Unprecedented deal volume for project finance in North America was seen in 2025, as liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminals and data centers drew eye-popping capital commitments.

At the same time, the new Trump administration’s reversal on US climate policy changed the narrative around conventional and renewable energy alike.

Major themes that defined the year included an explosion in data center activity, rising US energy demand, a resurgence in fossil fuel activity, and a renewables sector that remained resilient in the face of a near-total reversal of the previous administration’s accommodative policy environment for Clean Energy.

Industry estimates put total project finance activity at roughly USD 250bn, a surge of 30%-40% over 2024, which itself was a record-setting year, according to Louise Pesce, head of Power Project Finance at MUFG.

“This deal volume is unprecedented and is challenging the resources of many banks,” she said.

So far in 2025, Infralogic has tracked 433 power and energy financings totaling USD 207bn, USD 20bn higher than the volume total in 2024. Adding data center deals to the project finance volume, the amount skyrockets to over USD 268bn. This year’s total volume dwarfs last year’s by nearly USD 100bn, although 2024 saw more transactions take place: USD 185bn across 319 deals.

With such dizzying capital demand, and bank balance sheets stretching thin, private credit and investors stepped into the spotlight, taking pieces of these mega deals as their own.

LNG unleashed 

After facing permitting pauses and other setbacks under the Biden administration, the LNG industry benefited from support from the incoming Trump administration and saw a wave of new projects.

LNG projects dominated the top greenfield financings of 2025, with Global LNG’s Calcasieu Pass 2 (CP2) LNG phase 1 in Louisiana topping the list.

The USD 21.24bn July close was one of the largest project financings ever in the Western Hemisphere and included USD 15.1bn in debt and USD 6.143bn in equity. Twenty-nine banks participated, led by Santander and ING Group. The facility will produce up to 28 million tonnes per annum (MTPA) across two phases.

CP2 was followed by two other large LNG financings: Next Decade’s Rio Grande Train 4 at USD 6.7bn in September and Rio Grande Train 5 at USD 6.67bn in October. Located near Brownsville, Texas, the Rio Grande facility will have a 48 MTPA capacity across 10 trains.

“Surprisingly, margins stayed flat versus previous years despite the sharp increase in volumes. Margins for LNG are around 225 bps,” said Pesce. MUFG led several LNG financings this past year, including Rio Grande Train 4.

The sharp increase in volume saw USD 54.5bn worth of LNG export deals close in 2025, a jump of over USD 40bn from 2024 and the highest amount in the past decade.

But this LNG wave did not come without hurdles. Key challenges included uncertainty driven by volatile tariff policies, escalating costs, global LNG oversupply, and growing domestic competition fueled by the data center boom. Tariff uncertainty posed a risk for the projects, both for securing materials and for securing export agreements.

On 18 December, Energy Transfer suspended the development of its Lake Charles LNG project, focusing instead on its natural gas infrastructure project pipeline. It remains open to discussions with third parties interested in taking it forward, but, after analyzing the risk/return profile, decided to back away after 10 years.

Despite the drawbacks and massive outlay of capital, experts said both appetite and capacity in the market remain strong for more LNG deals in 2026.

“There seems to be quite a big appetite to lend against [LNG] facilities. The banks want to put those dollars to work, and they want to put them to work for LNG projects,” said Muhammad Laghari, managing director and head of energy, North America at Moelis.

The boom does not seem to be stopping in 2026, although there will be a pause after this wave of projects are financed, industry experts expect.

Miguel Pena, who worked on Venture Global’s CP2 financing as head of project finance for the US and Canada for BBVA, said he expects to see investor demand remain high for both LNG and data center deals in the year to come, despite the massive amount of credit already pledged to the two sectors in 2025.

“Liquidity has been really high in the market so there has been no need to ‘pick and choose’ between transactions,” he said. “Despite the large underwriting amounts generally involved for LNG, as well as data center projects, we have not seen any liquidity constraint or syndication blockage; on the contrary, there has been an unabated level of demand on the primary and secondary market as well as capital market issuance.”

Several large LNG deals that were announced in 2025 are expected to close in early 2026, including Commonwealth LNG and Port of Delfin LNG, according to sources familiar with those transactions.

Tale of two markets: data centers and power demand  

While LNG mega-projects like CP2 topped the market in terms of individual deal size, the data center boom was the story that shaped investment strategies across the core infrastructure and energy sectors—along with any number of investment verticals – in 2025.

