equal to 38 percent of their combined revenue, according to S&P Global Ratings.
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Most retain enough balance-sheet capacity to absorb the outlay, S&P said, but it is eroding their free cash flow.
Hyperscalers – the largest cloud computing companies, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud – issued more debt in the first quarter of 2026 than in all of last year, about $115 billion against roughly $70 billion, the ratings agency said.
The lenders backing DataVolt increasingly see the business as an extension of the infrastructure they already fund, Nanda said.
“They have done fibre, they have done towers … I think we have taken some very interesting first steps … by putting in place a first structure [for data centres],” he said.
“It’s a new asset class for them.”
