10 Power Players Behind The Data Center Debt Boom

Lewis has been active in the sector for nearly two decades, dating back to 2007 — well before the AI-driven boom pushed the industry into the spotlight.

Over that time, the scale of projects has shifted dramatically: what was once a $25 million deal is now dwarfed by gigawatt-scale campuses requiring billions. "If you can't invest a billion dollars, we don't even want to talk to you," Lewis said, underscoring how the surge in demand has raised the bar for investors.

Citizens, a Northeast regional lender, has become a significant player in the data center boom by building a 35-person specialized team spanning financing, advisory, and capital markets under the leadership of New York-based Managing Director Lewis.

Lewis's team traces its roots to DH Capital, a specialist advisory firm acquired by Citizens in 2022, which has completed more than 200 transactions totaling over $60 billion across digital infrastructure, including data centers, fiber networks, and cloud platforms, according to the company's website. The group had been a key advisor on major deals, including the sale of hyperscale data center operator ODATA to Aligned Data Centers.

Citizens helps arrange construction financing, often through syndicated credit facilities, which is later refinanced in the public markets through structures such as asset-backed securities. This allows developers to recycle capital and fund new projects as projects grow larger and more capital-intensive.

As the deals have grown more complex, Lewis said his team has had to become as fluent in the technical details, from learning to review electrical diagrams, mechanical systems, and land-use permits. That expertise, he said, allows bankers to assess better what could delay or derail a project — and to give investors confidence that it will ultimately be completed.

Lewis joined DH Capital after working as a finance executive at fiber-optic provider InfoHighway Communications.

Magliaro describes herself as the "quarterback" behind KKR's push into large-scale data center investment and financing.

We're "thinking about how we're going to finance the opportunity," said Magliaro, who is the head of structured capital markets within KKR's capital markets business. "Is it going to be bank capital, institutional capital? What should the capital structure look like?"

Magliaro, who joined KKR in 2019 after a 23-year career in structured finance at Citi, said that her team completed about 140 financing deals totaling $67 billion in 2025. Almost half were data center deals.

In 2022, she and her team secured $12 billion of debt for the take-private acquisition of the data center developer and operator CyrusOne by KKR and Global Infrastructure Partners — one of the industry's largest M&A deals in recent years. The financing included almost 30 banks and several additional institutional investors.

She and her team later refinanced those bank loans with cheaper, securitized debt and also private placements with institutional clients. Last year, they arranged a $7.9 billion borrowing facility for the company to help it continue to scale.

Magliaro, who is based in New York and oversees 12 people globally, said she and her group work as an "extension" of the firm's investment team.

"It's our job to take the capital structure and the financing off their plate so they can evaluate the risk of the investment," Magliaro said.

While Magliaro and her team finance KKR's data center investment pipeline, she said that about half of the debt she and the firm's capital markets team arranged last year was for third-party clients in deals that didn't otherwise involve the firm.

"We are completely agnostic around what type of capital structure we put in place, we think like owners, and we look to create the best capital solution," Magliaro said.

DigitalBridge, a $115 billion investment firm focused on digital assets, has one of the only lending platforms dedicated exclusively to extending debt to the sector, including data center development.

Its stature as a specialist has made Criares, a senior managing director at the company and the head of its credit business, a source not only for financing but also for insight. He joined Digital Bridge in 2020.

"We're seeing virtually every deal," Criares said. "We're able to provide clients with comparables and what's going on throughout the market."

The company focuses on providing senior debt to sub-investment-grade borrowers, leaning on its sector expertise to manage risk. The platform can also do subordinate loans, higher-leverage loans, Criares said.

"We can assess the risk and whether that property will be usable for multiple tenants," Criares said.

At the end of 2023, the firm closed a $1.1 billion credit fund and has since raised capital from institutional partners who co-invest in loans.

"We've built up a basket of partners who know what we're looking at, our risk appetite, the way we shape deals, and the way we go about our diligence," Criares said. "So that's where you gain trust and comfort with those co-investors and allows you to speak for more capital than you have in committed funds."

In a market crowded with lenders eager to finance the data center boom, Criares said that the firm's fluency with data centers allows it to move quickly and seize on deals.

"There's still a lot of smart people sitting in a lot of well-respected debt houses that can come to the same conclusions as us," Criares said. "I'm proud of our response times and believe we compete favorably."

Jackson co-led Apollo Global Management's acquisition of a majority stake in Stream Data Centers last year, marking the firm's largest data center investment to date.

Jackson, who is Apollo's head of digital infrastructure for credit and insurance, expects to play a role in financing the buildout of Stream's 4 gigawatts of future development capacity.

"We're capitalizing their pipeline where they're building mid-to large-size data centers for primarily hyperscalers in strong markets," Jackson said. "We are providing an attractive cost of capital."

