Google Backstops $15 Billion Loan for Anthropic's 1.6GW Texas Data Center Campus
In one of the largest infrastructure financing deals in the history of artificial intelligence, data center developer Nexus Data Centers is in advanced talks to secure a $15 billion debt package to construct a massive 1.6-gigawatt compute campus in Hubbard, Texas. The entire facility is slated to be leased to AI safety lab Anthropic PBC to power its next-generation frontier training and inference workloads.
A consortium of banks led by Morgan Stanley is negotiating the financing package, which is structured as a $14 billion bridge loan and a revolving credit facility. Crucially, the debt sits with the developer, Nexus Data Centers, rather than on Anthropic’s balance sheet.
The transaction is made possible by Google, which is backstopping the multi-billion-dollar deal. Google is providing financial guarantees covering the site's massive power requirements and Anthropic's long-term lease obligations, leveraging its investment-grade credit rating to make the massive loan comfortable for commercial banks.1 In exchange for this financial backstop, Google is expected to receive an equity stake of approximately 20% in the Texas data center project. The campus will also feature its own natural-gas-fired power plant to ensure a resilient, on-site power source capable of generating the required 1.6 gigawatts of electricity.2
This unprecedented corporate backstop highlights the intense infrastructure proxy war between Google and Amazon (both major Anthropic investors). By providing credit guarantees that shield Anthropic from carrying massive debt directly, Google is securing a critical foothold in Anthropic's physical compute footprint while maintaining its role as a primary cloud and custom TPU supplier.
Verbatim Quotes
"Nexus Data Centers is in advanced talks to secure $15 billion in financing to build an artificial intelligence data center campus in Hubbard, Texas, for Anthropic, with Morgan Stanley leading the bank group on the deal, CNBC confirmed on Thursday. ... Google is backstopping the deal with its investment-grade credit rating, and is expected to receive an equity stake of about 20% in the project."
— Quartz Report
"Under the deal being discussed, a consortium of banks led by Morgan Stanley would lend $15 billion to Nexus Data Centers to build the campus in Hubbard, Texas, which would have its own natural-gas power plant capable of generating 1.6 gigawatts of electricity. ... Google’s guarantees of power and lease obligations would help developer secure financing... The financing package includes a $14 billion bridge loan and a revolving credit facility, structured for Nexus Data Centers rather than for Anthropic directly."
— The Street Report / Bloomberg
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An instance of The AI hardware supply chain is shifting from venture equity to asset-backed private credit financing. — Computing infrastructure costs are shifting financing from equity to multi-billion-dollar debt packages backstopped by tech giants' corporate credit. ↩︎
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An instance of Software companies must now own physical infrastructure to compete. — Software development labs are forcing the construction of dedicated physical power plants on-site to bypass energy grid bottlenecks. ↩︎