Google backstops $15 billion loan for Anthropic's 1.6-gigawatt Texas AI campus

Google has agreed to back a $15 billion debt financing package for Anthropic's largest infrastructure project to date: a sprawling AI data center campus in Hubbard, Texas, built and operated by Nexus Data Centers. The deal, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, would represent the largest single financing round ever assembled for an AI compute facility, and it signals how aggressively the big AI labs are now racing to lock in dedicated infrastructure capacity before supply constraints worsen further.

The deal structure

Morgan Stanley is leading the financing, which is structured as a $14 billion bridge loan paired with a revolving credit facility. Google's role isn't equity investment in Anthropic directly — instead, Google has agreed to guarantee Anthropic's lease and power-payment obligations across four data-center leases and associated power-purchase agreements. In the event Anthropic defaults, Google steps in. In exchange, Google is expected to receive roughly a 20% equity stake in the combined data-center-and-power project — meaning Google gains infrastructure upside without putting the money directly on Anthropic's balance sheet.

Anthropic will deploy tensor processing units at the site — TPUs that Google codesigns with Broadcom. A separate vendor financing agreement between Anthropic and Broadcom will cover the chip costs themselves.

The campus

The Hubbard, Texas site spans roughly 2,800 acres. Nexus plans to pair the data center campus with a dedicated natural-gas-fired power plant capable of producing 1.6 gigawatts of electricity — sidestepping the Texas grid capacity constraints that have made large-scale AI builds difficult at this scale. At 1.6 GW, this single campus would consume more power than a mid-sized US city.

Neither Anthropic nor Nexus Data Centers commented when contacted by The Wall Street Journal. The loan terms, interest rates, and final deal structure remain subject to ongoing negotiations.

Why this matters

The deal reflects a broader pattern playing out across the AI industry: frontier labs are no longer just renting cloud compute from hyperscalers. Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI are all pursuing dedicated physical infrastructure at a scale that requires project-finance structures normally associated with oil fields and semiconductor fabs — not software companies.

For Google, the arrangement is strategically layered. Google is already Anthropic's largest investor, having committed over $3 billion in equity. Backstopping this loan extends that relationship into hard infrastructure, while the 20% project stake gives Google a claim on data center assets that could prove valuable if AI compute demand continues on its current trajectory. It also keeps Anthropic's compute tied to Google's own TPU hardware rather than shifting to NVIDIA or AWS.

The Amazon capex comparison is instructive: Amazon raised its own 2026 infrastructure spending plan to $220 billion in the same week this deal emerged, citing memory-cost increases and an AWS backlog that hit $496 billion in contracted demand not yet online. The race to build is intensifying in both the cloud and the dedicated-campus layers simultaneously.

As first reported by The Wall Street Journal, with additional detail from CNBC.