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.

In June, the first tranche of TPU hardware passed from Google through Broadcom into this financing blender. A special-purpose vehicle known as Compute SPV paid $35bn for roughly 1GW of the AI hardware, representing around 1mn TPUs, according to people familiar with the matter.

The SPV’s cash came from three tranches of debt anchored by Apollo and Blackstone. Broadcom, in effect, guaranteed the two senior tranches by agreeing to cover any shortfall if Anthropic stopped paying and the SPV could not sell the hardware for enough to make the senior investors whole.

I don’t know what the hell is going on here but it reeks of shell companies and Enron and meltdowns.