Nexus lines up ~$15B bridge loan for Anthropic's Texas AI campus

A group of banks is reportedly in talks to lend around $15 billion to Nexus Data Centers to build out the Hubbard, Texas AI campus that Anthropic will lease and Google will guarantee, according to a Wall Street Journal report picked up by Octus. The loan is a bridge, expected to be taken out by bonds or loans in the fall.

The structure is the interesting part. Google is not paying for this campus directly. It is guaranteeing power and lease obligations, which is what lets Nexus, a developer backed by Transition Equity Partners out of The Woodlands, Texas, borrow gigawatt-scale money from banks that would never underwrite an Anthropic lease on its own credit. The first phase alone is expected to cost more than $5 billion and provide about 500 megawatts, with the campus eventually scaling toward a targeted 7.7 gigawatts across a 2,900-acre site sitting near a major gas pipeline so it can be powered by gas turbines owned by Nexus. Construction is expected to start in January 2026 and be completed by October 2027.

The reason this matters beyond one project is that it is a template. Google gets its investee's compute footprint expanded without the capex hitting Alphabet's balance sheet, Anthropic gets access to power and buildings it could not finance itself, and the banks (and eventually bond investors) take the paper. DataCenterDynamics notes that Google has agreed to backstop lease payments at five data center locations for Anthropic, in what the reporting frames as roughly a $35 billion loan by effect. Expect other hyperscaler-startup pairs to run the same play.

The honest caveat is that a bridge loan only works if the refinance works. The plan is bonds or loans in the fall, into a credit market whose appetite for AI infrastructure paper can reprice fast on a single bad earnings print, and the reporting does not disclose the economic terms Google negotiated or what happens to Nexus and the bank syndicate if the take-out slips. What is clear is that Google-guaranteed AI infra debt is on its way to becoming its own asset class, and Nexus is about to become a name that fixed income desks track.