Virtus Data Centres closes £2.45bn financing from 13 banks for UK and Europe data centers

Virtus Data Centres has completed a £2.45 billion ($3.25 billion) financing package from a consortium of 13 banks, and the London operator will put the money into data center development across the UK and mainland Europe—with no tenant yet named against the megawatts it will build. Data Center Dynamics reported the completion, which Virtus announced the week before the report ran.

The coordinating seats went to BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole CIB, Société Générale and Standard Chartered Bank, each acting as coordinator, senior mandated lead arranger and bookrunner on the package, with Simmons & Simmons advising Virtus and Clifford Chance advising the consortium.

Inside the £2.45 billion sits a £1.2 billion ($1.6 billion) green capex facility, available through term and revolving tranches, which pairs long-dated money with committed revolving capacity. The structure matters as much as the headline number: a term tranche carries construction, a revolver gives the borrower room to move against it, and the company describes the whole package as long-term funding for the build-out.

The named recipients are the 78MW Saunderton campus in Buckinghamshire and future investment in London19 in Slough, part of a footprint that spans 14 data centers across four Greater London campuses and a fifth in Buckinghamshire, with further projects in development in Germany and Italy. Chief executive Adam Eaton described the financing as an important milestone reflecting the strength of the existing portfolio and the delivery record behind it. Virtus's own framing goes further: the company said the package was one of the largest data centre bank financings completed in the UK to date, a claim that arrives without a published league table and is best read as the borrower's description of its own transaction.

Virtus became a wholly-owned subsidiary of STT GDC, now STTGDC, in 2017, and Macquarie Asset Management took a 40 percent stake in 2023. The platform now sits with two institutional owners and 14 operating sites, and the 13-bank syndicate is what bank debt for European digital infrastructure looks like at the top of the market: lenders underwriting an operating platform with sponsors behind it rather than a single unbuilt shell.

The shape of the money matters as much as its size. In August, Eurofiber locked in a €2.2 billion sustainability-linked facility, replacing a €1.5 billion platform and testing whether open digital infrastructure—fiber without a hyperscaler anchor—could hold infrastructure pricing. Virtus's green tranche is a use-of-proceeds facility rather than a margin ratchet against targets, and the coverage does not describe how eligible spend is defined, what the pricing is, or what covenants attach—one instrument constrains what the money buys, the other prices the borrower's promises.

The green portion points where the European rulebook is heading. As this publication argued in September, Brussels' 2027 rating scheme for data centers can be satisfied on annual renewable arithmetic even as national grid-access rules move toward hourly matching, leaving operators who locked long-dated cross-border vPPAs holding the weaker hedge. A £1.2 billion green capex tranche is then a statement about what gets built, and the coverage does not say how that spend will be powered.

Which digital infrastructure gets bank debt still sorts by anchor tenant: hyperscaler-anchored assets trade at infrastructure pricing, everything else pays merchant risk. Virtus sits a rung below the anchor tenant on that ladder. A platform with deep-pocketed owners, a portfolio in Europe's tightest data center market and a mixed pipeline can still assemble 13 banks for more than £2 billion, but nothing in the coverage names a tenant, a lease or an anchor customer against either Saunderton or London19.

Macquarie's presence on the register is worth reading alongside its exits: the sale of its Polish fiber networks to Deutsche Telekom for €1bn, reported in August, framed the sponsor as recycling proceeds into data centers and towers. The 40 percent stake predates the Polish sale by years, and it also sits in the asset class identified as the destination for that rotation.

Underwriters would still want pricing, tenor, the covenant package, and any tenant commitment standing behind the megawatts. Virtus has said where the money goes and named the banks that provided it, but left the demand side of the equation to the future: Saunderton's 78MW comes with no named customer, London19 comes with no capacity figure at all, and those are the two numbers to watch.