$200 billion in Anthropic deals ride on Google’s elaborate, off-book chip scheme

Google has engineered one of the most complex infrastructure financing schemes in history to keep AI startup Anthropic supplied with its custom TPU chips while keeping billions in debt off everyone’s books. The arrangement, first detailed by the Financial Times, involves a special-purpose vehicle that buys roughly one million TPUs for $35 billion using outside investor money, then leases the hardware to Anthropic. Broadcom provides a $30 billion backstop, and Morgan Stanley structured the deal.

The motivation is simple: nobody wants the hardware on their balance sheet. Anthropic lacks a credit rating and can’t borrow the money. Google is already spending record sums on its own infrastructure. Broadcom, which co-developed the TPUs, doesn’t want to tie up capital in resold chips. So a shell entity called Compute SPV — funded mainly by Apollo and Blackstone — absorbs the asset, with Broadcom guaranteeing most of the lease payments.

But chips are useless without power, and here the scheme gets even more creative. Google is tapping crypto mining companies like TeraWulf, Cipher Digital, and Hut 8 that have already locked in large electricity allocations. Google guarantees a 360-megawatt TeraWulf data center in New York, Morgan Stanley packages that guarantee into a $3.2 billion construction bond, and Google gets an equity stake. Ten such projects totaling 2.4 gigawatts are already in motion.

The financial contortions obscure real risk. If every lease defaults, Google faces up to $44 billion in obligations — yet records just $815 million of that on its balance sheet. The entire structure, encompassing some $200 billion in contracts, depends on Anthropic’s revenue growing 20 to 30 times by 2029. That’s the same Anthropic that, alongside OpenAI, accounts for roughly half of the $2 trillion cloud backlog across the four major providers. One slip in growth projections and this elaborate scaffolding — which already gives Google-backed projects a 7.1% borrowing rate versus 9.3% for Nvidia-reliant neoclouds — could get very shaky, very fast.