Orion Energy Partners closed a multi-draw, senior secured debt facility for Nautilus Data Technologies for the commissioning of a 6.0MW colocation data center located in Stockton, CA, and construction of additional data center projects in the Nautilus pipeline.
Nautilus is a provider of data centers that use a sustainable water-based cooling process to achieve power usage effectiveness (PUE) and improvements in environmental performance.
Based in Pleasanton, CA, using its patented TRUE (Total Resource Usage Effectiveness) cooling system, Nautilus integrates maritime and industrial cooling technologies with data center infrastructure to increase the energy efficiency of its operations, reduce the overall cost of computing, and decrease greenhouse gases and air pollution, while consuming no water, producing no waste water, and using no water treatment chemicals or potent greenhouse gas and ozone depleting refrigerants.
The Stockton data center will commission in Q4/20 and use naturally cold water in an open and closed loop system of heat exchangers to cool client environments more efficiently when compared with the conventional HVAC solutions found in air-cooled data centers. Nautilus can deliver up to five times more power density per rack with a smaller footprint, enabling the widespread availability and affordability of high-performance computing for artificial intelligence, machine learning, healthcare, gaming and other compute-intensive applications.
“Orion Energy is providing Nautilus with flexible capital to complete the commissioning of our Stockton I data center, strategically located in Northern California at the Port of Stockton,” James L. Connaughton, CEO of Nautilus, said. “This capital will allow Nautilus to showcase and then rapidly expand our transformative approach to meeting the urgent business and community demand for higher performing and more sustainable data center solutions.”
“Nautilus is well positioned to set the standard for providing sustainable and reliable data center services to its customers, who have selected Nautilus for its significant commercial and environmental benefits,” Gerrit Nicholas, managing partner at Orion Energy, said. “Orion Energy is eager to partner with the Nautilus team and its existing shareholders to accelerate the deployment of additional environmentally innovative data centers in this high growth sector.”
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati acted as legal counsel to Nautilus and Marathon Capital acted as sole financial advisor to Nautilus. Greenberg Traurig acted as legal counsel to Orion Energy.
Orion Energy Partners is a private capital partner to lower/middle market energy infrastructure and related companies, primarily in North America, managing in excess of $2 billion of investable capital. The company provides non-control and non-dilutive capital in flexible, senior secured loan structures as an alternative to equity investment and traditional loans.