EdgeCore Digital Infrastructure announced the close of two limited-recourse senior secured term loans totaling $1.5 billion to fund construction of two single-tenant hyperscale data centers in Sterling, VA. AS01 (initial occupancy November 2026) and AS02 (initial occupancy July 2027) will support a combined 114 MW of critical load across 685,000 sq ft, engineered for AI / cloud high-density workloads. Both centers are fully pre-leased. Coordinating lead arrangers: Apterra Infrastructure Capital, Global Infrastructure Partners (BlackRock), ING Capital. The AS01 facility's financing was structured as a Green Loan aligned with the latest Green Loan Principles and EdgeCore's 2025 Green Finance Framework — believed to be the first US hyperscale data-center construction financing closed under the LMA Green Loan Principles framework. EdgeCore is a Partners Group portfolio company.
Primary source · Morningstar / EdgeCore press release ↗
Why it matters
Two pieces of signal — both worth adding to the financing / capital-markets layer of competitive-landscape-by-layer.md and to a new strategy/green-loan-data-center-financing.md page if the pattern repeats. (1) Per-MW debt: $1.5B / 114 MW = $13.16M/MW of senior secured construction debt for fully-leased hyperscale shells in NoVa. That's an empirical anchor for the senior-debt component of the 'firm-equivalent MW underwrite' frame in firm-equivalent-mw-underwrite.md, and notably high relative to the $7-9M/MW that consensus underwriting implies for fully-leased Tier III hyperscale shells. The 60-70% LTV implied here suggests Apterra / GIP / ING are pricing in a significant premium above replacement cost — meaning fully-pre-leased NoVa shells are now priced like infrastructure assets rather than real-estate assets, and the capital structure is increasingly bifurcated between pre-leased (infra-style) and speculative (real-estate-style) financing tiers. (2) Green Loan structuring is the more interesting signal. The Green Loan Principles framework requires the borrower to (a) identify Use of Proceeds tied to environmental categories, (b) describe a Process for Project Evaluation and Selection, (c) ring-fence Management of Proceeds, (d) provide ongoing Reporting on environmental KPIs. For a data-center construction loan, that's a meaningfully harder commitment than a vanilla green-bond gesture — EdgeCore had to justify AS01 specifically as a Green Loan project, which means the design-stage embodied-carbon, water-usage, and operational-PUE / WUE metrics are now contractually load-bearing for debt service. This is the first observable case of green-financing covenants becoming a constraint on data-center design rather than a marketing layer on top of standard financing. If the pattern spreads to other Partners Group / GIP / ING-tier financings, every hyperscale design package suddenly has a financing-covenant-driven KPI module that submission-readiness needs to model alongside the regulatory module. Worth a 30-minute pull-through of the 2025 EdgeCore Green Finance Framework PDF (referenced in the press release) to see what the actual covenants are and which design dials are constrained.
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