Google Isn't Investing in Anthropic. It Funds AI Power.

Google is not investing in Anthropic. Google is investing in a financing mechanism—and Anthropic is just the first proof it works.

The Financial Times reported this week that Google is nearing a deal to backstop a data center leased to Anthropic, the AI safety company behind Claude. The deal structure mirrors three previous arrangements Google has struck with Fluidstack, a U.K.-based AI cloud platform: Google guarantees the lease payments, which lets Fluidstack borrow roughly 85 percent of construction costs from JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs. In some deals, Google has taken equity stakes in the operators. In all of them, Google absorbs the downside if the tenant walks—but controls which AI labs get gigawatts of power they could not otherwise finance.

The pattern first appeared in September 2025, when Google backstopped $1.4 billion in Fluidstack lease obligations for Cipher Mining, a bitcoin mining company pivoting to AI hosting, and received a 5.4 percent equity stake in Cipher Mining as part of the same transaction. The same month, Google backstopped $1.8 billion for a TeraWulf deal and took an 8 percent equity stake in the miner-turned-hosting company. In November 2025, Google expanded its Fluidstack backstop by another $333 million, bringing the total to $1.73 billion. And in December, Hut 8 signed a 15-year, 245-megawatt lease with Fluidstack for its River Bend campus worth $7 billion in the base term—up to $17.7 billion with renewals—financed with that same JPMorgan-Goldman Sachs debt package.

The anchor tenant in each case has been different. Anthropic is the highest-profile. But the model is the model.

Here is the part that should make you lean in: Anthropic may not need this deal to get a data center. The company closed a $30 billion Series G round in February 2026 at a $380 billion post-money valuation, led by GIC and Coatue. Anthropic serves more than 300,000 business customers, and its number of large accounts—those generating over $100,000 in annual spend—has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year. The company has an $11 billion facility already up and running and has expanded its compute agreement with Google by tens of billions of dollars. Anthropic can self-fund. Anthropic can borrow on its own balance sheet.

So why is Google still structuring these deals?

One answer is leverage. The backstop arrangements give Google a seat at the table in how AI infrastructure gets built—not as a cloud provider selling TPU access, but as the co-signature on the lease that makes the whole project bankable. JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs are lending at up to 85 percent loan-to-cost ratios. They are doing that because Google is on the hook if the tenant walks. That means Google, not the bank, is underwriting the credit risk of the world's most capital-intensive construction projects. That is an extraordinary amount of influence over where AI compute gets built and who controls it.

Another answer is equity. The Cipher Mining and TeraWulf stakes appear to have been Google extracting something for free, as a condition of the guarantee. At those valuations, a 5.4 percent stake in Cipher Mining and an 8 percent stake in TeraWulf are not trivial. Google is not just protecting its cloud business. It is accumulating positions in the infrastructure layer underneath it.

The deeper question is what happens when the next Anthropic appears. The financing mechanism Google has now stress-tested with Fluidstack is available to any AI lab that needs gigawatts of power in a hurry and cannot get traditional project finance on its own. The lab gives up flexibility—Google is in the lease, Google is in the cap table. In exchange, it gets a data center that would otherwise take years to finance and permit. That is a real trade. For a startup that is not yet Anthropic, it may be the only trade.

Gary Wu, co-founder and chief executive of Fluidstack, called the Anthropic partnership "a new model for AI infrastructure investment." He is not wrong. The question is new for whom. Google has now done four deals of this structure. It looks less like a one-off accommodation for a strategic partner and more like a repeatable playbook—one that other developers and other AI labs will try to replicate, if Google lets them.

The Hut 8 lease closed. The Cipher and TeraWulf deals are in the ground. If the FT reporting is accurate, a fourth transaction is close. At some point you stop calling these special arrangements and start calling them strategy.

Note: Anthropic's revenue figure is cited from reporting by TechCrunch and CNBC; primary-source verification welcome.