London, 4 August 2026 — EBM Newsdesk Analysis — By Katie Winearls
Google has assembled one of the largest infrastructure financing programmes ever attempted, worth more than $150bn, to supply artificial intelligence chips to Anthropic. The Financial Times reports that the arrangement draws in Broadcom, Apollo, Blackstone, Morgan Stanley and a group of crypto miners, stretching from chip fabrication to data-centre construction. Its first tranche, a $35bn special purpose vehicle announced in June, was already the largest private credit transaction on record.
The mechanism deserves attention beyond its size. The SPV borrows money, buys Google’s tensor processing units, and leases them to Anthropic, whose lease payments repay the debt. The hardware sits inside the vehicle rather than on Anthropic’s balance sheet — useful for a company preparing to list.
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Follow the parties and the structure becomes unusual.
Alphabet owns roughly 14% of Anthropic. Google sells Anthropic the chips. Broadcom co-designs those chips with Google, and Broadcom is also guaranteeing the debt raised to buy them — a deficiency guarantee covering around $31bn of senior notes, meaning that if Anthropic stops paying and the chips resell for less than the loan, Broadcom covers the difference. Morgan Stanley advises Broadcom, arranges the debt, and lends to investors buying it.
That guarantee is what makes the paper investment grade. It priced at 5.75%, and it is the reason insurers and pension funds could participate at all. It also cost Broadcom something concrete: S&P downgraded the company over the leverage implied.
Vendor financing is not new. Lucent and Nortel used it to sell telecoms equipment in the late 1990s, and the losses when customers failed were substantial. What is new is the scale, and the fact that the guarantee has been engineered to keep the exposure off everyone’s balance sheet simultaneously.
Why It Matters in Europe
Two reasons, and neither is about who wins the model race.
The first is where the money comes from. This debt is being syndicated to insurance companies, banks and pension funds, with Apollo’s insurance arm taking a large share. AI compute is being sold to institutional investors as an infrastructure asset class — contracted cash flows, long duration, quantifiable residual value, priced like a pipeline. European institutions are being invited into the same trade, at a moment when private credit is already absorbing institutional money at unusual speed.
The residual value assumption is the part to examine. There is no established secondary market for used TPUs. Broadcom’s guarantee assumes the chips can be sold if the lessee fails, and nobody knows what a distressed pod of two-year-old accelerators fetches, because it has never been tested.
The second reason is absence. No European laboratory can raise money on these terms, because none has the revenue to support it or a domestic chip designer to guarantee it. Europe’s growth capital is not short of ambition so much as short of this kind of structural plumbing, and the Chips Act addresses fabrication rather than financing.
The Verdict
My view is that the structure is genuinely clever and the risk is genuinely underpriced.
It is clever because it solves a real problem: frontier laboratories need hardware faster than their balance sheets can support, and Broadcom’s credit converts a start-up’s obligation into investment-grade paper. Everyone in the chain gets what they need.
The risk is that every party is exposed to the same event. If Anthropic’s growth slows, the lease payments falter, the chips hit a market that does not exist, and Broadcom pays. That is not diversification. It is one bet, wearing several hats — and, as with the dollar’s AI-driven rally, a lot now depends on a demand curve continuing to behave.
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