Google Moves Billions in Risk Off Its Balance Sheet to Supply Anthropic with AI Hardware

According to a Financial Times report, Google, together with Broadcom, Apollo, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley, and several crypto mining companies, has built one of the largest infrastructure financing programs in history to sell AI chips to Anthropic. The chips in question are Google's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), developed jointly with Broadcom since 2016, now sold externally in pods of thousands of chips. Anthropic needs enormous quantities of AI chips but lacks a credit rating, so banks won't lend it enough, and other parties don't want the hardware on their books. Morgan Stanley helped structure a financing company that buys the chips and leases them to Anthropic, funded by external investors primarily Apollo and Blackstone. In June, the special purpose vehicle Compute SPV purchased about one gigawatt of TPU hardware for $35 billion, roughly one million TPUs, with Broadcom providing a guarantee covering about $30 billion if Anthropic defaults. This structure served as a template for larger deals, including a April agreement for 3.5 additional gigawatts of TPU hardware, with Broadcom's purchase commitments totaling $128 billion through 2028, almost entirely for Google TPUs. Google also secured data center capacity and power by partnering with crypto mining companies, starting with TeraWulf for a 360-megawatt data center in New York, and later Cipher Digital and Hut 8, totaling ten projects with 2.4 gigawatts. Google's potential liabilities could reach $44 billion if all leases fail, but it reports only $815 million on its balance sheet, keeping most risk off-book. Google-backed projects borrow at a median interest rate of 7.1% versus 9.3% for Nvidia-based neocloud operators, which Jefferies analysts called a structural capital cost disadvantage for Nvidia's ecosystem. The entire structure depends on Anthropic's ability to service its loans, with $200 billion in contracts at risk, and highlights how big tech AI financing models increasingly tie large parts of the financial system to industry growth.