• Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, KeyBank and Wells Fargo joined in Vultr’s credit facility.
• The debt financing came at a lower interest rate than what artificial intelligence cloud provider CoreWeave was previously able to attain.
• Vultr has a large customer base and says it’s profitable.

Vultr, a provider of cloud infrastructure, said on Monday that it has raised $329 million in new debt from some of the largest Wall Street banks as it aims to expand its ability to host and run artificial intelligence models.

Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, KeyBank and Wells Fargo participated in the syndicated credit facility, according to a statement. The company didn’t provide an exact rate that it’s paying for the debt, but did say that it’s down dramatically from prior debt raises in the industry, a sign that banks are getting more comfortable with the asset class.

CoreWeave, the AI infrastructure provider that went public earlier this year, said last month that it had raised $2 billion in fresh debt at a 9.25% annual interest rate. That’s down from a rate of over 14% in 2023 and 11% in 2024.

Vultr CEO J.J. Kardwell told CNBC that his company’s new debt is “hundreds of basis points below” what CoreWeave is paying in its latest offering. In 2021 Vultr raised $150 million in debt from Bank of America and JPMorgan.

Major cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft are shelling out tens of billions of dollars a year to set up data centers to meet growing demand, particularly for AI. While the megacap tech companies have hefty cash balances, many of the smaller cloud players have to tap outside sources of capital.

Vultr is still privately held, but the company says it’s profitable. CoreWeave, for its part, reported a $314.6 million net loss in the first quarter on about $982 million in revenue. As of March, CoreWeave had $8.7 billion in debt, according to its latest financial results.

Founded in 2014 and based in West Palm Beach, Florida, Vultr has built up a base of over 1.5 million customers, many of them paying a few dollars per month. The company operates 32 regions of data centers, mostly outside the U.S.

Competitors include Akamai’s Linode and DigitalOcean. In AI, Vultr competes more closely with companies like CoreWeave.

In December Vultr said chipmaker AMD joined in a $333 million funding round, valuing the startup at $3.5 billion, while Nvidia-backed CoreWeave has a market cap of $88 billion, up more than fourfold from its IPO. Vultr rents out AI chips from AMD as well as market leader Nvidia.

Kardwell said Vultr is always evaluating its options regarding a possible IPO, but hasn’t made a decision on its plans.