CleanSpark Borrows $2.23 Billion Against Meta Lease for Georgia Data Center

CleanSpark has attached a financing package and a rent date to its central Georgia construction site. Its CSDC Finance I subsidiary priced $2.227 billion of senior secured notes due 2031 to finish a 175-megawatt AI data center campus in Sandersville, and under the lease disclosed alongside the offering, rent revenue begins on November 30, 2027, after the first network hall is completed, with construction completion expected around March 2028.

The tenant is Anviran, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Meta Platforms. Meta guarantees rent and operating expenses, according to CleanSpark's September 17 Form 8-K and the investor presentation furnished with it. The 20-year triple-net lease carries an estimated $6.6 billion of base-term contracted payments, about $330 million of average annual net operating income and a 3.0% annual rent escalator. CleanSpark had announced the lease in July without naming the counterparty.

The Meta-backed lease helped CleanSpark, a bitcoin miner reporting losses, sell five-year secured paper at scale. Initial talk on the notes was around 8.5%, roughly two percentage points above the average for BB rated debt tracked by Bloomberg, a premium investors have been demanding on data center financings. The deal drew about $10 billion of orders, more than four times the size, and priced at 98.5 cents on the dollar for a yield of 8.25%, according to a person familiar with the transaction cited by Bloomberg. Morgan Stanley led the offering, with Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo in the syndicate. Bloomberg's data identify it as the first junk-bond deal tied to a Meta data center.

Data center developers have sold high-yield debt this year largely on the strength of multiyear leases with hyperscalers including Oracle and Amazon, Bloomberg-compiled data show, and comparable transactions with investment-grade tenants cleared earlier this year at yields below 6%. CleanSpark's 8.25% is what a junk-rated developer pays to borrow against an investment-grade tenant's promise.

The documents shift a key piece of schedule risk to CleanSpark. The notes are secured by first-priority liens on substantially all assets of the issuer and CSRE Properties Sandersville, and CleanSpark is providing a completion guarantee: if note proceeds fall short of what is needed to finish the facility on time, the parent funds the difference. Debt amortization is illustrated to begin on construction completion at a 1.275x debt service coverage ratio.

The parent carrying that obligation is not large. CleanSpark employs 312 people, and its legacy mining business reported fiscal third-quarter revenue of $138.0 million, down 30.5% from $198.6 million a year earlier, with a GAAP loss per share of $0.89 against a FactSet estimate of a $0.48 loss. The construction spend, the interest and the wait for first rent all land on a business whose current revenue base is smaller than it was a year earlier.

Much of the procurement risk is already retired. CleanSpark said last month that it had ordered and prepaid for all long-lead equipment needed to meet the Sandersville timeline and had fully funded its anticipated equity contribution. What remains between the site and November 2027 is construction execution: labor, power interconnection and a network hall that has to be finished before a dollar of Meta rent arrives.

The lease is triple-net, which the filing describes as producing an NOI margin of approximately 100%: the tenant covers rent plus taxes, insurance and maintenance. Under that structure, the long-run operating economics of the Sandersville site run through Meta rather than through the landlord's cost base. CleanSpark's nearer exposure is the period before rent revenue begins on November 30, 2027.

The Georgia campus may be the smaller piece. When CleanSpark disclosed the lease in July, it also said the same technology company had signed a letter of intent and exclusivity arrangement covering CleanSpark's entire Texas portfolio of up to 885 megawatts of secured and planned power capacity, Dow Jones reported. CleanSpark states it controls more than 1.8 gigawatts of power, land and data centers across the United States. An exclusivity arrangement is not a lease.