Seven lenders are currently holding $14.2B in disbursed credit for a compute campus in Texas after a consortium led by Morgan Stanley suspended plans to market a portion of the project’s debt to investors. The banks had sought to offload between $5B and $7B of the facility’s original loan through a junk bond sale, but the transaction stalled following a state order to stop approving new grid connections for data centers.
Governor Greg Abbott imposed the freeze to allow Texas regulators to conduct an audit of the state’s power grid and evaluate the risk posed by energy-intensive AI infrastructure. The audit has now become the primary obstacle to refinancing the Anthropic leased campus, leaving each of the participating banks with roughly $2B in exposure on the one year loan.