2 hours ago
37
CleanSpark, a company that built its reputation mining Bitcoin, just pulled off something remarkable: selling roughly $2.25 billion in junk bonds to finance an AI data center leased to Meta Platforms. Investors placed around $10 billion in orders, oversubscribing the deal by more than four times.
The transaction marks the first US high-yield bond offering tied to a Meta data center project.
The deal structure
The offering consists of five-year senior secured notes issued through CSDC Finance I LLC, a CleanSpark subsidiary. Proceeds will fund a 175 megawatt AI data center campus in Sandersville, Georgia.
The data center is backed by a 20-year triple-net lease with Anviran LLC, a Meta subsidiary. In a triple-net lease, the tenant covers rent plus all operating expenses, including taxes, insurance, and maintenance.
Initial yield discussions landed around 8.5%, roughly two percentage points above the average yield for BB-rated debt.
Morgan Stanley led the underwriting, with Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo rounding out the syndicate.
From Bitcoin mining to AI hosting
CleanSpark’s pivot is worth lingering on. The company has been a pure-play Bitcoin miner for years, operating large-scale facilities that consume enormous amounts of electricity to validate transactions on the Bitcoin network. Now it’s channeling that same energy infrastructure expertise into a different compute-intensive business: hosting AI workloads for one of the largest technology companies on the planet.
For CleanSpark, the Meta lease transforms its revenue profile from the volatile world of Bitcoin block rewards into something far more predictable. Twenty years of contracted rent from a tenant with a market capitalization exceeding $1 trillion is a fundamentally different risk proposition.
Prior investment-grade and private placement deals have been structured around Meta data center projects. But those sat comfortably in the safer end of the credit spectrum. This offering breaks new ground by bringing Meta-linked data center financing into the high-yield market.
Disclosure: This article was edited by Editorial Team. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.
English (US) ·