Blue Owl struggles to raise debt for $4B CoreWeave-anchored data center in Pennsylvania

Blue Owl Capital tried to raise debt for a roughly $4 billion data-center project in Lancaster, Pennsylvania—anchored by AI cloud provider CoreWeave—and found lenders notably unenthusiastic. That’s the sound of “AI infrastructure” colliding with old-fashioned credit analysis.

Business Insider reports that Blue Owl shopped financing to lenders over recent months but failed to secure the package. One debt-arranging executive attributed the cool response to growing caution about taking large exposures to AI firms with weak credit profiles—specifically CoreWeave, which S&P Global Ratings rates B+ (below investment grade). A senior executive at a specialty lender summarized the market’s view more bluntly to Business Insider: “We saw it. We passed.”

Blue Owl says the project is already under construction and “fully funded, on time, and on budget,” adding that third-party financing was merely considered. That may be true. It also means the firm could be writing very large checks itself while the debt market refuses to provide the usual leverage that makes these projects sing.

The episode matters because the AI boom has been sold as a clean abstraction: GPUs as the new oil, compute as the new real estate. Data centers are physical plants constrained by power availability, grid interconnection queues, cooling, and increasingly—capital markets that insist on being paid back. When the tenant is a fast-growing AI compute lessor carrying “billions of dollars of high-interest-rate debt,” as Business Insider puts it, the landlord’s financing suddenly depends on whether that tenant survives the cycle.

CoreWeave’s Lancaster lease is large: the company previously said it would take 100 megawatts initially, with potential expansion to 300 megawatts, and invest up to $6 billion in chips and cloud infrastructure for the site. The development partnership—Chirisa Technology Parks with Blue Owl and Machine Investment Group—announced $4 billion for construction of the facilities, separate from CoreWeave’s hardware spend.

This is not an isolated tremor. Business Insider notes that banks recently struggled to syndicate pieces of $38 billion in debt backing two Oracle-anchored data-center campuses, with lenders worried about Oracle’s AI spending and potential rating pressure. Oracle responded by saying it would raise up to $50 billion in cash via stock and bond offerings to preserve an investment-grade balance sheet.

The more AI hype demands real-world megawatts, the more it must negotiate with two unforgiving systems—electric grids and bond markets. Both are indifferent to demos.

For the industry, the question is not whether AI demand exists, but whether the “GPU as property” thesis holds when tenants are leveraged, hardware depreciates quickly, and refinancing is no longer a birthright. When lenders start asking what happens after the next model cycle, the party moves from keynote stages back to spreadsheets—the one place PwC’s new agent might actually help.