Cassidy: Fifteen billion for one campus, with Google's credit rating quietly co-signing the loan.
Cassidy: Today, the compute buildout comes with a harder question: who's exposed?
Cassidy: If you're just joining us, Meta's AI buildout now has a capacity-allocation problem on top of the model problem.
Cassidy: The company has been weighing whether to sell some excess compute through a cloud-style business while keeping enough headroom for its own
Cassidy: models. Anthropic has reportedly held preliminary talks to lease that compute
Cassidy: which could turn Meta's capex-heavy buildout into an outside infrastructure revenue line.
Bill: This is the AI Daily Briefing.
Bill: Amazon's at $220 billion while Meta has a quarter-trillion in leases.
Bill: One utility CEO is already admitting his grid is oversubscribed.
Bill: Stick around—we're tracing who's actually on the hook.
Bill: We're staying with this story: Meta AI compute monetization dilemma.
Bill: Follow the show and you won't miss what comes next.
Cassidy: Ashley Capoot, Hugh Son, writing in CNBC:
Quote: Morgan Stanley is the lead banker engaging in advanced talks to lend $15 billion to Nexus Data Centers to build out a large artificial
Quote: intelligence infrastructure project for Anthropic
Quote: CNBC confirmed on Thursday.
Quote: Nexus Data Centers will use the capital to develop a data center campus in Hubbard
Quote: Texas according to a source familiar with the discussions who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.
Cassidy: The key detail in this $15 billion Nexus deal is Google's agreement to backstop Anthropic with its own investment-grade credit rating.
Cassidy: Morgan Stanley is lending against Google's balance sheet, with Anthropic's name on the door.
Bill: Right. Anthropic doesn't have investment-grade paper on its own.
Bill: You want to build a campus in Hubbard, Texas, you need someone whose credit the bond desk actually trusts.
Cassidy: And that's a different kind of dependency from a chip order or a deployment deal.
Cassidy: Google already committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic in April.
Cassidy: Now it's lending its rating too.
Cassidy: Whatever the press releases say about independence, they're structurally stitched together.
Bill: Nvidia guaranteed OpenAI's lease last week.
Bill: Now Google's guaranteeing Anthropic's credit.
Bill: The guarantor's becoming a standard part of the stack, same as the GPUs.
Cassidy: So I keep coming back to this: if demand for these campuses comes in soft, Google's holding that Texas exposure.
Cassidy: That's a lot of faith riding on a rating for a campus that hasn't been poured yet.
Cassidy: From Converge Digest:
Quote: SEATTLE — Amazon Web Services delivered its strongest quarter in more than four years
Quote: with revenue surging 37% year-over-year to $42.2 billion—its fastest growth in 18 quarters—as demand for AI infrastructure accelerated
Quote: across cloud computing
Quote: custom silicon and foundation model services.
Bill: AWS AI has cleared a $25 billion run rate.
Bill: Custom silicon—Trainium and Graviton—has cleared another $25 billion, and both are growing at triple digits.
Bill: That's real revenue, not a demo.
Bill: I'll give Jassy that one.
Cassidy: And then he funds it with a $220 billion capex plan.
Cassidy: The revenue's real. But nobody has independently verified the demand curve behind that plan.
Bill: Right, and at a $25 billion run rate, Jassy's still saying capacity won't meet demand.
Bill: Wednesday's BEACON preprint asks whether long-horizon agent workloads justify pouring in compute at that scale.
Bill: Today's number only makes that question louder.
Cassidy: The multi-gigawatt Trainium commitments from Anthropic and OpenAI tell you where this is headed.
Cassidy: These deals are being measured in power now: gigawatts.
Cassidy: And we just heard Nexus scrambling for $15 billion on the Anthropic side.
Cassidy: Everybody's writing checks against megawatts that aren't interconnected yet.
Bill: A serverless product built specifically for persistent agentic workloads is a very optimistic thing to ship in the same quarter that a paper
Bill: says those chains fall apart at step seven.
Cassidy: Natalie Musumeci, writing in Business Insider:
Quote: Meta has more than a quarter trillion dollars in future lease obligations — largely tied to AI data centers— as the tech giant races to
Quote: build out its artificial intelligence infrastructure
Quote: a new regulatory filing shows.
Quote: In its quarterly securities filing released a day after its earnings report
Quote: Meta said it had approximately $278.99 billion in operating and finance leases that have not yet begun and were not yet included on its
Quote: balance sheet.
Cassidy: So here's the update on Meta's compute buildout: the lease tab is finally visible.
Cassidy: About $279 billion in future lease obligations, and it hasn't hit the balance sheet yet.
