Google’s backstops underpin $45 billion chip deal for Anthropic

Google was one of Anthropic PBC’s earliest investors, repeatedly buying equity in the artificial intelligence firm. Now it is increasingly backstopping the financing that underpins data centres for the start-up, underscoring the complex business ties among the handful of largest tech companies pouring money into AI.

Anthropic, the creator of Claude, is leasing powerful computer chips at five data centres with help from the long-established tech giant.

Google, whose AI entries include Gemini, agreed to backstop lease payments at each location, helping Anthropic obtain what amounts to a US$35 billion (S$ 45 billion) loan. Anthropic’s involvement with these data centres as part of the super-sized financing has not been previously reported. 

As Silicon Valley races to build AI infrastructure, leading firms have struck complicated and often circular deals with one another in a bid to secure access.

While Google is using its massive balance sheet to finance data centres, the support does not just benefit Anthropic; it is also a supplier of the chips that Anthropic will ultimately use at the data centres.

This gives Google an opportunity to sell more hardware to a customer whose products are seen as powering much of the AI industry’s future. 

The latest deal comes with an assist from chip designer Broadcom, which used its clout and top-level credit ratings to help clinch financing that will enable Google to deliver tensor processing units, or TPU chips, to AI model developer Anthropic.

The latter two have teamed up before: Google and Anthropic struck a long-term partnership for TPUs in 2025, and two months ago Google agreed to invest US$10 billion in the start-up. 

Tech tie-ups

More deals linking top tech giants seem to come to light by the day: SpaceX said late last week that Google agreed to pay it US$920 million a month from October 2026 to June 2029 to deliver compute capacity.  

“A year ago, some wondered if there could possibly be enough demand to support all this infrastructure spending,” said Joe Allen, head of securitised credit strategies at Bright Meadow, a Mariner Investment Group team.

“In fact, the amount of infrastructure available is still a limiting factor, and companies are going to great lengths to ensure access,” he said, without specifically addressing the Google-Anthropic tie.  

Anthropic declined to comment. Representatives for Broadcom and Google’s parent Alphabet did not respond to requests for comment. 

It is not unusual for large firms in the same industry to go into business with one another. Still, the concentration in the AI industry has generated scrutiny. Some earlier deals have raised concern about circularity – the idea that companies are propping each other up, raising the potential for setbacks to cascade among the partners and magnify the damage.

In 2024, the federal trade commission launched an inquiry to “scrutinise corporate partnerships and investments with AI providers.” 

In the new US$35 billion microchip deal, the linkage has custom chip designer Broadcom designing the chips, Google developing them and Anthropic using them at five US-based data centres. Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are financing the deal. 

TeraWulf, a cryptominer-turned-data centre operator, is developing two of the facilities – one at its Lake Mariner campus near Buffalo, New York, and another in Abernathy, Texas, said people familiar with the matter, who asked for anonymity to discuss non-public information.

Cipher Digital is developing one near Colorado City in Texas, Hut 8 is readying a data centre in St. Francisville, Louisiana and a joint venture comprising Next Frontier and Fluidstack are developing a facility in Sullivan County, Indiana.

In a spree of deals over the last nine months, those companies raised over US$15 billion in bonds to pay for the construction of the data centres. All of them include a lease from AI cloud platform Fluidstack. 

Each of these bond deals feature the so-called “Google backstop”. As part of the backstop, Google will step in to repay bondholders if Fluidstack defaults or goes bankrupt. Its support would not kick in until the data centres are operational and Fluidstack commences their lease.

Anthropic has a critical agreement with Fluidstack that ties the deals together. In November 2025, Anthropic announced a US$50 billion investment in US computing infrastructure. It revealed that it was working with Fluidstack on custom-built data centers for the Claude developer.

“In the sub-investment-grade market, we’re essentially financing the picks and shovels. All of the hard equipment,” said John Yovanovic, the co-head of leveraged finance at MetLife Investment Management. “But they’re pretty straightforward, and for most issuers, we’re effectively taking the credit risk of the Mag Seven.”

It is not uncommon for blue-chip technology companies to pledge financial support to get deals done. AI infrastructure deals often involve startups and other companies that make financiers skittish, and a helping hand from a friendly tech giant can assuage fears.

Speaking at Bloomberg’s Global Credit Forum, Christina Minnis, the global head of the alternatives origination group at Goldman Sachs Group, cautioned there was some risk that a handful of companies could concentrate the AI infrastructure space. But she countered that smaller businesses she would never heard of were peppering her group’s pipeline for deals.

“Yes, there is some concentration. But it’s spreading into the economy in a way that I think is constructive,” Minnis said. “The number of companies we’re now trying to develop a relationship with is extraordinary.” BLOOMBERG