"Project ratings are capped by the credit rating of the tenant." [Project ratings are capped]
This sentence directly states the mechanism: rating agencies are not rating the data centre asset itself, but instead pegging the entire project's creditworthiness to the tenant's credit profile, making the tenant's financial health the binding constraint on capital availability.
Reasoning from this article
The article shows that S&P, Moody's, and Fitch have all adopted this tenant-centric rating approach across tens of billions in data centre debt. An S&P director explicitly confirms '[Lenders] are only taking risks on Meta,' and Steenekamp warns that 'if one of these hyperscalers fails, there will be a bunch of contracts that cannot be fulfilled.' This reveals a structural shift: instead of diversifying risk across many projects and operators, the capital markets are now concentrating AI infrastructure financing risk onto the credit profiles of a small number of Big Tech firms. This is a systemic vulnerability, not a temporary market condition.