Willkie advises clients across the full lifecycle of data center and digital infrastructure ownership, development, operation, and financing matters. Our data center and digital infrastructure clients span the spectrum of market players, including data center developers and hyperscalers; energy project developers (conventional, renewable, and energy storage); private equity and institutional investors; commercial banks; GPU, CPU, and memory users; neo-cloud arrangers; investors and financiers, and other participants in the artificial intelligence market.
How We Work
We bring together lawyers from our market-leading practices—including real estate, power (project development, financing, and procurement), regulatory, finance, capital markets, and M&A and joint ventures—into cross-disciplinary teams that deliver comprehensive, bespoke commercial solutions for our clients.
What We Do
Willkie works across sectors and regions to advise on cutting-edge data center development and financing transactions.
Our experience encompasses project development, financing, M&A and joint venture structuring, and ongoing operational and capital raising matters across the digital infrastructure sector. We offer broad and in-depth knowledge in all legal aspects of the data center ecosystem, including:
- Acquisitions and Development. The acquisition, disposition, development, and management of powered land; stabilized data centers across all asset types (AI data centers, traditional data centers, edge data centers, data center conversions, etc.); data center campuses; and green- and brownfield data center developments.
- Power. Interconnection, power procurement, on-site / behind-the-meter power project development (conventional, renewable, and storage solutions), and financing (including project finance, hybrid-capital and tax equity); gas supply, pipeline development, and related arrangements supporting on-site generation.
- Leases and Commercial Contracts. Structuring data center service, operations, and security agreements; and integrated lease and sub-lease agreements.
- Financing. Debt, equity, and structured finance solutions supporting data center construction, acquisition, MEP build-outs, and operations.
- Corporate and Tax Structuring. Corporate and platform structuring, tax structuring, and realization of tax incentives in connection with data center construction and operation.
- Regulatory. Regulatory needs arising from data center development and operations including energy regulatory matters.
- Procurement. Bespoke GPU, CPU, memory, and rack acquisition, services, financing, leasing, and equity arrangements to support AI training and inference workloads, cloud computing platforms, and other data center services and operations.