Major Wall Street banks plan to sell 15 billion dollars (about 21.4 trillion won) of loan claims tied to a large data center guaranteed by Google and leased by generative artificial intelligence (AI) startup Anthropic, by refinancing them through a bond issue.
It is understood as a move to spread risk, so that loan risk does not pile up excessively on bank balance sheets amid the surge in funding demand from big tech's AI infrastructure build-out.
On the 5th (local time) the Financial Times (FT), citing multiple sources, reported that a bank consortium led by Morgan Stanley plans to refinance through the bond market, as soon as it is disbursed, the 15 billion dollars of loans tied to a 2,000-acre (about 8.09 square kilometer) data center under construction in Hubbard, Texas, USA.
The reason banks pass infrastructure loan claims to the bond market is that funding is faster and cheaper, and it also reduces the banks' own AI-related credit exposure, freeing up capacity for further lending. The existing infrastructure finance market, which used to fund gas pipelines and airports, is currently unable to absorb the formidable funding demand for building AI data centers.
Major Wall Street banks have already been looking for buyers for months to sell more than 50 billion dollars of construction loans tied to data centers leased by Oracle earlier this year, and some banks have managed exposure using credit risk transfer (CRT) transactions.
This 15 billion dollar package is a 'delay-draw loan' structure in which the data center developer 'Nexus Data Centers' draws funds sequentially each time it meets a construction milestone. Accordingly the bond issuance will also be split across several tranches, and some may be raised in the leveraged loan market.
Although Google's financial guarantee exists, the bonds to be issued are expected to receive a speculative grade. This is because Google's guarantee takes effect only after the data center is completed, so investors must directly bear construction-stage risks such as completion delays and cost overruns. The data center is due to be fitted with Google's custom AI chip, the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU), and financing for the chips is being arranged separately.
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It does not look like a big issue, but since Google is providing the guarantee, TPUs go in.
▶ Original source: https://news.nate.com/view/20260805n21866