Earlier this year, Apollo struck a deal to invest equity and lend more than $3 billion to a venture that will lease Nvidia GPU chips to Elon Musk's artificial intelligence developer xAI.

Jackson says he sees more opportunities for Apollo to serve as a hybrid financier, where it might both invest equity and also provide debt to transactions, including lower-cost capital from its large insurance business, Athene.

"We have an open architecture business that allows us to do a lot of different things and my team and I are the leading edge of the spear for engagement and then structuring," Jackson said. "We can deliver insurance capital, we can deliver hybrid capital, and we can also deliver key services to key customers in a programmatic way."

He also sees ways to streamline the enormous debts needed to support multi-billion-dollar data center construction deals. Most development projects source construction loans, then refinance into long-term loans when complete.

"We could put on permanent financing at the construction stage and take refinancing out of the picture," Jackson said. "We'll do stuff like that, that's kind of more bespoke."

At Goldman Sachs, Greenwood has worked on several of the largest digital infrastructure financings, including multi-billion-dollar debt raises tied to Oracle-backed data center developments and other projects reshaping how these assets are funded.

Those transactions reflect the growing scale and complexity of the sector, where projects increasingly resemble infrastructure investments rather than traditional real estate.

"Up until two years ago, data centers were primarily underwritten as a real estate play," said Greenwood, who is the global head of infrastructure and real asset finance in the bank's Capital Solutions Group. "But the size, location, and bespoke nature of the new Gen-AI data center campuses are requiring a different risk allocation and mitigants, making these large projects look more like large infrastructure transactions."

That shift is being driven in part by changes in how these projects are powered. "Many of these projects are requiring bespoke behind-the-meter power solutions as opposed to sourcing power from existing power plants on the grid," he said.

As a result, the capital required to fund these developments has expanded significantly. "While the bank market continues to have significant appetite for well-structured projects with investment-grade offtakers, there is a need to expand pockets of capital to include institutional investors and insurance companies," Greenwood said.

At the same time, Greenwood noted that the pace of development is running up against real-world limits. He said, "There is a physical limitation on the ability to spend these sums of money," pointing to constraints in labor, including electricians, as well as supply chain bottlenecks for equipment such as turbines and microgrid components.

A Goldman partner since 2018, Greenwood previously held senior structured finance roles at Goldman and Citi spanning Latin America, infrastructure, and energy.

Fang is familiar with 13-figure sums.

In 2020, Bank of America put her in charge of an effort to lend $1.5 trillion by 2030 to projects with a sustainable theme, including renewable energy, clean transportation, carbon capture, and community development. Fang has since helped deploy more than half of that amount and said she's roughly "$150 billion ahead of pace."

Fang has leveraged her background in power and infrastructure to help the bank push into the multi-trillion-dollar data center financing boom.

"I've been doing this for 27 years across capital structures, across sectors," said Fang, who was a managing director at Goldman Sachs before joining Bank of America in 2010. "Understanding cashflow-based lending, understanding project finance lending, understanding how we actually underwrite risk factors are really hard to digest if you haven't done it before."

Last year, she arranged for Bank of America to be a lead lender on a $7.1 billion construction loan for an OpenAI data center in Texas. It was the first in an initiative called Stargate, an expected $500 billion buildout of data centers across the country.

Fang is now leading a separate effort to raise $14 billion of debt for another Stargate data center planned for Michigan.

Fang said she is focused on the creative structures being utilized to pay the huge tabs for data center development. Last year, for instance, Blue Owl arranged a bond offering to raise debt for a roughly $30 billion data center for Meta in Louisiana. Her team has also used project bonds and securitized products alongside balance sheet construction loans.

Fang, the bank's global head of infrastructure and sustainable finance and the cohead of its global capital solutions team, said that she has reached across the bank to compete for data center deals, collaborating with its commercial real estate and investment banking groups.

"When I took this over, we formed this really effective joint venture within the firm," Fang said.

As tens of billions of dollars pour into AI infrastructure, Myers is helping figure out how to finance projects at a scale the market hasn't seen before.

As global head of private capital markets and securitized products at Morgan Stanley, Myers has worked on several of the largest and most complex financings in the sector, including a $2.6 billion loan tied to CoreWeave and a project bond supporting a $27 billion joint venture between Meta and Blue Owl to build a major data center campus in Louisiana. His team has also been active in asset-backed securities for operators such as Switch, Stack, Compass, and QTS.

Much of that work has focused on expanding how these projects are funded — moving beyond traditional construction loans and bringing institutional investors in earlier. Myers said his team has helped introduce new structures, including project bonds and other capital markets solutions, to tap deeper pools of funding as projects scale.

