Developers of a Utah data center have secured one of the biggest construction loans in recent years, the latest sign of the market’s enormous appetite for facilities that provide the backbone for artificial intelligence. JPMorgan Chase and Starwood Property Trust have agreed to lend $2 billion for the 100-acre data center campus in West Jordan, Utah, outside Salt Lake City. The borrower, a venture of real-estate investor CIM Group and Novva Data Centers, said the facility will be able to provide 175 megawatts of continuous power. That is roughly enough juice to power 175,000 average-size U.S. homes. The loan marks the second data center construction loan of more than $2 billion this year, following a $2.3 billion loan in January from JPMorgan Chase for a facility in Abilene, Texas. Until recently nearly every data center construction loan was less than $1 billion, and typically amounted to less than half of that. Now, lenders are starting to write much bigger checks because data centers are getting much larger to serve AI, which consumes more advanced chips and more power. Data centers are also increasingly getting commitments from big-name tenants before breaking ground, rather than building on a speculative basis with little preleasing.

Full exclusive : Banks loan one of the biggest construction loans ever for a data center highlighting booming demand for artificial intelligence.