To build a serious rival to Nvidia, Google has reached for Nvidia’s own playbook.
A Wall Street Journal investigation lays out how Google is using financial guarantees and what the industry calls “circular financing”, the very tactics that helped make demand for Nvidia’s chips unstoppable, to win data-centre customers for its own silicon.
The clearest example sits on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, a short drive from Niagara Falls.
The $3.2bn guarantee by the falls
At an AI data-centre cluster in western New York known as Lake Mariner, Google has provided a $3.2bn financial guarantee, according to the WSJ. The site’s developers, TeraWulf and the Google-backed cloud provider FluidStack, will rent computing power from thousands of Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs, to Anthropic.
