According to Bloomberg News on August 13, the Oklahoma data center project Zenith Arc is planning to price a $2.25 billion green bond, with the facility already leased to a subsidiary of the US market maker Jane Street Group under a long-term lease agreement. Compared to a regular project financing, this transaction first presents a long-term lease to the creditors.

The bond mentioned in the report is a senior secured bond, with a Ba2 rating from Moody's. The funds will be used for the computing facility and substation. As of the time of this retrieval, no public confirmation of the pricing or settlement of the bond was found, so this article uses the term "proposed issuance" accordingly.

A Data Center, Why Can It Support Such a Large Debt

According to Bloomberg News, the disclosed power capacity of the project is approximately 149 MW. Dividing the proposed financing amount by this capacity, we get a financing intensity of about $15.1 million per MW.

This number is not equivalent to the cost per square foot of the data center. The bond funds cover both the computing facility and the substation, and the denominator is the projected power capacity supported by the project, not the operational load. It is more like dividing a construction loan for a shopping mall by the future leasable area; it shows how much financing has been put into the project but does not deduce the cost of each floor.

This is also one of the three things that are easily confused in AI data center financing. The bond amount is the funding source, MW is the capacity metric for power supply and onboarding, and construction costs require more detailed disclosures such as equipment procurement, civil engineering, grid connection, and operational design. Folding these three into a "per MW cost" can misinterpret the financing structure as an engineering quotation.

What Creditors Truly See Is Who Will Pay the Rent

According to the same article, Zenith Arc is a joint venture project between Fluidstack and Next Frontier, with a subsidiary of Jane Street Group signing an absolute triple net lease. Jane Street's hashpower arrangement did not start with this project; the report also mentions that some of its hashpower comes from a data center in Dallas and collaborates with AI cloud service providers such as CoreWeave.

The so-called absolute triple net lease is not just about "leasing for a long time." In addition to the base rent, the lessee also bears operating costs, taxes, utilities, insurance, and electricity costs. For the project company, this shifts more of the day-to-day expenses and some price fluctuations to the tenant's side, making the lease look more like a predictable long-term revenue contract.

For a creditor, this turns an operational project that may fluctuate with the market into a contract relationship with a name, a term, and a responsibility split. The length of the lease does not answer whether the construction can be completed on time, nor does it replace judgment of the tenant's future business needs. A long lease is a cornerstone of the financing structure, not a roof that covers all risks.

The two lines in the graph are not a cash flow coverage table, nor do they disclose a common start date. It only indicates that the lease term is longer than the proposed note issuance, with a 10-year difference shown in the graph. Jane Street Group also provides customary lease guarantees, but this should not be exaggerated as an unconditional corporate guarantee, or an additional commitment to bond principal and interest.

This lease adds a identifiable long-term lessee to the public financing structure, but should not be written as the sole reason the project can enter the bond market. Creditors are faced not with just a data center and a substation, but with a market maker's long-term lease commitment for hashing power premises. The Ba2 provided by Moody's should also be limited to this debt, and should not be extended to the corporate ratings of Zenith Arc or Jane Street Group.

What Does "Green" Actually Describe

According to Bloomberg News, sustainable bond issuances for data center development and construction expanded by nearly half in 2025 from the previous year. The chart places this change next to Zenith Arc, indicating it is within the context of existing similar sustainable bond financing. The scope, sample, and methodology have not been disclosed, so these data cannot be written as the total global green bond market value, nor can they be extrapolated to all AI infrastructure bonds.

The key to such labels lies in the use of funds and disclosure, rather than automatically stamping a data center with an environmentally-friendly label. The report mentions that some projects enter the green bond market by committing to standards related to renewable energy and sustainable water management. The subject here is "some projects," not the environmental performance already disclosed by Zenith Arc.

The financing label answers whether the funds are allocated to a certain use, while environmental performance answers what resources are actually consumed and how much is emitted after the project is operational. They are related but not two different formulations of the same issue. For a data center, the bond name cannot replace operational data such as efficiency, power supply, and water usage.

In publicly verifiable documents, Zenith Arc's green financing framework, second-party opinions, efficiency indicator PUE, power supply structure, or water usage indicators have not been found. This does not mean the project lacks these arrangements, but rather that the existing information is insufficient to directly translate "green bonds" into low-carbon, low-water consumption, or clean power.

Resource Pressure: Why It Accompanies Financing Labels

According to the International Energy Agency's "Energy and AI" report, the annual electricity consumption of all global data centers is projected to more than double by 2030 compared to 2024 levels under its baseline scenario. The scope in the report covers all data centers, with AI being a significant driver but not the sole factor, and certainly not a basis for estimating Zenith Arc's own energy consumption, emissions, or water usage.

However, this global trajectory explains why the market has linked the resource issue to financing documents. AI data centers require not only servers but also stable power access, cooling systems, and land and water resources. For green bonds to become a compelling financing tool, environmental performance needs to be addressed by verifiable project-level data, rather than relying solely on the bond's name.

Zenith Arc's proposed bond issuance has compressed the expansion of AI data centers into a very specific balance sheet, with long-term leases providing income clues, the financing amount indicating the disclosed funding scale rather than per-unit cost or total construction cost, and the green label leaving behind a checklist that is still awaiting project disclosure.

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