Why Is Google Guaranteeing $43.8B of Other People's Data Center Rent? TPU Operators Borrow at 7.1%, Nvidia's at 9.3%

There’s a number in Alphabet’s Q2 2026 10-Q: as of June 30, the ceiling on third-party data center rent Google has promised to cover if tenants default stands at $43.8 billion.

Nine months earlier it was $6.5 billion. A sevenfold increase.

None of those data centers belong to Google. It guaranteed somebody else’s rent.

What $43.8 billion buys is 2.2 percentage points

A guarantee costs nothing to issue. What it transfers is credit.

With Alphabet standing behind them, lenders price these projects differently overnight: operators running Google TPUs borrow at 7.1%, while comparable projects inside Nvidia’s ecosystem pay 9.3%. A structural 2.2 points.

In an industry where capex runs to tens of billions and construction is heavily debt-financed, 2.2 points is not a finance detail — it decides whether a project gets built at all. To get a sense of scale: on a $10 billion ten-year facility, the interest gap is $220 million a year, north of $2 billion cumulatively — enough to eat a data center’s operating profit across its entire life.

So the nature of this should be stated plainly: what Google is using against Nvidia is not chip performance. It’s its own credit rating. It didn’t cut the price of TPUs. It cut the cost of borrowing for people who buy TPUs.

Google has now extended this kind of guarantee across 10 TPU data center projects, totalling 2.4 gigawatts of power capacity.

At the other end of the chain is a company that can’t borrow

The primary customer this structure serves is Anthropic.

Its run-rate revenue just crossed $30 billion — at the end of 2025 that figure was around $9 billion. The growth is steep, but it is a private company with no credit rating, and infrastructure financing in the tens of billions is not something its own balance sheet can raise.

Google’s guarantee is what fills that gap. What flows along this chain is Alphabet’s credit; what Anthropic supplies is demand and rent.

The supply end is locked down too. In April 2026, Broadcom, Google and Anthropic expanded their arrangement to roughly 3.5 gigawatts of compute, delivering from 2027; separately, Broadcom and Google hold a long-term TPU supply agreement running to 2031. Analysts estimate Broadcom will book around $21 billion of Anthropic-related revenue in 2026 and about $42 billion in 2027 — those two figures are sell-side estimates, not disclosed in filings.

Four parties in the middle, none of whom wants the hardware on their books

• Morgan Stanley built a special purpose vehicle called Compute SPV, structuring the deal and packaging the guarantees into bond products for investors.
• Apollo and Blackstone provide the money through private credit. The SPV uses that outside capital to buy chips and leases the hardware to Anthropic. The first transaction, in June 2026, was $35 billion for roughly 1 million TPUs.
• Broadcom provides about $30 billion in residual value guarantees, the buffer for when Anthropic can’t make lease payments. Its total procurement commitments to Google run to $128 billion ($55.2B in FY2027, $72.9B in FY2028).
• Crypto miners — TeraWulf, Cipher, Hut 8 — supply grid power and sites. The 360 megawatt facility TeraWulf built in upstate New York is dedicated to Anthropic; Google guarantees the lease and takes share purchase warrants in return. Back in October 2025, Morgan Stanley had already packaged TeraWulf’s lease into construction bonds and raised $3.2 billion.

There’s one more layer: AI cloud provider Fluidstack leases and develops data centers packed with Google TPUs, then rents that compute on to Anthropic — with the leases, again, guaranteed by Google.

Line the roles up and the common thread is obvious: not one party wants the hardware recorded on its own books. The chips are bought with outside investors’ money, held by an SPV, hosted on miners’ sites, backstopped by Broadcom’s residual guarantee, and the rent is guaranteed by Google. Every link pushes the asset and the risk to the next one.

What’s actually scarce isn’t chips — it’s grid power

The miners’ presence in this network is the most revealing part of the whole thing.

Chips can be ordered and capacity can be scheduled, but hundreds of megawatts of grid interconnection cannot be conjured up. What crypto miners have done for the past decade is find cheap power, secure the interconnection, and get machines energised as fast as possible. As mining economics deteriorated, the idle interconnection capacity in their hands turned out to be exactly what AI is short of.

That also explains the deal on August 4 that looks most absurd on its face: Anthropic signed a $10 billion, six-year compute contract with Volta — a company founded this year — for a 133 megawatt facility in Norway, with the actual construction handled by the crypto mining company Bitdeer.

Norway has cheap hydro power and free cooling. Mining companies have an off-the-shelf ability to turn electricity into a machine room. This isn’t an isolated oddity; it’s the same logic replicated in another location.

How much more is off the books

The 10-Q discloses more than that $43.8 billion:

Per reporting, the liability Google actually recognises on its balance sheet for these guarantees is only about $815 million — because accounting records the fair value of a guarantee, not the maximum exposure.

None of this machinery is new to Wall Street; leasing and project finance have run on it for decades. What’s new here is that it’s being used to sell a chip.

One buyer, three completely different ways of paying

Anthropic gets compute from each supplier by a different mechanism, and the mechanism reveals what each seller is after.

The Nvidia one is the most circular: on November 18, 2025, Nvidia announced an investment of up to $10 billion in Anthropic and Microsoft up to $5 billion, and on the same day Anthropic committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute plus up to 1 gigawatt of Nvidia systems. The money goes around and lands back on the seller’s books. After that round Anthropic’s valuation reached roughly $350 billion, against $183 billion in September 2025.

The three instruments share one purpose: keep this buyer able to buy, and buying. They differ only in where each party is willing to park the risk.

SpaceX also sells compute to Anthropic, and its deal is a completely different animal from Google’s.

After xAI and SpaceX merged, xAI moved its training to Colossus 2, leaving Colossus 1 in Memphis empty — over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, over 300 megawatts, at roughly 11% utilisation. It was then leased in its entirety to Anthropic for $1.25 billion a month through May 2029. Musk’s response to the arrangement: “No one set off my evil detector.”

That is genuinely disposing of idle capacity: the facility is already built, it depreciates every day, renting it to anyone beats leaving it dark, and no financial structure is required.

Google’s version isn’t disposing of idle capacity — it’s manufacturing capacity. One monetises a sunk cost; the other mobilises outside capital to build new supply and then distributes the new risk. Both look like “selling to a rival.” Underneath they are not the same thing at all.

The path the risk travels back

The whole structure rests on one condition: that Anthropic can pay the rent.

It’s at a $30 billion run rate now and growing fast. But if demand falls short, or competition erodes its pricing power, pressure moves back up the chain in order:

1. Anthropic can’t make the payments
2. The SPV’s cash flow breaks, impairing the credit held by Apollo and Blackstone
3. Broadcom’s $30 billion residual guarantee is triggered
4. Google’s rent guarantees are triggered — $815 million on the books, $43.8 billion of exposure

Every link in the chain believed it had pushed the risk to the next one. The last link is Alphabet’s balance sheet.