Blackstone-backed AirTrunk secures S$2.3 billion green loan for second Singapore hyperscale data centre
As Singapore's largest green loan for a data centre, the transaction marks a major milestone in sustainable digital infrastructure financing in the region, said the Asia-Pacific and Japan hyperscale data centre specialist on Monday (Aug 18).
Credit Agricole, DBS and ING were coordinators and sustainability structuring agents for the financing structure. The mandated lead arrangers and bookrunners were MUFG, Natixis, Standard Chartered (Singapore) and UOB.
With the data centre sector fast emerging as a key growth industry in Asia, DBS group head of telecommunications, media and technology Amit Sinha noted that Singapore is 'uniquely positioned to catalyse the sector's transformation', as it is both a global financial hub and a data centre leader.
The financing agreement begins as a green loan with the option of being converted into a sustainability-linked loan (SLL) – a debt instrument where the interest rate can be raised or lowered depending on the borrower's achievement of pre-determined sustainability performance indicators.
AirTrunk will partner technology companies to develop the new data centre, which will be sited in Loyang – where its first data centre AirTrunk SGP1 is located.
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The data centre will provide its partners in Singapore and South-east Asia with more than 70 megawatts of essential cloud and artificial intelligence computing capacity.
It has been designed to achieve a Building and Construction Authority (BCA) Green Mark Platinum rating – the top certification level under the BCA's building rating scheme – AirTrunk said.
This comes as the campus features green concrete and green steel throughout, to reduce embodied carbon, it added.
The data centre is also designed to attain a Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) score of 1.20, which is among the lowest data centre PUE scores in Singapore, AirTrunk noted.
PUE is the ratio of the total energy a data centre uses to that of the IT equipment energy used. Data centres with lower PUEs are more efficient.
AirTrunk founder and chief executive officer, Robin Khuda, remarked that the loan's financing structure highlights 'the strength, depth, and international scale of Singapore's financial ecosystem'.
Credit Agricole head of telecom finance for Apac, Jasmine Zhang, said that the option to convert the green loan into an SLL at a later stage is a 'holistic approach to long-term impact'.
The loan aligns with the Monetary Authority of Singapore's (MAS) Technical Screening Criteria of the Singapore-Asia Taxonomy for Sustainable Finance and AirTrunk's Green Financing Framework, AirTrunk said.
The company added that all financial incentives from the loan will be directed to its social impact fund.
'(The loan) reflects growing momentum in the shift towards responsible investment, and accelerates Singapore's trajectory as a world-leading green finance hub – a vision championed by the MAS,' the data centre firm said.
Beyond Singapore, AirTrunk operates data centres in Malaysia, Hong Kong, Japan and Australia.
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