Cassidy: The quarterly securities filing puts it at $278.99 billion, one day after earnings.
Cassidy: You treat a filed number differently from something a CFO says out loud on a call.
Bill: Right, and those leases start rolling in from now through 2036.
Bill: That's a decade-long commitment that outlasts basically every product cycle these leases are supposed to serve.
Cassidy: And it lands the same morning Amazon guides to $220 billion in capex.
Cassidy: In the same 24 hours
Cassidy: two of the industry's biggest infrastructure bets are now in filings
Cassidy: with no independent check on the demand curve behind either one.
Bill: Sit with the phrase off-balance-sheet.
Bill: The commitment is real, and it runs through 2036.
Bill: You just don't have to stare at it in the same place every quarter.
Cassidy: From Converge Digest:
Quote: AMD and Core Scientific announced a strategic infrastructure partnership under which AMD will secure access to more than 500 megawatts of
Quote: U.S. AI-ready data center capacity beginning in 2027, with the potential to expand to as much as 2.5 gigawatts over time.
Bill: So AMD's deal here is for power
Bill: not chips: more than 500 megawatts starting in 2027
Bill: scaling to 2.5 gigawatts
Bill: locked in with Core Scientific before a single rack goes in.
Cassidy: Core Scientific can bring already-connected land to the table, thanks to converted crypto-mining sites.
Cassidy: That interconnection queue everyone else is stuck in? They skipped it.
Bill: That tells you exactly where the pain is.
Bill: When a chip company signs a capacity deal this size, the bottleneck has moved from silicon to substations.
Cassidy: The warrant structure is the part I'd underline: AMD gets market-priced warrants to buy Core Scientific stock.
Cassidy: That gives AMD an equity hook into its own landlord alongside the colo contract.
Cassidy: It echoes the Google-Anthropic backstop we talked about earlier: wire the counterparty into your balance sheet so the dependency runs both
Cassidy: ways.
Bill: A 2027 start date, with 2.5 gigawatts coming "over time."
Bill: Nobody's independently priced that demand yet, but at least AMD's hedging with equity instead of simply eating the lease.
Cassidy: Here's Kristi E. Swartz at Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Quote: The company had inked deals for roughly 8,000 megawatts of electricity out of the 10,000 megawatts that the Georgia Public Service
Quote: Commission approved last year before OpenAI’s project was announced.
Quote: “ … Our OpenAI contract in Georgia pushes us beyond our recently approved capacity by right around 1 gigawatt,” said Chris Womack
Quote: chairman president and chief executive of Southern.
Quote: A gigawatt is 1,000 megawatts.
Cassidy: Less than a year ago, Georgia's commission blessed a doubling of the grid—10,000 megawatts—specifically for data centers.
Cassidy: On Thursday's analyst call, Womack said it was already gone, and OpenAI's Savannah project pushes them a full gigawatt past that.
Bill: Twenty billion dollars, 3,200 megawatts—that's three Vogtle reactors' worth of power for one campus.
Bill: Next to the interconnection queue, capital looks easy.
Cassidy: Here's the part no earnings call names: they'd already inked deals for 8,000 of the 10,000 approved megawatts before OpenAI even showed up.
Cassidy: The Amazon and Meta capex numbers from earlier are bets on a demand curve.
Cassidy: Womack's the operator saying the curve is outrunning the grid—out loud, on the record.
Bill: They've signed 17,000 megawatts of large-load deals through the mid-2030s, and sales are up 55% in a year.
Bill: To cover the gap, they're proposing 2,000 to 6,000 megawatts of dispatchable capacity by 2032.
Bill: The answer for today's demand is a maybe, seven years out.
Cassidy: That sends another expansion back to the same commission that just approved this one.
Cassidy: Every one of these campuses is now waiting on a utility docket rather than a chip shipment.
Cassidy: That's where the exposure sits if the projections miss.
Cassidy: If AI Daily Briefing is part of your routine
Cassidy: check out Anthropic Pentagon Watch
Cassidy: a daily briefing on Anthropic’s fight with the DoD
Cassidy: military AI use autonomous weapons
Cassidy: and AI procurement blacklisting.
Cassidy: Find it wherever you listen to podcasts.
Cassidy: One thing we’re watching: AMD’s reserved access to more than 500 megawatts of AI-ready U.S.
Cassidy: capacity from Core Scientific is due to begin in 2027.
Cassidy: You’ll find links to every story in today’s show notes if you want to dig into anything that caught your attention.
Cassidy: That’s AI Daily Briefing for today.
Cassidy: This is a Lantern Podcast.