This Is What It Takes to Get a Data Center Financed | Odd Lots

Our Take

Credit to Bloomberg's Odd Lots for getting a lawyer who actually structures these deals to explain the plumbing. When a Baker Botts partner walks you through 'how you get your ducks in a row' to finance a data center, what he's really describing is a machine built to move fast on land, power, and tax deals before most communities know what hit them. The financing stack, the power purchase agreements, the on-site generation workarounds when the grid can't deliver — all of it is designed to de-risk the developer's capital, not the ratepayer's bill or the neighbor's well water.

That's the part these finance-world explainers tend to gloss over. Every legal complication Wofford flags as an obstacle to close a deal is, from where we sit, a decision point where a county commission, a utility regulator, or a state legislature had leverage and often gave it away for a promised tax base or a handful of jobs. The 'increasingly their own power plants' line should stop you cold — that's a tacit admission that grids can't absorb this load without new gas turbines or worse showing up next to somebody's backyard, financed and lawyered into place long before the public hearing.

If you want to see where this is actually landing — not in the abstract, but in specific counties, on specific parcels, tied to specific utility filings — check our facility map. And if your town is being asked to sign off on one of these deals, our take-action page has what you need to ask the right questions before the financing is already locked.