According to Infralogic data, North America saw USD 113.4bn provided across 37 data center deals in 2025, compared to USD 28bn across 31 deals in 2024. With hyperscalers across the sector ratcheting up their ambitions, and no visible limit to investor appetite, experts said that trend is likely to continue in 2026 and beyond.

But the effects of the artificial intelligence (AI) data boom stretch far beyond the boundaries of hundred-acre-plus server campuses. Data center growth—and its potential limits—have become inextricably linked to energy generation, as access to baseload power has come to be seen as a major potential constraint on capacity growth in the sector.

“In 2025, we’ve seen further integration between digital and energy infrastructure driven by the insatiable demand for AI and data centers,” said Brian Restall, CEO of Quinbrook Infrastructure Partners. “The ‘Data Boom’ isn’t just a buzzword, it’s a baseload reality.”

According to Restall, 2025 was a tale of two markets. Valuations for utility-scale solar and wind projects without storage fell, while data center-linked infrastructure remained strong.

The surge in data center demand has reshaped energy investment priorities, compounding an existing trend toward electrification and demand growth in the US, and creating both opportunities and challenges for developers.

Lenders re-enter gas and LNG space 

With more mega-deals on the horizon for both the LNG and data center sectors, and a finite amount of bank capital available to the market, many expect private credit to play an increasingly pivotal role in both sectors going forward.

“I think private credit is going to be a real option to be a lead provider on these multi-billion-dollar deals,” said Ralph Cho, Co-CEO of Apterra Infrastructure Partners. Private credit could become a preferred provider in 2026, a shift that could make it competitive, added Cho.

But banks aren’t necessarily viewing this as a threat. Given the sheer volume of deals in the market, private credit will have to become increasingly integrated into project finance solutions, added MUFG’s Pesce.

“Traditional PF banks cannot do it all,” she said. “Some of the larger data center deals this year had private credit investors alongside banks in the same facilities. We expect this to become more common going forward.”

The commanding roles of LNG and data centers in the infrastructure space have even driven some traditional banks to rethink their approach.

“It’s pretty interesting that in 2025 we saw a lot of banks that, for ESG reasons or capacity reasons, would not [previously] invest in LNG, have gone away with all that,” added Moelis’ Laghari.

Despite being traditionally associated with renewables, National Bank of Canada doubled the amount it lent to LNG and gas-fired projects, from USD 574m in 2024 to USD 1.416bn in 2025, according to Infralogic data. JPMorgan also more than doubled its lending capacity to the sectors this year, from USD 624m in 2024 to USD 1.7bn in 2025, making it into the top four lenders by volume.

Gas-fired generation also saw new or revived bank interest, as banks that once focused exclusively on renewables began turning their attention to gas-fired projects, added Pesce.

BNP Paribas was one of those lenders. Without any deals executed since 2020, BNP served as one of the mandated lead arrangers on the Blackston Wolf Summit Energy Project.

“Of course, data centers need round-the-clock power with redundancy. For this reason, we are seeing a marked increase in gas-fired power opportunities,” said Pesce.

No brakes, all gas  

With the return to the White House of Donald Trump in January, many in the industry entered the year predicting a resurgence in gas generation capacity to meet that demand growth.

In fact, 2025 did see a wave of gas-fired transactions, though most were M&A and refinancings. Industry experts noted that supply constraints, including a years-long backlog for turbine orders, lengthy development timelines, and slow permitting processes, even under an accommodative administration, were factors that limited greenfield financing to a handful of gas deals. Activity is expected to accelerate in 2026 and beyond.

“Obviously, we haven’t seen as much greenfield activity in thermal. But we probably will. [BNP] already saw one this year,” said Aashish Mohan, MD at BNP Paribas.

BNP Paribas participated in one of these financings: Blackstone’s Wolf Summit Energy, a 600 MW combined-cycle plant that secured USD 1.2bn in November.

“Even the oil and gas companies want to get into the gas-fired business to support the data center growth. They’re using their expertise from building behind-the-meter gas facilities as power supply for their oil and gas activities,” said Mohan.

At its investor day presentation on 8 December, NextEra announced a partnership with ExxonMobil to develop gas-fired generation for data centers, starting with a 1.2 GW plant with carbon capture near the Denbury CO2 pipeline. They are currently marketing to hyperscalers.

