Anthropic has stacked $71 billion in chip-lease debt in 60 days and kept it off its books

Anthropic has committed to roughly $71 billion in computing hardware over about two months. Almost none of it sits on Anthropic's balance sheet, and that is the point.

The Structure

The mechanism is a special purpose vehicle — a separate legal entity created for a single financial purpose. The SPV acquires the chips, in this case Google TPUs. It then leases them to Anthropic. Broadcom backstops the senior tranches of the debt financing the purchase.

The effect is that Anthropic gets the compute while the hardware, and the debt that bought it, remain outside its corporate accounts. There is no multi-billion-dollar asset depreciating on its books and no corresponding borrowing against its own credit. What appears instead is a lease expense.

By the reported figures, Anthropic's total structured-credit exposure tied to Google hardware alone would exceed $71 billion — among the largest private-credit arrangements ever assembled by any company, in any industry.

Blackstone is leading early investor discussions on a second package, with deployment targeted at data centres in New York, Texas, Louisiana and Indiana, structured the same way.

The Bitcoin Miner Deal

One component illustrates how far this reaches beyond conventional technology finance. Anthropic signed a $9.1 billion compute agreement with Riot Platforms, a Bitcoin mining company pivoting its facilities to AI data centres. Riot's shares rose 25 per cent in after-hours trading on the announcement.

That is a logical trade for both sides. Bitcoin miners already possess what AI companies are short of: sited facilities, secured power contracts at scale, and cooling infrastructure. Converting from mining to AI compute is a substantially smaller undertaking than building from nothing. For Anthropic, it is capacity available on a timeline that new construction cannot match.

Why Anthropic Is Doing This

Anthropic's compute position has been unusually exposed all year, and this is the third major procurement in three months.

The company already agreed to pay xAI roughly $1.25 billion a month through May 2029 — more than $40 billion over the term — for exclusive use of the Colossus 1 data centre in Memphis. It has separately expanded a partnership with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation compute. This month it also confirmed it is building an in-house team to design its own chips, hiring semiconductor engineers at salaries up to $485,000.

The common thread is a company that concluded it cannot compete without vastly more compute, and cannot obtain that compute through any single conventional route.

What The Structure Trades Away

Off-balance-sheet financing is legal, well established, and genuinely useful. It also has a specific history.

The benefit is real: Anthropic scales compute without carrying hardware depreciation or taking on corporate debt that would constrain future borrowing. The cost is that the obligations still exist. Lease payments are contractual regardless of whether Anthropic's revenue arrives as projected, and the exposure is harder for outsiders to assess precisely because it does not appear where they would normally look.

That matters more than usual right now. OpenAI's chief financial officer has privately raised concerns about honouring compute contracts if revenue lags. More than $1.3 trillion was erased from semiconductor market values in late July as investors questioned whether AI infrastructure spending will earn its cost of capital. Meta has moved a $14 billion data centre to BlackRock-managed funds at 80 per cent ownership and leased it back. Nvidia is reportedly in talks to guarantee $250 billion for OpenAI's Ohio campus.

A pattern is now visible across the industry: the AI build-out has outgrown the balance sheets of the companies driving it, and the financing has moved into structures designed to keep the liabilities at arm's length.

Anthropic's version is among the largest and the fastest-assembled. Sixty days, $71 billion, and a set of arrangements in which the company using the chips is not the company that owns them or, formally, the company that owes for them.