MANY MINDEDThe falling price of intelligence has a balance sheet under it
Google has assembled one of the largest infrastructure financing programmes ever built, to put more than $150 billion of its own AI chips under Anthropic. The Financial Times, reviewing corporate filings and speaking to people involved, tallies the interlocking contracts at around $200 billion.
The mechanics are the story. Rather than either company carrying the hardware, a special-purpose vehicle buys the chips and leases them to Anthropic, keeping them off the balance sheet and repaying investors out of lease income. The first tranche, agreed in June 2026, covered about $35 billion of hardware — roughly a gigawatt, on the order of a million TPUs — priced at approximately 5.75 percent. Apollo and Blackstone supply the private credit. Morgan Stanley advises, arranges and lends at several points. Broadcom, which co-designs the chips, commits to buying back unsold capacity and provides a deficiency guarantee covering roughly $31 billion of the senior debt. Crypto-mining firms that pivoted to compute are part of the arrangement. Broadcom's financing platform is described as capable of supporting more than 20 gigawatts through 2028.
Two days ago this site wrote that most of the collapse in AI token prices was a real cost curve rather than a discount. This is the other half of that picture, and it does not contradict it: the chips are real, the efficiency gains are real, and this is how they get paid for before the revenue arrives. But a curve financed by structured credit has a failure mode a curve driven by engineering does not, and the market has already priced some of it — S&P downgraded Broadcom over the leverage this implies.
The figures come from trade-press accounts of the FT's reporting; the original is paywalled, and individual numbers vary slightly between secondary summaries.
Source: Capacity