Google has assembled one of the largest infrastructure financing programmes in history to supply more than $150bn of artificial intelligence chips to Anthropic.
Surging demand from Anthropic, in which Google is an investor, has led the Big Tech company to orchestrate a sprawling operation to supply its chips to the start-up, according to people involved in the project and corporate filings reviewed by the FT.
The effort brings together Google, Broadcom, Apollo, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley and a slew of crypto miners in a web of transactions that stretches from chip manufacturing to data centre development.
At the centre of the project are Google’s tensor processing units, or TPUs — AI chips it has co-developed with Broadcom since 2016. Once used largely inside Google’s own data centres, the chips have begun to be sold externally, challenging Nvidia’s dominance of the AI processor market.
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To support the relentless surge in demand for the AI chips, Google, Broadcom and Wall Street investors have each taken on different pieces of the financial risk.
Google guarantees the data centres. Broadcom commits to buying the chips and helps finance them. Apollo and Blackstone provide much of the private-credit capital that purchases the hardware before leasing it to Anthropic.
“This is each of us putting our balance sheet to work,” said a Google executive involved in the effort. “We’re doing it on the data centre side, [Broadcom’s] doing it on the chip side.”The web of contracts underpinning these arrangements adds up to about $200bn, with roughly four-fifths tied to the chips themselves, making it one of the largest infrastructure financings ever assembled.
A programme of such a size posed a problem: none of the companies involved wanted to carry tens of billions of dollars of AI chips on their balance sheets.
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That challenge produced an unusual solution. Morgan Stanley helped arrange a private-credit vehicle, funded by outside investors, that buys the chips and leases them to Anthropic in an adaptation of the vendor-financing model Boeing and GE built to sell aircraft and engines.
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Financing the chips solved only half of Google’s problem. The company also needed enough powered data centres to house them. “We have a schedule and we’re looking for capacity that will fit the schedule,” the Google executive said. “Crypto miners with excess capacity were helpful.”
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People familiar with the matter said the Big Tech company had so far backstopped 10 developments with 2.4GW of power for TPUs. Google’s guarantees put it on the hook for as much as $44bn if all the leases go bad, though it marks the liability at $815mn on its balance sheet. It could also step into the leases itself.
The Google team is now racing to put together additional data centre projects with enough power to ultimately house all of the 4.5GW of TPU hardware they’ve agreed to sell. “We’re spending a lot of time on [power] right now — all of our time,” said the Google executive.
It is absolutely insane that it isn't considered a conflict of interest or collusion under competition/antitrust law for Google to both be developing a competitor to Anthropic while also being a...
It is absolutely insane that it isn't considered a conflict of interest or collusion under competition/antitrust law for Google to both be developing a competitor to Anthropic while also being a major investor.
Rinse/repeat for Microsoft and Amazon especially. This whole affair is a giant circular capex-burning dumpster fire. It's massively inflating cloud provider income that the cloud provider pays...
Rinse/repeat for Microsoft and Amazon especially. This whole affair is a giant circular capex-burning dumpster fire. It's massively inflating cloud provider income that the cloud provider pays Anthropic or OpenAI for them to pay the bills.
The entirety of the Apollo program cost $184 billion in today's dollars. Microsoft alone has spent almost $300 billion since 2023, with about 1/3 going to Open AI.
They're starting to build support for a bailout under the guise that their product is as valuable to the nation as the entire banking system. When the reality is the main problem we'd face if OpenAI and Anthropic shutdown tomorrow is about about a week or three of crippled chatbots and some slightly drawn-out deadlines.
Along with the crippled chatbots we'd also have a huge crash in global markets. A lot of industries are now looking healthy from a market perspective only because of AI related...
Along with the crippled chatbots we'd also have a huge crash in global markets. A lot of industries are now looking healthy from a market perspective only because of AI related spending/investment/fomo
Whether that would cause a long lasting recession is anyone's guess, markets don't seem to follow the same rules they once did. At the moment these companies are propping up markets to as significant a degree as investment banking has in the past.
A crash, and a recession, might be the right thing in the long run, but there would be a lot of collateral damage to everyday people.
Google only holds non-voting shares and exerts no direct control over the company....
Google only holds non-voting shares and exerts no direct control over the company.
Google owns 14 percent of Anthropic, according to legal filings that the A.I. start-up submitted as part of a Google antitrust case. But that investment gives Google little control over the company. The internet giant can own only up to 15 percent of Anthropic, according to the filings, and Google holds no voting rights, no board seats and no board observer rights at the start-up.
https://archive.is/mC6hM
From the article:
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It is absolutely insane that it isn't considered a conflict of interest or collusion under competition/antitrust law for Google to both be developing a competitor to Anthropic while also being a major investor.
Rinse/repeat for Microsoft and Amazon especially. This whole affair is a giant circular capex-burning dumpster fire. It's massively inflating cloud provider income that the cloud provider pays Anthropic or OpenAI for them to pay the bills.
The entirety of the Apollo program cost $184 billion in today's dollars. Microsoft alone has spent almost $300 billion since 2023, with about 1/3 going to Open AI.
They're starting to build support for a bailout under the guise that their product is as valuable to the nation as the entire banking system. When the reality is the main problem we'd face if OpenAI and Anthropic shutdown tomorrow is about about a week or three of crippled chatbots and some slightly drawn-out deadlines.
Along with the crippled chatbots we'd also have a huge crash in global markets. A lot of industries are now looking healthy from a market perspective only because of AI related spending/investment/fomo
Whether that would cause a long lasting recession is anyone's guess, markets don't seem to follow the same rules they once did. At the moment these companies are propping up markets to as significant a degree as investment banking has in the past.
A crash, and a recession, might be the right thing in the long run, but there would be a lot of collateral damage to everyday people.
Google only holds non-voting shares and exerts no direct control over the company.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/11/technology/google-investment-anthropic.html?unlocked_article_code=1.3FA.g_wA.cereazHOj1Lh&smid=url-share
It's unusual, but I guess it's more of an investment in a rising tide lifting all boats.