Google nears massive financing agreement for Anthropic’s 500-megawatt data center project: Report

Google is nearing a multibillion-dollar deal to power a data center in Texas leased to Anthropic. According to a report by the Financial Times, Google is expected to finalize its support for the project in the coming weeks, which could include the company offering construction loans for the site’s operator, Nexus Data Centers.

The report stated that a consortium of banks was competing to provide financing for the first phase of the project by mid-year. The financing could total more than $5 billion. However, the support of Google’s parent company Alphabet will allow the technology giant to increase the financing of the project at a lower cost, thanks to its strong credit rating.

Anthropic’s Texas data center:

The 2,800-acre data center campus is said to be part of Google’s partnership with Anthropic, even as the Claude maker faces off against the Trump administration over the use of AI in military use cases.

The project’s lease was signed earlier this month and construction is already underway at the Texas site, which has received an early-stage loan from asset manager Eagle Point.

The project is said to offer around 500 megawatts of capacity and could be ready by early 2026, and final plans could include increasing capacity to around 7.7 gigawatts.

Reportedly, a key advantage of this location is its proximity to many major gas pipelines operated by companies such as Enterprise, Energy Transfer, and Atmos. This could allow Nexus to power the site with its own gas turbines, avoiding overpricing from a single energy source.

Data center developers in particular are increasingly focused on reducing their reliance on grid connections, which can be time-consuming and expensive to secure. Instead, behind-the-meter power technology is growing in popularity among Big Tech companies, with around 50 gigawatts of behind-the-meter projects announced by 2025, according to research provider Cleanview (cited by Financial Times).

Elon Musk’s Colossus data centers in Tennessee and Mississippi reportedly use off-grid gas turbines, while Microsoft and Amazon are also said to be attached to major backend projects.

Meanwhile, Meta announced earlier this week that it had entered into an agreement with Entergy Louisiana to power the “Hyperion” data center with seven new natural gas-fired facilities, providing a total of 5.2 gigawatts of electricity to the data center.

Energy use from data centers in the state could reach 78 GW by 2031, or about 36 percent of the state’s total power demand, according to estimates from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (cited by the FT).