Anthropic-related data center receives US$1.3 billion private equity loan, adding another giant deal for AI infrastructure financing

The Zhitong Finance App learned that Eagle Point Credit Management LLC is providing a private equity loan of about 1.3 billion US dollars for a large AI data center in Texas linked to Anthropic PBC, making the investment institution play a key role in the latest round of huge financing to boost the AI boom.

According to people familiar with the matter, the debt is part of the $16 billion project financing package for the developer Nexus Data Centers. The funds will be used to complete the construction of a 2,900-acre data center campus in Hubbard, Texas. The source added that the park will be equipped with its own natural gas power plant, and Anthropic will be the main tenant.

The source said that Eagle Point is the largest single investor in this loan. The loan structure is mezzanine debt (mezzanine debt), which is lower than the safest part of the overall financing plan. As the transaction was private, the person was not authorized to discuss it publicly.

According to previous reports, several banks, including Morgan Stanley, are leading the larger financing package. According to the statement, the mezzanine portion of the deal was recently settled.

A Nexus representative declined to comment. An Anthropic spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment during off-hours.

The Hubbard Campus is located about 70 miles south of Dallas and is the first project Nexus is seeking to develop. The park will be one of the largest of dozens of data center campuses across the U.S. — developers are racing to put these parks into use to meet the surge in demand from tech companies to train AI models and provide services to customers.

Eagle Point is headquartered in Greenwich, Conn., and was co-founded by Thomas Majewski and Stone Point Capital in 2012. The company manages around $14 billion in assets, and its leading role in this transaction is particularly notable at a time when major Wall Street asset managers are dominating the giant private equity market.

According to people familiar with the matter, Eagle Point began loan work for Nexus around September last year. It was initially conceived as a priority secured financing of about $150 million secured by Nexus secured by land acquired by Hubbard. The source added that over the next few months, Eagle Point and Nexus expanded the financing scale several times, eventually reaching the current amount and structure.

The source said the deal became easier to arrange after Anthropic became the main tenant of the data center through a bidding process and Google agreed to guarantee priority debts. Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., has provided support for debt repayment at multiple data centers across the US. This arrangement can concentrate financial risks while allowing investors to provide large sums of money with greater confidence.

Data center developers usually repay construction loans by issuing new bonds after the project is completed. One possibility is that the company may seek to issue high-yield bonds later this year to help refinance $15 billion of bank-led financing, a process that would require Nexus to obtain a credit rating, according to people familiar with the matter.