Google partners with Broadcom, Apollo, Blackstone, and Morgan Stanley on a multibillion-dollar financing structure to supply Anthropic with AI chips while off-loading balance sheet risk.
Google has assembled a consortium of financial and industrial partners—including Broadcom, Apollo, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley, and several cryptocurrency mining companies—to finance the sale of AI chips to Anthropic, creating what the Financial Times describes as one of the largest infrastructure financing programs in history.
The deals center on Google's Tensor Processing Units, which the company has developed with Broadcom since 2016. Originally built for Google's own data centers, TPUs are now sold to outside customers and present a direct challenge to Nvidia's dominance of the AI processor market. Google sells the chips in "Pods," server racks that connect thousands of TPUs into unified computing systems.
Anthropic requires vast quantities of AI hardware but cannot purchase the chips directly, having no independent credit rating to support such borrowing. Banks cannot lend a startup sums of this magnitude, while the other parties involved also wish to keep the hardware off their balance sheets. Google, already spending record sums, declines to add further strain to its own balance sheet. Similarly, Broadcom, which resells Google's chips, prefers not to tie up its capital in inventory.
Morgan Stanley structured the solution by establishing a financing vehicle that purchases the chips and leases them to Anthropic. Outside investors, primarily Apollo and Blackstone, provide the capital. The arrangement first operated in June when a special purpose vehicle called Compute SPV purchased approximately one gigawatt of TPU hardware for $35 billion—roughly one million TPUs by Financial Times estimates. Broadcom provides a backstop covering approximately $30 billion of the purchase should Anthropic default on its lease payments.
This structure now serves as a template for larger deals. The most substantial agreement to date is an April arrangement covering Google's sale of an additional 3.5 gigawatts of TPU hardware to Broadcom for use by Anthropic. According to Broadcom's financial filings, the company has committed to $128 billion in purchases through 2028, with nearly all of that amount tied to Google TPUs.
Financing the chips addresses only half the challenge; Google must also secure data centers with sufficient electrical capacity to operate them. The company is therefore partnering with cryptocurrency miners that have already secured reliable access to large quantities of power. TeraWulf became the first recipient of a Google guarantee, covering a 360-megawatt data center in New York. Morgan Stanley packaged this guarantee into a $3.2 billion construction bond, while Google received an ownership stake in TeraWulf in return. Google has extended this model to other cryptocurrency miners including Cipher Digital and Hut 8, backing ten projects with a combined capacity of 2.4 gigawatts.
The arrangement entails substantial financial exposure for Google. Should every lease default, the company could face up to $44 billion in obligations. However, Google records only $815 million of this liability on its balance sheet, leaving most of the exposure off its books.
Google's financial backing is already reshaping the economics of AI infrastructure. Data center projects backed by Google borrow at a median interest rate of 7.1 percent, compared with 9.3 percent for cloud operators relying on Nvidia chips—a gap that Jefferies analysts describe as "a structural cost-of-capital disadvantage" for companies within Nvidia's ecosystem.
According to separate reporting from The Information, Anthropic has committed to spending approximately $200 billion on Google Cloud services over five years in exchange for five gigawatts of server capacity. This commitment represents more than 40 percent of Google's committed future cloud revenue. Collectively, Anthropic and OpenAI account for roughly half of the $2 trillion in cloud backlogs at Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle. Both companies are projecting revenue growth of 20 to 30 times by 2029, and the entire financial structure could face serious stress should that growth slows or stalls.
The arrangement also carries concentrated risk, as $200 billion in contracts depend on Anthropic's ability to sustain its lease payments. Additionally, Google occupies a dual position as both an investor in Anthropic and the supplier of its core computing infrastructure.