Banks in talks to lend USD 15bln for Anthropic data centre backed by Google (GOOGL), WSJ reports; would use TPU chips
- Under the deal being discussed, a consortium of banks led by Morgan Stanley would lend USD 15bln 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.
- The deal could be announced as soon as today.
- To help Nexus raise the debt, Google has provided guarantees for billions of dollars of Anthropic's lease and power-payment obligations in the event the startup defaults, according to people familiar with the matter.
Hyperscale data centre buildouts financed through third-party developers with sponsor guarantees have become the standard template for large AI capacity deals, and the structure here follows the established pattern: a bank syndicate lends against the project entity while the credit anchor is the anchor tenant's balance sheet, not the developer's. The distinguishing feature worth noting is the guarantee layer, since Google backstopping Anthropic's lease and power obligations effectively converts speculative AI demand risk into quasi-investment-grade counterparty exposure for the lenders, a mechanism that has historically compressed spreads on comparable project debt and shifted the risk onto the guarantor's credit metrics rather than the borrower's. The dedicated on-site gas generation is also consistent with prior large campuses where grid interconnection timelines forced self-supply, and power procurement has repeatedly been the binding constraint rather than chips or land. Points of interest beyond announcement are syndication terms and pricing, how the guarantee is disclosed in Alphabet's filings and whether it prompts rating agency comment on contingent liabilities, and whether Anthropic's own capital-raising trajectory keeps pace with obligations of this scale. For the banks involved, deals of this size have tended to be as much about fee league-table positioning in AI infrastructure as about hold exposure, with meaningful portions typically distributed onward.