Morgan Stanley Nears $15 Billion Loan to Build Anthropic's Next Data Center, With Google Backing the Debt
The financing arrangement would have Google backstop the loan with its own investment-grade credit rating, tightening the financial bond between the search giant and the AI lab it has already poured billions into.
Morgan Stanley is in advanced talks to lead a $15 billion loan to Nexus Data Centers for a new AI computing campus built for Anthropic, according to CNBC, which confirmed reporting first published by the Wall Street Journal. The money would fund a data center project in Hubbard, Texas, according to a source familiar with the discussions who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The structure of the deal is the more interesting part. Google has agreed to backstop Anthropic's side of the arrangement using its own investment-grade credit rating, the source told CNBC. That's a meaningful detail: it means a loan nominally made to a data center developer is effectively underwritten by the balance sheet of one of the world's largest companies, even though Google isn't the one building or operating the facility. Anthropic, Nexus Data Centers, Google and Morgan Stanley all declined to comment or didn't respond to requests for comment, so the precise terms of how that backstop works remain unclear.
A deal-making sprint
This loan doesn't exist in isolation. It's the latest entry in what's been a busy year of infrastructure dealmaking for Anthropic, which has been signing partners at a rapid clip to lock down the computing power it needs to train and run its AI models. Earlier this month, the company struck a deal with chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices. In May, it reached an agreement with Elon Musk's SpaceX. And in April, it closed deals with both Google and Broadcom.
That April agreement with Google went well beyond a typical vendor relationship. Google committed to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic, a figure that builds on a partnership stretching back to 2023, when Google first put $300 million into the AI lab in exchange for roughly a 10% stake. Months later, Google followed with another $2 billion. The $15 billion data center financing now in the works would layer yet another form of support on top of that, this time structured as debt rather than equity, with Google's credit standing rather than its cash doing the work.
Why the credit backstop matters
The arrangement illustrates a pattern that's become common as AI labs try to secure enormous amounts of computing infrastructure without necessarily taking on the debt directly themselves, or without having the credit history to borrow cheaply on their own. Anthropic is a fast-growing but still relatively young company by the standards of infrastructure finance. Google, by contrast, has an investment-grade rating and decades of corporate credit history. Attaching that rating to the loan presumably makes the debt cheaper and easier to secure than it would be if Nexus Data Centers or Anthropic were borrowing on their own standing.
It also deepens Google's exposure to Anthropic well beyond its existing equity stake. Between the earlier investments, the up-to-$40-billion commitment from April, and now a credit backstop on a $15 billion loan, Google's financial fingerprints are increasingly all over Anthropic's ability to function and grow, even as the two remain separate companies with Google also running its own competing AI efforts.
None of the parties involved have confirmed the specifics publicly, and the talks are still described as advanced rather than finalized. But the shape of the deal fits the broader moment in AI infrastructure: massive, capital-intensive buildouts that increasingly rely on complex financing structures stitched together between AI labs, their cloud and hardware partners, and Wall Street banks willing to underwrite the bet. Morgan Stanley's role as lead banker here puts one of Wall Street's biggest names squarely in the middle of that bet.
What happens next is worth watching. If the loan closes at the reported size, it would rank among the larger financing deals dedicated to a single AI data center project to date, and it would offer a clearer template for how companies without Google's balance sheet might still tap into that kind of borrowing power through a partner's backing. For now, the deal remains unconfirmed by any of the companies directly involved, but the trajectory is clear: Anthropic keeps adding infrastructure partners, and Google keeps finding new ways to be attached to the money behind them.
