AI Flash News: Behind Anthropic’s Google computing power order, a financing and contracting system worth about $200 billion has already been put in place. (The Financial Times) says that roughly 80% of it is related to TPU chips. Anthropic does not need to fork out all the money upfront; the chip costs are mainly funded by Wall Street, while Google and Broadcom respectively back the data centers and the chips.

The first batch—about $35 billion, 1GW of TPU—was initially sold by Google to Broadcom, then transferred to an SPV (a financing company set up specifically for the deal). Institutions such as Apollo and Blackstone provide debt financing to the SPV, which buys about 1 million TPU chips, and then leases them to Anthropic.

Broadcom provides residual value support of about $30 billion. If, going forward, Anthropic can’t pay the rent, and the TPU sales are insufficient to repay the debt, Broadcom would have to make up the gap for senior creditors.

The data centers are backed by Google. Google guarantees the lease for Anthropic; the developer uses Google’s credit to borrow money to build the data centers. FT says Google has supported 10 projects totaling 2.4GW, with a maximum potential exposure of about $44 billion.

The whole chain is: Wall Street pays to buy the chips; Anthropic pays rent; Broadcom covers the chip’s residual value; Google guarantees the data-center lease. A compute-power order worth over a trillion dollars is thus broken down into layer after layer of financing and guarantees.

Wall Street has rebuilt a brand-new capital structure for Anthropic’s compute-power procurement: it does not buy chips, only pays rent. Through an SPV, residual value risk is separated from lease risk. Google and Broadcom are not simply suppliers; they act as guarantors—Google for data-center debt financing and Broadcom for chip residual-value backing—injecting their own credit into the financing chain in exchange for Anthropic’s compute-power lock-in.

In June, Apollo and Blackstone agreed on $35 billion in TPU debt financing. After that, Broadcom, together with the two, set up an “AI XPV platform,” targeting 20GW of computing power by 2028. Recently, Anthropic also rented Nvidia chip compute power from Nscale for $45 billion and recruited the former head of Google’s TPU team to develop in-house chips. What began as a race for single large purchases has evolved into a capital-engineering battle with deep involvement from Wall Street. Anthropic is tying itself to multiple suppliers at the same time to hedge the risk of a single architecture.

Worth noting is the detail: “Google provides support for 10 projects totaling 2.4GW, with a maximum exposure of $44 billion.”

This goes far beyond the scope of a single-lease guarantee. In practice, Google is endorsing Anthropic’s data-center expansion, making its credit the foundation of the entire financing structure—if Anthropic’s performance shows fluctuations, Google would be directly exposed to risks amounting to tens of billions of dollars.

If Google defaults, could it become the trigger for the next black swan?