CyrusOne scores another $7.9B in debt financing to expand AI datacenter empire

The sum comes on top of $1.8 billion in capital the datacenter operator sored back in May, bringing its total debt financing to roughly $9.7 billion. The bulk of the funding will support a variety of existing and future datacenter developments with a heavy emphasis on meeting growing demand for sustainable AI infrastructure, the outfit explained in a Monday statement.

Whether this investment will include entire GPU clusters or just powered shells where others can park their own accelerators isn't clear. Given the amount of cash involved, we'd assume the former, and have asked CyrusOne for more information.

Whatever the case, it's now common knowledge that training the large language models (LLMs) that power generative AI chatbots, image generators, and code assistants requires massive quantities of accelerators connected over high-speed networks. It's not uncommon to see clusters of 10,000 or more GPUs working in this way.

CyrusOne's emphasis on sustainability is also unsurprising, and not just because it has committed achieving carbon neutrality by 2030. AI datacenters have garnered considerable attention for the vast amounts amount of energy and water they require to operate. Emphasizing sustainability can therefore impact both a datacenter operator’s bottom line and burnish its environmental credentials. We fancy CyrusOne is likely less motivated by preserving the planet than maintaining margins by reducing energy consumption.

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