The most consequential numbers in artificial intelligence are no longer benchmark scores. They are loan sizes. On Thursday, The Wall Street Journal reported that Nexus Data Centers, a developer headquartered in The Woodlands, Texas, is in talks with banks to borrow $15 billion for a new campus in the state, with Anthropic signed on as the tenant.
The campus would draw 1.6 gigawatts of electricity, roughly the output of a large nuclear reactor. Google would guarantee both the lease and the power payments, according to people familiar with the discussions, and the buildings would be filled with Google's own AI chips rather than Nvidia's.
Nexus would own the buildings. Anthropic would rent them. Google, which owns neither, would promise the lenders that if the tenant stops paying, Google pays instead. That promise is the mechanism that makes the loan possible. It lets a developer with a short track record borrow at something close to Alphabet's cost of money, and it is why $15 billion is on the table for a company most investors could not have named last year.
The new part is in the phrasing. Anthropic would lease the campus, in the Journal's words, "with Google guaranteeing lease and power payments." A chip supplier's obligation used to end when the hardware left the loading dock. Here it extends to the rent and the electricity bill for the life of the contract. For someone holding Alphabet shares, that is a different kind of exposure than a sale. It is a contingent liability, one that costs nothing at all until the day it costs a great deal.
Google's disclosed lease guarantees have reached $44 billion
Alphabet said in recent filings that it has agreed to backstop third-party data center lease payments of as much as $44 billion, a figure that stood at $6.5 billion at the end of September last year. About ten projects and 2.4 gigawatts of capacity are covered. None of the sites is finished, so none of the guarantees has yet been triggered.
The reason is chip sales. Google's tensor processing units, the in-house silicon it sells as an alternative to Nvidia's, need somewhere to live, and the developers building those somewheres cannot raise money cheaply on their own. Executives have said they expect TPU revenue to exceed what the guarantees might eventually cost. Anthropic is the anchor customer for that bet: in April it expanded a compute agreement with Google and Broadcom that a Broadcom filing later sized at roughly 3.5 gigawatts of TPU capacity starting in 2027.
Nvidia is doing the same thing at larger scale. On July 26, the Journal reported that Nvidia would provide roughly $250 billion of support for a 10-gigawatt OpenAI campus in southern Ohio, structured as a guarantee on lease and construction debt rather than a cash investment. The two dominant AI chipmakers are now competing partly on whose balance sheet lenders trust more.
The rent, the lease term, and Google's exposure are not public
What the reporting does not include is the number that would settle the question: how much Anthropic would pay in rent, over how many years, and what Google's maximum liability on this campus alone would be. Those terms have not been disclosed. Nor is it clear whether the 1.6 gigawatt site is entirely separate from the campus Nexus is already building for Anthropic in Hubbard, Texas, first announced at about 600 megawatts and described as scaling toward 7.7 gigawatts.
That ambiguity matters, because Octus reported earlier this week that Nexus was lining up roughly $15 billion in bridge financing from banks for the Hubbard buildout, to be refinanced with bonds or term loans in the fall. A bridge loan is short-term money that carries construction until permanent financing replaces it. Whether the Journal is describing that same $15 billion or a second one of equal size is not established.
Alphabet's own accounts have changed shape while this was happening. Debt has risen from $23.6 billion a year ago to about $98 billion, and free cash flow turned negative in the second quarter for the first time since the company went public. Moody's analysts have made the narrow point that guarantees like these are not hidden, only early, and that the recorded liability is unlikely to reflect every plausible future scenario.
Anthropic is growing into the commitment. The company said in April that annualized revenue had passed $30 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. It is also still litigating with the Department of War over a supply chain risk designation it has warned could cost it billions.
None of this breaks unless the tenant stops paying. That is the entire structure, and it now holds up a meaningful share of American AI capacity.