A development joint venture has secured $600M in construction financing to complete a Virginia data center for artificial intelligence cloud provider CoreWeave.
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The 50-megawatt build-to-suit facility, which has already been leased to CoreWeave, is being built by a JV of PowerHouse Data Centers, Chirisa Technology Parks and Blue Owl Real Estate. It is located in CTP’s 350-acre campus near Richmond.
Brokerage firm Newmark arranged the $600M construction loan from a syndicate led by Société Générale to finance the remaining build-out on the project, which broke ground earlier this year and is expected to deliver initial capacity in 2025.
CoreWeave is already a tenant at CTP’s Richmond-area campus, where it signed a 28 MW deal in September 2023.
The Virginia project is part of a development partnership between American Real Estate Partners-owned PowerHouse, Chirisa and Blue Owl. Announced in late August, the JV said it could eventually deploy as much as $5B to build large-scale AI data centers for CoreWeave and other customers. According to the firms, further build-out is expected in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Texas, Kentucky and Nevada.
For New Jersey-based CoreWeave, the upcoming Richmond data center continues the aggressive expansion of its data center footprint over the past 18 months.
Initially founded as a crypto mining and blockchain firm in 2017, CoreWeave has since pivoted toward being a cloud provider exclusively for graphics processing unit computing needed for AI and other high-performance applications.
The Nvidia-backed firm is considered among the most successful AI startups, landing a $10B contract with Microsoft and raising more than $12.7B in investment over the past year and a half. CoreWeave is reportedly preparing for an initial public offering in 2025.
CoreWeave has been snapping up data center capacity at a frantic clip. The company now plans to open 28 data centers globally by the end of the year, with 10 new facilities planned in 2025. By contrast, CoreWeave said in August that it had opened nine data centers in 2024, with just 11 others in the works.
Among the data center projects CoreWeave has in the works is a $1.2B redevelopment of a former Merck campus that includes an on-site natural gas power plant.
