Google Builds Nvidia-Style Chip Rental Business for Anthropic

The move that made Nvidia the largest beneficiary of the AI infrastructure boom was not just great chip design. It was building a recurring-revenue model where customers effectively rent access to compute rather than buying and owning it. The Wall Street Journal reported on June 19 that Google is now applying that same logic, funding a $3.2 billion data center in New York stocked with its Tensor Processing Units that Anthropic will lease under a long-term arrangement.

The New York facility sits inside a larger financial structure. Apollo Global Management and Blackstone closed a $35 billion debt package in early June 2026 to fund Google TPU access at five US data centers. A special-purpose vehicle acquires the chips, Anthropic leases them back with payments that service the debt, and Google provides payment guarantees across all five sites. According to CryptoBriefing, Broadcom, which designed the TPUs, layers in residual-value guarantees on top. The result is a financing stack in which Google acts simultaneously as chip supplier, infrastructure financier, and financial backstop.

Google had already signaled this direction. Sundar Pichai announced in April that TPUs would go on sale to select customers who install them in their own facilities, saying the move would "expand our addressable market opportunity" as demand grows from AI labs and financial firms. The New York facility goes one step further: Google is building and financing the infrastructure itself, removing the step where a customer has to arrange its own data center. That is a move Nvidia has never made — Nvidia designs and sells chips but does not own the buildings its hardware lives in.

The honest caveat is that this depends on Anthropic's commercial trajectory holding. Anthropic's run-rate revenue reportedly surpassed $30 billion as of early 2026, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, but a $35 billion debt load means lease payments have to keep flowing. What the reporting does not settle is the exit structure: Google's obligations if Anthropic does not renew, and whether the New York facility sits on Google's own balance sheet or is parceled through the same SPV as the broader package.

If the model scales, Anthropic is only the first line. Meta has been in TPU discussions for months, and financial firms were named explicitly as target customers. If Google extends this hardware-as-a-service structure to more tenants, it gains something Nvidia built its data-center dominance on and has never had to share: the rent.