To support that shift, Myers is part of Morgan Stanley's investment banking data center task force. He described this as a "bottoms-up underwrite," examining everything from construction contracts to power agreements and insurance coverage.

That multidisciplinary approach reflects the nature of the assets. "It's a huge component of what we're looking to build," he said, referring to the need to combine financial expertise with a deep understanding of the infrastructure.

For Myers, the scale and speed of the current buildout mark a defining moment. He said the surge in AI infrastructure investment is "really historic in scale," comparing past infrastructure expansions to the rise of railroads — but with a new sense of urgency driven by competition among the world's largest technology companies.

Tran, the deputy head of structured finance at Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, led what she believes was one of the first project financing deals tied to a data center in the US in 2016.

"At that point, I did not know what a data center was, but I did know that from a project-financing perspective, a long-term lease with a high-credit counterparty is golden," Tran said.

Project finance, where the debt is collateralized by the facility's cash flow rather than the property itself, has since become the dominant model for data center lending, and Tran has become a star financier who has helped arrange tens of billions of dollars of debt tied to a surge of development.

As data centers have grown to accommodate the vast computing necessary for AI, Tran has been a leader in arranging increasingly massive transactions. She structured the first widely syndicated billion-dollar data center financing deal in 2022 and oversaw SMBC's $1.28 billion loan to the Blackstone-owned data center builder, QTS, that year.

Last year, the bank was a participant among a group of lenders that extended $18 billion to a data center campus for Oracle and OpenAI in New Mexico and $38 billion to projects in Texas and Wisconsin for the same users.

To help inject new cash into the market, Tran and her team sought and received investment-grade credit ratings on construction debt that SMBC originated. The ratings allowed it to sell off portions to pensions and insurers, unlocking more capital.

Tran is expanding further into the asset—backed securities market, project bonds, and private placements among institutional clients.

"Every market is going to be stepping up and expanding," Tran said. "Last year was the busiest year ever. This year is fully expected to be busier."

At JPMorgan, Wilcoxen sits at the center of one of the fastest-growing segments in finance, helping raise capital for the physical infrastructure underpinning the AI boom. He describes the "cloud" not as an abstract digital service, but as a network of tangible assets — data centers, fiber, and wireless infrastructure — that must be built, powered, and financed at massive scale.

As the sector has grown, Wilcoxen has focused on what he calls the industry's biggest constraint: how to accelerate "time to power." With demand for computing capacity far outpacing the ability of existing electrical grids to support it, his team increasingly works alongside energy and infrastructure specialists to evaluate whether projects can secure the power they need. "We don't have the grid infrastructure for this," he said. "There's a lot of work to do."

Wilcoxen's role as global head of digital infrastructure has also centered on finding new sources of capital to fund that expansion. "The industry continues to grow and it continues to consume capital," he said. "So the challenge has just been finding new markets to access to effectively quench the demand for that capital."

He has worked on several of the largest financings in the space, including a $3.8 billion bond offering for Fleet Data Centers in February, which helped demonstrate that developers could tap institutional bond markets for large-scale funding; and a roughly $9 billion investment in Vantage Data Centers in 2024, underscoring the scale of capital now required to compete in the sector.

More broadly, Wilcoxen said the buildout extends well beyond AI alone, pointing to the growing demand for data infrastructure across cloud computing, enterprise migration, and wireless networks.

"We're building the physical underpinnings of the future technological progress of mankind," he said.

As global cohead of leveraged finance at Morgan Stanley, Graham has been helping channel institutional capital into the massive buildout of AI infrastructure.

He has led a series of large financings, including a $3.2 billion senior secured notes offering for TeraWulf in 2025, as well as multi-billion-dollar transactions for companies such as Applied Digital and Fluidstack.

Those deals reflect how financing for data centers is evolving, with banks tapping institutional investors earlier and structuring transactions to absorb far larger pools of capital. Graham said Morgan Stanley has helped bring traditional bond investors — including large mutual funds and asset managers — into projects that were once financed primarily through bank lending.

To support that shift, he's part of a global data center task force the bank established in 2024. Now, specialists across leveraged finance, real estate, technology, power, and capital markets structure increasingly complex deals and address the sector's biggest constraint — access to capital.

That approach has also changed how deals are marketed. Rather than relying on traditional roadshows, Graham and his team began flying investors to project sites to see data centers at different stages of construction and speak directly with engineers and developers. The strategy helped build investor confidence in an asset class with little precedent at this scale.

Under his leadership, the firm has also accelerated execution timelines, completing financings in under a month in some cases. Graham said those innovations have helped open a new market for capital, raising tens of billions of dollars from institutional investors.

"We really are at the beginning stages," he said, likening the current moment to "the advent of the PC, or the advent of the cell telephone, or the advent of air travel — you pick your major milestone over the last 100 years."