Google moves billions in Anthropic chip risk off its balance sheet

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Google has engineered one of the largest AI infrastructure financing structures in history to supply Anthropic with compute while protecting its own balance sheet. The structure: a special-purpose vehicle (Compute SPV) buys approximately one million TPUs (one gigawatt of capacity) for $35 billion, funded by outside investors primarily Apollo and Blackstone. Broadcom provides a $30 billion backstop if Anthropic stops making lease payments. Morgan Stanley structured the deal.\n\nThe motivation is a chain of credit constraints: Anthropic cannot directly borrow at this scale (no credit rating), Google doesn't want more balance sheet strain, and Broadcom doesn't want to hold hardware it resells. The SPV structure threads all three constraints simultaneously. For power capacity, Google is turning to crypto mining companies — an unconventional infrastructure move that reveals how constrained data center capacity has become.\n\nBroadcom's financial filings list $128 billion in purchase commitments through 2028, with FT sources saying nearly all ties to Google TPUs via a subsequent April agreement covering 3.5 additional gigawatts. Total contracts now dependent on Anthropic's ability to grow its revenue: $200 billion. The arrangement is described as a template for future deals — off-balance-sheet AI compute financing may become a standard industry structure.