Vantage raises €720M in first-ever Euro ABS deal backed by European data centers

Vantage Data Centers just pulled off a first in Europe’s tech infrastructure market: raising €720 million (about $821.4 million) through a bond deal backed by data center assets. The move marks another clear sign of booming demand for data center infrastructure, fueled in large part by the AI arms race and the growing need for compute-heavy workloads.

The deal was structured as an asset-backed securitization (ABS), a model familiar in U.S. markets but new to European data centers. It includes four fully leased hyperscale facilities—two in Berlin and two in Frankfurt—with a combined power capacity of around 55 megawatts. The sites were valued at over $1 billion earlier this year.

What makes this so notable is how the financing was set up. Vantage used the infrastructure itself, plus projected future revenues from those facilities, as collateral. It’s a play that’s worked well in the U.S., and now Vantage is bringing it to Europe.

The company will pay an average 4.3% coupon on the issued bonds, which is relatively attractive given the size and structure of the deal.

“We believe the ABS market in particular is kind of best suited for our type of asset, which is real estate centric, high credit quality tenants, long term leases, something that is almost perfect for the ABS investor,” Vantage CFO Sharif Metwalli said in an interview with CNBC.

And demand was strong. According to Rich Cosgray, SVP of global capital markets at Vantage, the offering was “two and four times oversubscribed on the respective financings,” even though, as he put it, “this transaction was actually pretty highly levered.”

“We had some investors that just weren’t comfortable at that leverage level,” Cosgray said, “Yet… we were able to tighten pricing pretty meaningfully through the marketing process.”

The funds will go toward paying down construction loans used to build the four German facilities.

This isn’t Vantage’s first dance with ABS. Last year, the company raised £600 million in a similar deal involving its Cardiff campus in the UK. Across the EMEA region, Vantage now has about 2,500 megawatts of capacity either live or in development.

Barclays and Deutsche Bank led the latest transaction, with Clifford Chance providing legal counsel.