The off-balance-sheet TPU

Anthropic needs roughly a gigawatt of Google's TPU chips, but it doesn't want to borrow $35 billion to buy depreciating silicon right before going public. So Apollo and Blackstone built a workaround: a separate entity raises the debt, buys the chips, and leases them back to Anthropic. The capex never lands on Anthropic's balance sheet.

Broadcom CEO Hock Tan said the company is building an "AI XPV platform" with Apollo, Blackstone and other investors to deploy over 20 GW of compute through 2028 for both Anthropic and OpenAI. — Hock Tan

A deal this size only closed because two parties absorbed the two scariest risks. AI hardware loses value fast, so lenders feared being stuck with stale chips — Broadcom, which designs the TPUs, guaranteed they will hold a floor value, covering about $30 billion of the debt. And Anthropic might miss a payment, so Google itself backstopped the lease across all five US data centers. The chip designer and the cloud provider are jointly underwriting someone else's loan.

The striking part is Broadcom's bet: to make the financing work, the company that builds the chips had to wager against its own product going obsolete — a residual-value guarantee is effectively a put on TPU depreciation, written the same season its newest TPU shipped. It's a template the rest of the industry will copy, a way to move tens of billions in fast-aging silicon off a lab's books by getting its suppliers to share the downside.