Google Routes More Than $150 Billion of Anthropic Chip Risk Through Off-Balance-Sheet Vehicles

The financing structure behind Anthropic's compute is now clearer, and it sits on the balance sheet of neither company. Reporting this week describes a program worth more than $150 billion that Google assembled to place its tensor processing units (TPUs) in Anthropic's data centers, drawing in Broadcom, Apollo, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley and a set of crypto miners with available power and shell capacity.

The mechanism is a lease, not a sale. A special-purpose vehicle borrows from outside investors, buys the chips, and leases them to Anthropic, whose payments repay the debt. The Decoder reports that the first vehicle bought roughly one gigawatt of TPU hardware for about $35 billion in June. Apollo and Blackstone provided most of the money, and Broadcom guaranteed about $30 billion of it if Anthropic stops paying. Alphabet owns roughly 14 percent of Anthropic. That makes it supplier, shareholder and, through separate lease guarantees reported at up to $43.8 billion against $6.5 billion nine months earlier, partial guarantor of its largest customer.

The context matters. Alphabet raised its 2026 capital spending guidance to a range of $195 billion to $205 billion at its second-quarter results, and its shares fell about 7 percent as investors scrutinized hyperscaler capital intensity instead of treating the increase as a positive. Moving chip purchases into vehicles that are never recorded in Google's reported capital spending lowers the figure investors are measuring without lowering the underlying obligation.

The structure depends on one variable, which is Anthropic's ability to grow revenue fast enough to make the lease payments. The chips are the collateral, and TPU resale value outside Google Cloud is untested.