JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs curb exposure on Volta AI loan

JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs are pulling back from fully underwriting a $5 billion loan package for Volta Infrastructure Holdings, an AI cloud startup, according to Bloomberg. The package consists of a $1.3 billion term loan and a $3.7 billion chip loan.

The term loan will cover lease payments to Bitdeer Technologies Group, a Bitcoin miner that operates the Norway data center site where Volta will run its operations. The chip loan will fund the purchase of roughly 36,000 Nvidia graphics processing units. The site offers 133 megawatts of capacity powered by Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips, and Volta is developing it in partnership with Bitdeer.

Volta is a neocloud, meaning a company that rents access to chips and AI infrastructure to other businesses. In August it signed a $10 billion, six-year agreement with Anthropic to provide computing capacity at the Norway site. The company was founded in January by former Brookfield Asset Management executives Ricard Boada and Sofia Gumuzio. It has raised $300 million across a seed round and Series A financing, which values it at $2.4 billion.

The significance for the Nordics is that the financing is tied to a large AI compute build-out in Norway, backed by a multibillion-dollar customer contract. The two banks' decision to curb their exposure means the loan will not be fully underwritten by them. The available details do not say how the remainder of the package will be funded or why the banks changed their position.