彭博特稿：数据中心交易激增重塑美国CMBS市场，承销风险与供应过剩担忧上升

The commercial mortgage backed securities market, long a mainstay of financing for America’s offices, apartments and malls, is being reshaped by a surge in data-center deals, forcing investors to grapple with an entirely new set of risks.

From power availability and grid constraints to rapidly evolving requirements for cooling and computing density, CMBS buyers have been pushed into areas of underwriting that have historically had little to do with commercial real estate. Even familiar questions about tenant demand and stability are changing as facilities depend on a handful of often secretive hyperscalers whose future needs can be difficult to gauge. If those tenants leave when their leases expire in the coming years, highly specialized buildings could be costly to repurpose.

About $17 billion of data-center CMBS has been issued since the start of 2025 — more than triple the amount sold over the previous two years. During that span, data centers have grown to account for roughly 8% of new commercial property bond deals. With billions more in the pipeline, industry veterans are rapidly revamping their risk-assessment playbooks to try to steer clear of any potential blowups that could leave a hole in their portfolios.

“True data centers that are measured in units of compute and megawatts — it’s a totally different universe for real estate investors,” said Alex Killick, a senior managing director at CWCapital Asset Management. “These are metrics that aren’t easily translated to what we’re used to. It’s difficult to re-underwrite years later. We do that every day with an office deal or a hotel CMBS. How do I do that with a data center two years from now?”

Killick said CWCapital is developing a new set of stress tests for the sector to try to answer that question.

That same dilemma is evident at Axonic Capital, where portfolio manager Steven Jury has taken a cautious approach, keeping data centers a small part of the firm’s portfolio and emphasizing diversification across tenants, use cases and geographies. Most data center CMBS are structured as single-asset, single-borrower transactions, or SASBs, in which one large mortgage – often tied to a single facility or complex – backs the bonds.

“What these assets will be worth — and who will need them — five, 10 or 20 years from now” is the hard question, Jury said. “Technology, tenant demand and the supply landscape can all change significantly over that time.”

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Many of the risks CMBS buyers have long had to weigh still apply, but the factors shaping them look very different when it comes to data centers.

Take the lease agreements themselves. Provisions covering power costs, minimum capacity commitments and downtime determine who absorbs unexpected expenses, which can reduce the cash available for servicing debt. Scrutinizing those terms can also be more difficult, with tenants often insisting that their identities and other lease details be kept confidential.

“Traditional CRE investors know how to underwrite offices, apartments, warehouses and retail because leases tend to be relatively standardized and tenant information is reasonably transparent,” said Ben Hunsaker, a portfolio manager at Beach Point Capital Management. “Data centers are much more opaque.”

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Location is another example. Instead of judging properties based on how close they are to transportation, amenities or a city’s core, prime sites are now the ones with access to cheap electricity and available transmission capacity. Those advantages can determine how competitive facilities remain and what they’re worth when loans mature.

Tenant concentration and lease rollover risk have also changed. In an office or apartment, releasing risk is often a simple matter of finding another client. When it comes to data centers, however, just as critical is whether bespoke electrical and cooling setups can even accommodate other firms, and what the ultimate price tag would be to overhaul a facility if they can’t.

For CMBS investors, that raises the prospect of higher capital spending, longer periods without rental income and weaker recoveries if a borrower runs into trouble.

“It’s really, really difficult for me to wrap my head around all of the nuanced risks,” said Stephen Buschbom, head of applied research and analytics at data firm Trepp. “These properties look and act more like infrastructure and nuanced tech plays than they do traditional real estate,” he said.

Obsolescence Cycle

Then there are considerations that are almost entirely new for CMBS buyers.

The rapid evolution of artificial intelligence chips can drive sharply higher power and cooling requirements. A facility designed around one generation of hardware could therefore become outdated in just a few years, reducing its value and making its debt harder to refinance.

“With traditional real estate, you can model an obsolescence cycle in decades. Data centers are a completely different story,” Killick said. “The chips you put in six months ago could be supplanted by who knows what. That alone makes underwriting very difficult.”

The industry is also confronting a level of opposition that’s rarely seen elsewhere in commercial real estate, turning data-centers into a major political issue both at the local and national level. Concerns over utility costs and the strain on local infrastructure have fueled calls to restrict new developments in some communities, making the future regulatory environment particularly hard to predict, market watchers say.

Supply Glut

Some familiar worries remain, too, chief among them oversupply. Big tech has already issued more than $429 billion of debt globally this year to fund the AI buildout. While that borrowing spans fixed-income markets well beyond CMBS, investor fatigue around the financing boom is crossing over into property bonds.

Just last week, the top-rated tranche of a $356 million bond backed by a 30-megawatt facility near Elk Grove Village, Illinois, priced notably wider than initial guidance, marking the third such instance in recent months. In fact, AAA data center deals now pay an average of 1.65 percentage points above their floating-rate benchmark after their risk premiums widened since the start of the year, versus 0.93 for office, 1.05 for retail and 1.25 for industrial, Barclays Plc data show.

With a large pipeline of projects soon needing financing, Citigroup Inc. expects issuance to jump roughly 50% next year to between $18 billion and $20 billion.

“Rising supply that we expect next year poses a longer-term mark-to-market risk, particularly if demand becomes more tenuous,” Jeffrey Berenbaum, director of research at Citigroup Global Markets, wrote in a report earlier this month.

Still, demand for computing capacity continues to far outstrip available supply, helping underpin investor confidence in the sector.

Those dynamics could shift quickly, however, said Bob Neighoff, a portfolio manager at Mariner Investment Group.

“Right now it may look like you may have AA rated tenant demand leased out for approximately 15-30 years,” he said. “But if those go away, you’re left with the world’s biggest pickleball court.”