Chevron, meanwhile, is developing a power plant project in West Texas to support an unnamed data center, according to the company’s investor day presentation in November.

Renewables resilient

The same demand trends that led big lenders to stray from their ESG commitments likely helped save the renewables sector from a traumatic reversal of fortunes in 2025.

While myriad policy headwinds emerged under the Trump administration, the story of renewables in 2025 was one of robust growth, at least in the debt markets. In the first 11 months of 2025, Infralogic tracked 192 debt transactions across the North American renewables sector, valued at USD 74.68bn. That marked a 26.1% volume increase from the 176 transactions, valued at USD 59.12bn during the same period in 2024.

Unlike solar and battery storage, onshore wind projects fell from 33 in the first 11 months of 2024, at a USD 9.83bn value to just 23 during the same period this year, at USD 7.24bn, while offshore activity virtually froze, according to Infralogic data.

But, despite a steady stream of negative headlines from Washington, renewables remained arguably the hottest game in town, said Apterra’s Cho.

“Across power, digital, and oil and gas, the tightest and most in-demand asset class is transition-oriented assets. You can’t get enough,” said Cho. Pricing for this asset class remains irrationally tight, according to Cho, who said deals in the 300bps spread is difficult to find without taking some material credit risk.

For comparable fully contracted deals with strong sponsors across renewables, conventional power, and digital infrastructure, renewables deals will price anywhere from 50 to 75 basis points tighter, added Cho.

That fits with capital markets benchmarks. As of September 2025, fully-contracted utility-scale solar and wind projects, developed by established sponsors, were able to secure construction debt at spreads of around 150 bps over SOFR, according to data from tax and debt platform Crux.

Mohan of BNP Paribas said that number tracks with what he’s seen.

“I think it’s stable. I haven’t seen that go down,” he said.

Rohit Chaudhry, a debt-focused partner at Kirkland & Ellis said that, on the whole, the negative policy headlines for renewables were drowned out by a drumbeat of data center and electrification-driven demand growth.

“The need for new power sources to fuel the explosion in data center development has fueled a resurgence in financing deals for gas-fired power plants while also serving to offset some of the negative impacts for the renewables sector of roll backs of climate and clean energy incentives under Donald Trump,” Chaudhry said.

But the impacts of the data center boom on renewables go beyond demand growth, according to Justin DeAngelis, global head of sustainable infrastructure for Denham Capital.

Utility-scale renewable projects aimed at directly serving data centers remain a work in progress, a trend to watch in 2026 and beyond, DeAngelis said.

But the massive draw on capital from the sector is already opening opportunities for private capital to jump in where big banks might have traditionally played a leading role, he said.

“The data center market is sucking in such a very large amount of project finance capital that there are more opportunities for private investors to be lenders, because the banks are getting a dramatic amount of their capital sucked into the data center market,” said DeAngelis.

Energy investors unbowed 

On the fundraising front, concerns over the impact of Trump administration energy and trade policies percolated through international LP communities throughout the year, according to Jorge Camiña, head of sustainable infrastructure credit for Denham. But again, results won out over policy headwinds, as a bustling US market for energy projects of all stripes appears to have largely allayed those concerns, said Camiña.

“The pitch that I was hearing from a lot of [international fund managers] was ‘There is political disruption in the US in terms of policy. You are better off shifting your attention to other markets,” said Camiña of the early months of 2025.

Despite a tumultuous year, Camiña says, his firm still prioritizes deals in the US market.

“Our take has always been that there’s just too much going on in the US, and we’ve been largely validated on that. The reality is that projects are getting done, volumes are very strong, and the economics are very attractive, because there’s just so much demand for capital. So, you get more attractive returns in the US market,” he said.

Pullback from international funds and sponsors is also creating opportunity for others, explained Michael Tatarsky, managing director at CRC-IB.

“Strong underlying power demand may create opportunities for investors amid any softening in European participation,” he said.

Looking forward 

Demand drove the narrative in 2025, whether that meant growing electricity demands from the grid or jaw dropping demand for capital to finance LNG terminals and data center campuses. Experts widely expect those trends to continue in the coming year. And, if that’s the case, the question for 2026 won’t be about any one market vertical, energy technology, capital source, or regulatory outlook. The question will be how quickly all of those components can adapt to meet a rapidly changing world.