Analysis
A group of banks led by Morgan Stanley is in advanced talks to lend roughly $15 billion to Nexus Data Centers to build an AI campus in Hubbard, Texas, backed by Google, for use by Anthropic. The financing package includes a roughly $14 billion bridge loan and a revolving credit facility, and the campus will include its own 1.6-gigawatt natural gas power plant to meet the site's electricity demands directly rather than relying solely on grid capacity.
Google's role goes beyond a typical customer relationship: in exchange for financial backing and chip supply, Google will take roughly 20% equity ownership in the data center and power project, and has issued guarantees covering billions of dollars of Anthropic's lease and power-payment obligations across four separate data center leases, should Anthropic fail to meet its commitments. Anthropic will deploy tensor processing units at the site that Google co-designs with Broadcom, tying the buildout directly to Google's custom-silicon roadmap rather than merchant GPU supply.
The financing structure fits Anthropic's broader strategy of leasing data centers directly rather than renting capacity from cloud providers -- the company has signed more than a dozen preliminary lease agreements with US developers, targeting at least 10 gigawatts of capacity in the coming years. Structuring the debt through Nexus Data Centers with Google guarantees, rather than raising it on Anthropic's own balance sheet, is a financing pattern likely to recur across the rest of Anthropic's gigawatt-scale ambitions.
For VCs and LPs watching AI infrastructure financing, the deal is a clean example of how the largest AI buildouts increasingly route through debt-financed, guarantee-backed special-purpose vehicles rather than direct corporate capex -- a structure that lets a hyperscaler like Google underwrite a lab's buildout without fully consolidating the liability. What to watch: whether the $15 billion facility closes on the terms reported, and whether Google extends similar guarantee structures to other Anthropic data center leases in its pipeline.
