Blue Owl-managed funds have led $2.4 billion in AI Factory Financing for IREN, providing capital for the purchase of NVIDIA Accelerated Computing Infrastructure for the Mackenzie data centre campus in British Columbia, Canada.
The AI Factory Financing consists of a $1.2 billion senior secured term loan and $1.2 billion of senior secured notes. The proceeds will fund IREN’s purchase of air-cooled NVIDIA Accelerated Computing Infrastructure, including NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs.
Blue Owl Leads $2.4 Billion IREN Financing
The AI Factory Financing is structured to fund equipment purchases in tranches over a defined draw period. This allows capital to be deployed alongside the delivery and commissioning of the hardware at IREN’s Mackenzie campus.
Blue Owl said the transaction draws on its digital infrastructure operating and underwriting experience. The firm also pointed to operating experience across more than 100 data centres worldwide as part of its approach to financing large-scale computing infrastructure.
For IREN, the financing supports the continued build-out of its AI Cloud infrastructure, which provides data centres, compute and software for AI training and inference. The company said the funding will help expand capacity at the Mackenzie campus and serve customers across those workloads.
Financing Supports AI Infrastructure Deployment
The AI Factory Financing comes as IREN continues to develop an AI Cloud platform backed by a more than 5GW global data centre development pipeline, according to Blue Owl. The financing facility is designed around the timing of equipment delivery, allowing funding to be drawn as the hardware is purchased and commissioned.
The structure places the AI Factory Financing alongside the physical assets being acquired, rather than funding a general corporate requirement. The transaction therefore directly links institutional capital to the purchase and deployment of computing equipment.
NVIDIA described the transaction as an example of asset-backed GPU financing for AI infrastructure. Blue Owl said this type of equipment financing requires an approach suited to how AI infrastructure is delivered and deployed.
The AI Factory Financing supports IREN’s purchase of NVIDIA infrastructure for its Canadian data centre campus, while giving the project a defined financing structure for equipment procurement and deployment. The transaction highlights the role of institutional financing in supporting the expansion of AI computing infrastructure.
Blue Owl’s financing is therefore tied directly to the capital needs of a large computing deployment. The transaction also shows how equipment finance can be structured around specialised digital infrastructure, with debt funding matched to the delivery schedule of the underlying hardware. For financial institutions and infrastructure investors, the deal provides a concrete example of capital being directed toward AI-related physical assets.