Google isn’t just selling AI chips anymore; it is helping finance the entire ecosystem that runs them.
Google sits at the center of roughly $200 billion in financing arrangements supporting Anthropic’s infrastructure expansion, according to the Financial Times. The network reportedly involves more than $150 billion in Google Tensor Processing Units, along with private-credit firms, banks, data-center developers, and cryptocurrency miners that control valuable power capacity.
The network pulls in Broadcom, private equity firms Apollo and Blackstone, Morgan Stanley, and a cluster of cryptocurrency miners, according to people involved in the project and corporate filings cited by the FT.
How the money actually moves
No one wanted these chips sitting on their books. So Morgan Stanley helped build a private-credit vehicle called Compute SPV that buys the hardware and leases it to Anthropic — an approach borrowed from how Boeing and GE once financed jet engines.
In June, the SPV paid $35 billion for about 1 million TPUs. Apollo and Blackstone supplied the debt; Broadcom backstops much of it through what’s called residual value support.
Power is the other half of the puzzle
Chips need somewhere to run, and that means data centers with serious electricity supply. Google turned to crypto miners sitting on spare grid capacity, starting with TeraWulf, which is building a 360-megawatt site in upstate New York backed by a Google guarantee and $3.2 billion in construction bonds.
“We have a schedule and we’re looking for capacity that will fit the schedule,” a Google executive told the FT. Google has now backstopped 10 such projects totaling 2.4 gigawatts, putting itself on the hook for up to $44 billion if the leases sour.
Where the risk concentrates
Google is simultaneously Anthropic’s chip supplier, landlord and investor; a triple role that has fed criticism of “circular financing,” where a manufacturer’s own capital props up its customer’s ability to pay.
Jefferies analyst Jonathan Petersen called it the industry’s biggest exposure: “There’s a whole world that’s been built underneath those companies, and if their appetite to invest decreases, all of it sees a slowdown. That’s the big macro risk.”
The bottom line
The arrangement is already reshaping costs: data centers backed by Google’s guarantees borrow at 7.1%, versus 9.3% for those built around Nvidia chips, per the FT — a gap Jefferies calls a structural disadvantage for Nvidia’s ecosystem. That’s good news for Google’s push to sell TPUs externally, but it also means Wall Street, crypto miners and Big Tech’s balance sheets are now all leaning on one customer’s ability to keep paying its bills.
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