00:00Despite geopolitical volatility, AI deals have continued at pace.
00:04PIMCO is the latest debt giant looking to add to its AI financing portfolio.
00:09People familiar are telling us that the bond backer is in early talks with Bank of America
00:13to help provide roughly $14 billion of financing, debt financing that is,
00:18to Oracle for a data center in Michigan.
00:21Bloomberg's Laura Benitez joins us now for more on this.
00:24Laura, what do we know about the deal?
00:26So this financing is for a huge data center in Michigan,
00:30where Oracle plans to power applications for open AI.
00:33It requires a huge amount of financing and some equity as well, obviously.
00:38There's been quite a few hurdles in putting all of this in place,
00:41and it's taken a while, but it looks like some of those obstacles have started to clear.
00:45So that lays the way for the financing talks to be pursued.
00:50Can we go through some of those obstacles, Laura?
00:54Because whether it be from Wall Street and jitters around financing markets to even locals,
00:59it felt like this is a deal that had a lot of resistance.
01:02It did, and there was multiple levels to it.
01:05So on a local level, there was a lot of resistance towards development,
01:07and the developer faced a lot of challenges in it being able to actually build out.
01:11The data center, they did get the request to, sorry,
01:15they did get the approval to go ahead and build, I think, in January.
01:19But until then, there was this kind of back and forth.
01:22And also on the lending side, until that is cleared up and in place,
01:26it's difficult to really put terms in place.
01:28But we do hear there has been a lot of negotiations around lease terms.
01:32This will be debt that will go into an SPV.
01:35So there's lots of back and forth.
01:37And, you know, these these finance things are never straightforward.
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