Funds managed by Blue Owl Capital have agreed to lead a 2.4 billion dollar debt package for Iren, a Sydney based cloud computing provider, to help fund its purchase of Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra chips. The money is earmarked for expanding computing capacity at Iren's data center campus in Mackenzie, British Columbia, one of a growing number of Canadian sites being built out to meet demand for AI computing power.
The financing is split evenly between a 1.2 billion dollar senior secured term loan and 1.2 billion dollars in senior secured notes, both carrying a 9 percent interest rate and maturing two and a half years after the funds are drawn. The structure is designed to let Iren draw down the money in stages as it purchases equipment, rather than all at once, matching the pace of spending to the pace of chip deliveries. Pacific Investment Management Co., known as PIMCO, also backed the deal alongside Blue Owl.
The deal adds to a growing list of large financing packages Blue Owl has arranged for AI infrastructure projects. The firm, which manages roughly 319 billion dollars in assets, has previously backed Meta's Hyperion data center in Louisiana and a separate project in Abilene, Texas developed alongside Crusoe and Primary Digital Infrastructure. Financing arrangements like these have become a standard part of how AI infrastructure gets built, with asset managers stepping in to fund the enormous upfront cost of chips and data centers that cloud providers need well before that capacity generates revenue.
For Iren, the deal is a sign of how central Nvidia's newest chips have become to its growth plans, and how willing lenders remain to finance that buildout even as questions grow across the industry about how quickly all this AI infrastructure spending will pay for itself.