Banks line up $15 billion in debt for an Anthropic data center, with Google standing behind it

7:00 AM ET · July 31, 2026

Bloomberg reported that a group of banks led by Morgan Stanley is in talks to arrange about $15 billion of debt financing for a data center project in Hubbard, Texas, built for Anthropic by developer Nexus Data Centers, with the package structured as a $14 billion bridge loan plus a revolving credit facility. Google is providing crucial backing for the deal without directly borrowing itself: the company would take an equity stake of roughly 20 percent in the project and has agreed to guarantee billions of dollars of Anthropic’s lease and power payment obligations should the AI startup default, a structure that lets lenders treat the debt as effectively backed by Google’s balance sheet. The site itself will be powered in part by a dedicated natural gas fired plant capable of producing 1.6 gigawatts of electricity, reflecting how thoroughly AI data center financing has become intertwined with new power generation projects rather than just leased grid capacity. The arrangement is the latest example of a pattern that has repeated across the industry this year, in which AI labs without the balance sheets to fund gigawatt scale campuses on their own lean on a deep pocketed partner, in this case Google, which is also a major Anthropic investor, to backstop the debt that makes the projects financeable in the first place.