Here is a contradiction worth sitting with. Oracle disclosed $260 billion in data-center lease commitments, and for its honesty the market handed it a BBB- rating, one notch above junk, and cut its stock in half since June.
Anthropic has assembled a larger structured-credit exposure than that in 60 days, and it carries no credit rating at all—because, technically, it hasn't borrowed anything.
That is the sleight of hand. A company with no rating, burning cash at a rate that would terrify any bond desk, just put together $71 billion in chip financing by renting Broadcom's balance sheet instead of building its own.
Last week we sized the aggregate: Morgan Stanley's ~$1.8 trillion in off-balance-sheet obligations sitting across the hyperscalers—purchase commitments, uncommenced leases, vendor financing that locks up future cash without ever landing as debt. This week the mechanism has a name and a scale. Anthropic's SPVs are that aggregate estimate rendered in load-bearing steel.
Start with the plumbing, because the plumbing is the whole story.
In June 2026, Apollo Global Management and Blackstone's Credit and Insurance arm arranged a $35 billion facility. A special purpose vehicle buys Google's tensor processing units. The SPV then leases the hardware back to Anthropic. Anthropic pays rent; the SPV services the notes.
Note what just happened. The chips are owned by the SPV. The debt sits in the SPV. Anthropic's obligation is a lease payment—an operating expense, not a balance-sheet liability. The single largest claim on the company's future cash flow has been engineered to appear nowhere on the company's books.
Now the credit enhancement, which is where the magic actually lives.
The senior tranches—roughly $6 billion in Senior A1 notes and roughly $24 billion in Senior A2 notes—carry a Broadcom residual-value backstop. If Anthropic stops paying, or if the resold TPUs fetch less than the loan balance, Broadcom covers the shortfall on roughly $31 billion of senior debt.
That backstop is everything. It lifts the senior paper into investment-grade territory, and it priced at around 5.75%—a rate only reachable because Broadcom's guarantee makes the notes something a pension fund or an insurer is legally allowed to hold.
Insurers and retirement funds do not buy unrated startup debt. They bought this. They bought it because, on paper, they are lending against Broadcom, not Anthropic.
Then there is the tranche nobody backstops. The $4.5 billion Class B slice carries no Broadcom support, and it trades at roughly 8.5%.
Sit with that spread. Senior paper at 5.75% with the backstop; Class B at 8.5% without it. The 275-basis-point gap is not a technicality—it is the market's live quote on Anthropic's naked credit. It is what the company is worth as a borrower when nobody bigger is standing behind it, and 8.5% is high-yield territory. That is the number the S-1 will not print.
The 275-basis-point gap is not a technicality—it is the market's live quote on Anthropic's naked credit. That is the number the S-1 will not print.
Because there are two capital structures here, and only one of them is visible.
Anthropic's confidential S-1, filed June 1 with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan leading, anchors to the $965 billion post-money valuation from its $65 billion Series H round. That equity funds corporate operations.
The compute is funded by something else entirely. Against a $19 billion annualized revenue run-rate, the company is spending an estimated $45 billion a year on compute. The Series H did not pay for that. The SPV debt did—and the debt has to keep stacking, because equity cannot absorb a $45 billion annual bill without rewriting the entire cap table.
The proof is in the calendar. Barely two months after the first facility closed, Blackstone was already pitching a second package of at least $36 billion, targeting data centers across New York, Texas, Louisiana, and Indiana. Same blueprint: SPV buys TPUs, leases to Anthropic, Broadcom backstops the senior slices.
Finalize that, and Anthropic's structured-credit exposure to Google hardware alone clears $71 billion—the largest private-credit arrangement ever assembled, built by a company that has never issued a rated bond.
Here is why this is worse than Oracle, not better.
Oracle's $260 billion in lease commitments is disclosed. S&P folded it into an adjusted-debt forecast and projected leverage peaking near 4.4x. The rating agencies can see it, punish it, and downgrade it. That is what functioning credit markets look like—ugly, but honest.
Anthropic's obligations sit off everyone's books at once. Off Broadcom's, until a default triggers the guarantee. Off the SPV lenders', who hold what looks like investment-grade paper. And critically, off Anthropic's own pre-IPO filing, where the equity buyers about to price a near-trillion-dollar company will see a lease line, not a debt stack.
The structure was engineered precisely so the exposure vanishes from all of them at once. That is not scaling. That is credit laundering—taking an unrated borrower's risk, washing it through Broadcom's rating, and selling the clean version to buyers who could never have touched the original.
And the whole edifice rests on a single assumption: that AI revenue shows up, on schedule, to cover lease payments that run 15 years and longer.
That assumption gets fragile the moment you look at where the chips actually go.
On August 4, Bitdeer—a Bitcoin miner—announced its Tydal subsidiary had signed a 16-year, $4.7 billion agreement to supply 121 megawatts at its Norway campus to Volta, with the end customer reported as Anthropic. Average revenue: about $290 million a year, escalating 3% annually.
But Bitdeer has to build it first. Hitting first delivery requires roughly $500 million in additional spending, and the first phase is due online December 31, 2026—a hard deadline a crypto miner is racing to meet with financing it has not yet closed.
And Volta's payments? Propped by roughly $1.3 billion in letters of credit arranged by JPMorgan affiliates and another major institution. Bitdeer can walk if Volta misses the milestones tied to that credit support.
Trace the daisy chain. A Norwegian data hall, built by a Bitcoin miner on unclosed debt, leasing to Volta, whose payments lean on JPMorgan letters of credit, serving an AI lab whose own chip debt leans on a Broadcom residual-value backstop, all of it feeding a company burning more than twice its revenue.
Every link is a guarantee standing in for cash that does not yet exist. Broadcom backstops the notes. JPMorgan backstops Volta. The SPV structure backstops Anthropic's balance sheet. And underneath all of it is a bet that Claude generates enough revenue to make 15-year rent checks clear.
The elegant part—the dangerous part—is that none of it has to be marked to market. Uncommenced leases are not liabilities. Off-balance-sheet SPV debt is not corporate debt. The 8.5% Class B tranche is the only piece anyone is repricing in real time, and it is telling you exactly what the market thinks when the guarantees fall away.
Oracle at least got its downgrade. Anthropic gets an IPO first, and the load-bearing wall stays invisible—right up until the moment revenue misses the schedule the entire structure was engineered to assume.
That is the tell in the spread. 8.5% is the price of Anthropic alone. Everything below it is borrowed.