Stack Infrastructure, the data-centre arm of the private-credit giant Blue Owl, is seeking a loan of about $5.9 billion, Bloomberg reported.
The deal, if it closes, would rank among the larger single financings in a market that has become the engine room of the AI build-out.
Blue Owl has made itself central to that market. Through Stack and a string of joint ventures, it has become one of the biggest private financiers of the data centres AI needs, part of a wave of borrowing that now runs into the hundreds of billions.
The new loan follows quickly on the last. Stack raised $2.1 billion as recently as February, and the jump to nearly $6 billion in a matter of months is a measure of how fast the appetite for capacity, and for debt, is growing.
The structure is characteristic of the moment. Rather than fund data centres from cash, the companies building them increasingly borrow against the assets and the long-term contracts that anchor them, a model that spreads the enormous cost across lenders hungry for yield.
Blue Owl is no bystander in that shift. It has helped arrange tens of billions in financing for hyperscale projects, including large facilities tied to Meta, putting private credit where traditional banks have grown more cautious.
The scale is what has changed. Individual AI campuses now cost tens of billions to build, sums that outstrip what any single bank wants to lend, which has handed private-credit firms like Blue Owl a central role they did not hold a few years ago.
The caution has a reason. Data-centre debt is only as safe as the demand that underpins it, and a few high-profile wobbles, including a soured Oracle-linked deal, have reminded lenders that the AI boom carries real credit risk beneath the enthusiasm.
Oracle needed PIMCO to anchor a $16 billion financing after banks pulled back, and infrastructure funds from Blackstone to Brookfield are writing cheques that would have looked outlandish two years ago.
The lenders are betting on a simple proposition. Compute is scarce, the companies renting it are among the richest on earth, and the contracts behind these buildings can run for a decade, which makes the loans look, on paper, like some of the safest bets in infrastructure.
The risk is that the proposition is circular. Much of the demand comes from AI firms still burning cash, and some of the debt is being backstopped by chipmakers with their own reasons to keep the build-out going, which knits the industry’s fortunes tightly together.
Blue Owl’s size gives it room the banks lack. As a private-credit manager, it can hold loans that regulated lenders would balk at, and it has leaned into that advantage as the AI-infrastructure market has swollen.
The $5.9 billion figure, for now, is Bloomberg’s reporting rather than a closed deal. Terms, pricing, and the exact assets behind it will decide how the market receives it, and large data-centre loans have both sailed through and stumbled in recent months.
What is not in doubt is the direction. The money required to build AI has outgrown balance sheets and is being met, more and more, with borrowed capital, and Stack’s latest raise is another rung on a ladder the whole industry is climbing.
Each of these loans is a wager on the same future. If AI demand holds, the debt is cheap money against a durable asset; if it cools, the buildings and the borrowings will both look heavier than they do today.
For Blue Owl, the calculation is one it keeps making. The firm has decided that financing the picks and shovels of the AI rush is the safer way to profit from it, and a $5.9 billion loan is its latest move to stay at the front of that queue.
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