Google has teamed up with Broadcom, Apollo, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley, and several crypto mining companies to finance AI chip sales to Anthropic. The Financial Times describes it 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 challenge Nvidia's dominance of the AI processor market. Google sells the chips in "Pods," server racks that connect thousands of TPUs into one computing system.
Nobody wants the chips on their own books
Anthropic needs vast amounts of AI hardware but can't buy the chips itself because it has no credit rating. Banks won't lend the startup that much money, while the other companies involved also want to keep the hardware off their balance sheets, FT sources say. Google is already spending record sums and doesn't want to add more strain to its balance sheet. Broadcom also doesn't want to tie up its capital in the Google chips it resells.
Morgan Stanley has helped set up a financing vehicle that buys the chips and leases them to Anthropic. Outside investors, mainly Apollo and Blackstone, put up the money. The structure first goes into use in June, when a special purpose vehicle called Compute SPV buys about one gigawatt of TPU hardware for $35 billion. That works out to roughly one million TPUs, according to the FT. Broadcom provides a backstop covering about $30 billion of the purchase if Anthropic stops making lease payments.
