An investment firm is lending about $1.3bn to help build a giant AI data centre in Texas that will house Anthropic. It is one of the latest jumbo deals fuelling the AI boom. Eagle Point Credit Management is providing the loan, Bloomberg reported.
The loan is one slice of a much larger deal. It sits within a roughly $16bn project-finance package for the developer, Nexus Data Centers, a person familiar with the project told Bloomberg. Nexus will use the money to finish a 2,900-acre campus in Hubbard. The Texas city sits about 70 miles south of Dallas.
Anthropic will be the primary tenant, the same person said. The AI lab is racing to lock in computing power, and deals like this one give it access to a large new site without building it itself. The campus will have its own gas-fired power plant to run it. Eagle Point described the site as a data-centre and “behind-the-meter” power project, meaning it generates its own electricity rather than drawing it from the grid.
Where the loan sits
Eagle Point is the single largest investor in the roughly $1.3bn loan, Bloomberg reported. The debt is structured as mezzanine financing. That means it sits below the safest parts of the overall package. It therefore carries more risk than senior debt, and usually pays a higher return to offset it.
Eagle Point described its piece as a “HoldCo” loan in a statement. It said the financing completed the capital structure for the first phase of the multi-phase campus, and let Nexus reach a final investment decision. The mezzanine portion recently closed, according to a statement seen by Bloomberg. Eagle Point said its financing helped Nexus complete the capital structure for the first phase of the campus.
Banks including Morgan Stanley are leading the larger package, Bloomberg reported. The bank-led senior portion runs to about $15bn of the roughly $16bn total, with Eagle Point’s $1.3bn a riskier layer on top. Nexus declined to comment, and Anthropic did not respond to Bloomberg’s request for comment outside business hours.
A smaller lender lands a big role
Eagle Point’s size makes its lead role stand out. The firm is based in Greenwich, Connecticut, and manages about $14bn, Bloomberg reported. Thomas Majewski founded it in 2012 with Stone Point Capital, and it now has more than 120 staff, according to its own statement. Wall Street’s largest asset managers have taken much of the jumbo private-financing market. That makes a mid-sized firm leading part of this deal notable.
Eagle Point grew into the role over months. It began working on a loan for Nexus around September last year, Bloomberg reported. The first plan was for about $150mn of senior debt, backed by the Hubbard land. Eagle Point and Nexus then raised the size and reworked the structure several times to reach the current deal.
The firm framed the speed as the point. Nexus reached its final investment decision in under a year. Jennifer Powers, Eagle Point’s head of infrastructure credit, called that “a truly remarkable achievement” in the statement. Nexus chief executive Ivan Van der Walt said Eagle Point had backed the project across four financings.
He said its team helped complete the capital structure “at a critical moment”. Eagle Point cast the deal as a milestone for its infrastructure-credit business.
How the deal came together
Two things made the financing easier to arrange, Bloomberg reported. Anthropic won a competitive process to become the campus’s primary tenant. And Google agreed to guarantee the senior debt in the deal.
Google’s role follows a pattern. Alphabet’s Google has backstopped debt payments at a number of data centres around the country, Bloomberg reported. Such guarantees can make investors more comfortable lending large sums, while concentrating the financial risk. If a tenant or backer runs into trouble, the exposure sits with fewer parties.
The structure is common in the sector. Anthropic has leaned on outside money to build the computing it needs, striking financing deals such as a partnership with Macquarie and others. The pattern lets the AI lab secure capacity without owning or paying for the buildings up front.
The debt behind the boom
The Hubbard campus is Nexus’s first. It will rank among the largest of dozens of data-centre projects that developers are racing to bring online, Bloomberg reported. The demand comes from companies training and running AI models. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and others have signed a run of multibillion-dollar deals to secure computing over the past year.
Those projects run on borrowed money. Developers usually repay construction debt by issuing new debt once a project is done. It is a model that depends on lenders and bond buyers staying willing to fund the next round. Nexus may sell high-yield bonds later this year to refinance the $15bn bank-led part of the package, Bloomberg reported. That step would require it to get a credit rating.
The deal adds to a fast-growing pile of data-centre debt. Lenders from private-credit firms to banks have poured money into the buildout, in deals such as Blue Owl’s $5.9bn loan for another campus. The scale of that borrowing has drawn scrutiny over how much of the AI boom is running on debt.
The projects are landing as some Texas officials question the strain the sites put on power and water. Whether the Hubbard bet pays off will depend on demand holding up long enough to repay the borrowing.
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