DataVita's £300m is underwritten twice: by CoreWeave's 15-year lease and by the state

DataVita has closed a £300 million ($406.1m) debt facility to expand its DV1 data centre and build a second facility, DV3, in the North Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone ^[1][2]. The capacity of both buildings is contracted to CoreWeave under a 15-year lease ^[3], which puts this in a different category from most UK AI infrastructure announcements: the revenue is signed before the concrete.

The financing structure is the interesting part. The facility carries a £202m ($273m) financial guarantee from the National Wealth Fund ^[4], with lending from a syndicate of ING, ABN AMRO, Santander, the Scottish National Investment Bank and Siemens Financial Services through Siemens Bank ^[5]. The guarantee is written against the £252.5m ($341m) provided by ING, ABN AMRO and Santander, covering 80 percent of that tranche; the SNIB and Siemens portions are uncovered ^[6][7]. That leaves roughly £47.5m of uncovered lending ^[8] and about £98m of unguaranteed exposure across the whole facility, or a shade under a third of it ^[9]. The guarantee itself is equivalent to about 67 percent of the headline number ^[10].

Read that alongside what the National Wealth Fund says about why it was needed. CEO Oliver Holbourn said new compute capacity is key to unlocking the UK's future, "yet private finance can be difficult to secure for emerging infrastructure at this scale," and that the guarantee is giving lenders the confidence to invest ^[11]. The implication is worth stating plainly: a fully pre-let asset with a 15-year term and a named AI cloud tenant still did not clear three commercial banks' credit committees without the state standing behind four-fifths of their money. Signed offtake is now the entry ticket, not the whole financing case. What lenders are pricing is counterparty risk on a single tenant in a sector with a short operating history.

DataVita's managing director Danny Quinn leaned on the delivery argument. "There is plenty of talk about AI infrastructure just now. This project is being delivered: work is well advanced on site, every megawatt is contracted, and the first facility completes this year," he said, adding that the UK needs its own AI capability, built and run domestically ^[12].

The site has history behind it. DataVita has operated DV1 since 2016 as its first occupier, and took ownership from a syndicate of private investors in a 2021 deal with £45m ($63.1m) of support from its owner ^[13]. It filed in January 2025 to add an external plant building to the existing Fortis building, and applied in November for permission to build DV3 ^[14]. Its second facility, DV2, sits in the basement of 177 Bothwell Street in Glasgow with 130 racks across 1,000 sqm ^[15]. CoreWeave announced last year that it was deploying an unspecified number of Nvidia GPUs in DataVita data centres ^[16]. North Lanarkshire was appointed an AI Growth Zone earlier this year, a designation intended to encourage development through financial incentives and priority access to power ^[17].

Three things to watch. First, DV3's planning outcome: the source records a November application, not a consent ^[14]. Second, whether the National Wealth Fund's 80 percent partial guarantee becomes the standard shape for AI Growth Zone debt, which would tell you the commercial market is not yet lending unaided against neocloud leases. Third, the concentration: a 15-year single-tenant lease is an asset while the tenant performs and a balance sheet problem if it does not ^[3].