When Robin Khuda was raising capital to fund AirTrunk’s first hyper-scale data centre in 2016 he struggled to win interest from bankers and funders in Australia. Eventually he went offshore and raised $400 million, in what was at the time one of the largest cheques written for a start-up in the region.

Roll on to 2023 and Khuda, who is the data company’s founder and chief executive, has bedded down the year’s biggest debt deal for a data centre globally – a whopping $4.6 billion loan. This time around, it was the lenders who formed a line at Khuda’s door, with more than 40 of them piling into the offering.