Connaught addresses industry demand for financing of data centres in the AI market.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has fundamentally reshaped the global data center landscape over the past few years. The infrastructure required to train and deploy large AI models—massive clusters of GPUs, high-speed networking, and vast energy supplies—has led to a wave of specialized “AI data centers” worldwide.

Connaught has established a specialized team to focus on equipment finance for data centres (DC). The multitude of geographic locations bringing the different regulatory issues can easily be managed by Connaught as they already have global coverage.

Key Factors Influencing Location
Developers and governments select AI data centre sites based on several critical factors:

• Power availability and energy cost—AI workloads require extensive electricity and cooling. As AI racks now consume 50kW to 120kW+ each, traditional air cooling is being replaced with liquid cooling.
• Proximity to fiber-optic networks for low latency.
• Regulatory environment, including data privacy and tax incentives.
• DC Footprint – space availability drives location away from major city centres

The AI data Centre Market
The market is currently experiencing a historic capital expenditure cycle, with hyperscalers ( Azure, Meta, Google Cloud) projected to spend roughly $900 billion in 2026 alone. This ecosystem is broadly divided into those who own/operate the facilities and those who build the underlying hardware such as the TPU v6 Trillium (Google) and the GPU 200 / 300’s (Nvidia)
Connaught are providing various finance structures to cater for the different market sectors with finance being provided for the DC operators as well as the equipment manufacturers and the hyperscalers.

Paul Errington, the CEO of Connaught, said in a recent interview “The finance industry has experienced many market disruptors over the years and we need the creativity with finance to respond to the AI boom. I firmly believe that Connaught’s new team have that creativity, focus and global coverage to provide diverse finance solutions for AI data centre projects”